‘Charitable’ Conquest: The 'Sociedad de Beneficencia' and Indigenous Women’s Forced Labor in Nineteenth-Century Argentina

• In Event: Indigenous Women, Coloniality, Gender Oppression, and Political Subjectivities

Abstract

This paper recovers the stories of indigenous women who labored against their will in Buenos Aires households in the late nineteenth century. From 1878 through 1885, the Argentine military marched through the Pampas and Patagonia, imprisoning and displacing thousands of indigenous men, women, and children. Many female prisoners were brought to Buenos Aires and placed under the jurisdiction of an elite women’s charity organization called the Sociedad de Beneficencia. In conjunction with Argentina’s Ministry of War, the Sociedad distributed these imprisoned women to wealthy Buenos Aires families, where they worked as domestic servants and nannies. The Sociedad used a racialized and gendered rhetoric of moral uplift in order to justify their coercive treatment of these indigenous women. My paper centers the interactions between the elite women of the Sociedad de Beneficenica and the indigenous women placed in their care, in order to reveal how processes of settler colonial dispossession and “national modernization” in nineteenth-century Argentina were deeply gendered. I will analyze the particular place of elite and middle-class white women within attempts to construct Argentina as a modern, civilized nation-state. What’s more, I will pay attention to the specific ways in which settler colonial logics operated upon indigenous women’s bodies during the state’s incursion into the Pampas and Patagonia.

Author

• Hannah Greenwald, Yale University