"Don't Forget Me": Cultivating a Politics of Trust with Agricultural Workers in the Hinterlands of Northeast Argentina

What is today understood by History is the attempt to dignify this obsessive madness with fine-sounding goals such as the search for "meaning" or design—goals whose primary function is to ensure the empowering illusion of standing freely above history, now the object of study. To the contrary, the end point of the madness that is history would be that the patient is able to get off the psychoanalyst's couch for the final time because the transference with the present had achieved a functioning praxis.

(Taussig 2006, 38)

The history of brutal state repression of small farmers fighting for social justice during Argentina's last dictatorship period (1976-83) in the countryside of Misiones, Argentina, haunts both body and mind of those who continue to dedicate themselves to organizing for an improved livelihood for rural workers. Especially just after the 1976 military coup, members of the fiercest and most effective agrarian league in Argentina, El Movimiento Agrario de Misiones (MAM), were tortured, imprisoned and killed. But MAM and other groups defiantly "rose from the ashes," as Argentine scholar-activist Francisco Ferrara has written, at the end of the dictatorship in 1983 to organize anew (2007a, 267-308; my translation). Today MAM and other groups struggle for the rights of small producers, landless workers, women, and indigenous people throughout the province, even as they battle division and distrust. They work with the specter of state violence always at their backs; at times that violence is realized in the present (Schiavoni 2008). For them, engagement with history is as Michael Taussig has suggested it should be—folded into now, inseparable from today—there can be no standing outside of history, peering in.

In this essay, I ponder the intricacies of conducting politically engaged ethnography in such a climate. By revisiting one ethnographic encounter in detail, I argue that cultivating a politics of trust at the interpersonal level is an essential precondition to practicing politically engaged ethnography, particularly in work that concerns those who live deepest in the countryside, off the political grid, in what might well be considered a "zone of social abandonment" (Biehl 2005). I invoke this frame of abandonment due to the way in which the Argentine state has neglected terribly this sector of its citizenry, in terms of social services, substandard education, and the allowing of interminable exploitation of agricultural workers caught in the downward spiral of informal agricultural work that is a stalwart tradition throughout the province (Cerdá and Gutiérrez 2009; Schiavoni 2008).

Gatherings and Requests on a Red Dirt Road

It was a gray day with a storm on the way. But the coming rain was a blessing for local farmers beleaguered by drought that had generated sharp concern in the countryside for the last year. Those with oxen and wells joined together to transport water to neighbors who had neither. This was my second trip to Misiones to conduct ethnographic research on agrarian struggle and rural exodus. After years of focusing on urban poverty and social violence in Latin America, I had decided to study efforts to help people stay on in their rural homes in Argentina so that they would not be compelled to migrate to urban areas; mass migration to urban areas so often leaves people vulnerable to violence and to the structural unemployment that haunts contemporary Argentina.

Just weeks before, I was invited to a forum on family agriculture by Eugenio Kasalaba, a veteran MAM activist who belongs to the corps of extraordinarily committed activists who resurrected agrarian struggle when democracy was returned to Argentina in 1983. At the forum, activists from all over Misiones gathered to discuss the far reaching environmental crises that were at play in their communities—toxic contamination from the tobacco and paper mill sectors, relentless deforestation, drought, water shortages, and creeping climate change. They represented the multiethnic mix of the province in which over twenty different ethnicities are both rooted and on the move in this triple border area that Argentina shares with Brazil and Paraguay.

One...