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An Expedition to the Ranquel Indians, and: A Visit to the Ranquel Indians (review)
- Ethnohistory
- Duke University Press
- Volume 48, Number 1-2, Winter-Spring 2001
- pp. 375-377
- Review
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Ethnohistory 48.1-2 (2001) 375-377
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Book Review
An Expedition to the Ranquel Indians
A Visit to the Ranquel Indians
An Expedition to the Ranquel Indians [Una excursión a los indios ranqueles]. By Lucio Victorio Mansilla. Translated by Mark McCaffrey. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. xiv + 418 pp., illustration, bibliography, glossary, notes, index.)
A Visit to the Ranquel Indians [Una excursión a los indios ranqueles]. By Lucio Victorio Mansilla. Translated by Eva Gillies. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. xl + 453 pp., illustrations, bibliography, notes, index.)
During most of the nineteenth century, Argentine caudillos fought to dominate the immense Indian territories that comprised approximately 70 percent of Argentina. They continued a war of conquests that had begun in the first and unlucky attempt to establish a Spanish colony at the estuary of the Rio de la Plata in 1536. The decisive struggle occurred during the dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829—1852) in a prolonged bloody war, followed by epidemics as large areas finally were liberated for colonization and for the establishment of a European style of living. However, [End Page 375] up to 1900, militaries campaigns were constantly organized to eliminate diehard resistance and to confine the natives to specific predetermined areas, very similar to what occurred in the United States during this period.
Una excursión a los indios ranqueles is a chronicle that narrates the Argentine version of the conquest. At the same time the reader is impressed by the literary style and relativist sensitivity of Lucio Victorio Mansilla (1831—1913), who delved deep in the best "ethnographic" works published at the end of the nineteenth century. It is not in vain that the book has been translated twice in 1997. It is a classic on the literature of the "Indian problem," frontiers and interethnic encounters, now available to scholars and to other interested persons who are not acquainted with Spanish. The work, composed of letters published between May and September 1870 in the newspaper La Tribuna of Buenos Aires, is a report on an experience with the Ranquel Indians in the former province of Cordoba. The letters were published in book form in the same year and soon became a bestseller. Mansilla was a lieutenant-colonel and commander of the military forces between 1868 and 1870 in Cordoba, with headquarters at Río Cuarto. It is a report on his impressions of the Ranquel Indians and of a mission with native leaders to agree on a reconciliation "treaty" that would never be respected by Argentines. Mansilla’s book raises many questions about the "frontier" theme and brings forth evidence of the violence committed by the Argentines who were concocting a policy by means of which the native populations would be destroyed and their lands exploited by European descendants. In the midst of a covert agreement on the necessity of exterminating the people of the desierto, Mansilla’s text occupies a rare moment in that period. It describes in detail and reflects on the life, costumes, and values of one of the peoples fated to die by Argentine weapons and by diseases.
Both translations maintain Mansilla’s original style; many dialectal expressions proper to the type of Spanish spoken in Argentina, together with native and European expressions, have been kept. Eva Gillies’s translation preserves and transmits to the reader the somewhat obscure expressions found in the illiterate prose of the frontier spoken by the gauchos and contained within long conversations with the natives. Gillies, a retired lecturer at the University of London, is qualified for the task since she was born in Argentina. But Mark McCaffrey eliminated precious information on ethnography and certain details that enriched the narrative. He confesses that "certain obscure allusions to local personages, especially those intended by the author to answer other newspaper writings, have been also deleted at no discernible cost to narrative flow" (xiv). McCaffrey took great pains in the edition and translation. It turned out to be economical [End Page 376] in commentaries and notes, concentrating almost exclusively on Mansilla’...