This research aims to analyze and understand the construction of Indigenous territorialities from a multidimensional perspective framed within processes of ethnic reorganization and territorial resistance of Diaguita communities from Catamarca, which have been developing since the beginning of the 21st century. These processes have implicated an identity reconstruction of Diaguita communities through their struggles for recognition of territorial rights and disputes against the advance of capitalist forms of development, which have involved the appropriation and commodification of their territories.
This research addresses the case of Diaguita communities in the Santa María department, grouped among other Diaguita communities from the province in the Unión de Pueblos de la Nación Diaguita (UPND) of Catamarca, a second-level intercommunal organizational space. It is worth mentioning that despite a rise in the amount of studies dealing with these issues in Latin America –and particularly in Argentina–, the matter of Indigenous (re)emergence in the Catamarca province hasn’t been investigated fully.
Although the processes of Diaguita community reorganization extend in the provincial territory along many provincial departments –Belén, Andalgalá and Santa María–, this research proposes the department of Santa María as a geographic clipping for feasibility reasons. Through a predominantly qualitative approach, with in-depth interviews, document analysis and observations, this research examines different dimensions of the (re)construction of Indigenous territorialities, linked to diverse areas of communal life (political organization through self-government and self-determination; practices of communal economy; traditional medicine; education), emphasizing the resignification and revalorization of traditional practices and knowledge. This study identifies tensions and conflicts in each of these dimensions, manifested between the societal forms of Indigenous communities, and the societal forms of colonial, modern and capitalist hegemonies.
The hypothesis at the core of this research sustains that the processes of Diaguita reorganization entail a particular form of territorialization that leads to the construction and defense of specific territorialities as ways of living/feeling/thinking on and of the territory. Thus, communities that are in the process of reaffirming their ethnic identity, territorialize practices and knowledge, (re)constructing meanings around the land they inhabit and defend. In this way, the defense and (re)creation of Diaguita territorialities converge with processes of community (re)existence, which are not exempt of conflicts and disputes with hegemonic economic and political actors and logics (modern, colonial, capitalist, patriarchal), against which, in most cases, Indigenous identities are further reaffirmed.
Thus, it can be noticed that in the last two decades, both the affirmation of identity and the exercise of communality in the defense and control of territories have become crucial in the processes of Diaguita territorialization, and appear to be closely intertwined. Community reorganization has become a refuge against the advance of modernity and extractive capitalism in Diaguita territories, as well as a way of building their own power and their own ways of dealing with communal needs in a more autonomous way, against political and economic hegemonies.
