The "gypsy way". Caravans and stigmas in Patagonia at the beginning of the 20th century

Abstract

Gypsies are a historically discriminated and persecuted People. However, the relative absence of studies that allow us to understand both their histories as well as the reasons why they are reduced to the criminal or the exotic prevent us from recognizing the particularities of each historical context. In this work we propose to analyze the passage of gypsy caravans at the beginning of the 20th century over Neuquén and Chubut, as well as to attend to the reaction of the authorities, the press and society in general. We will do so working on a series of official sources found in different national and provincial archives. We understand the Conquest of the "desert" as a structuring event of a society that was established on the basis of dispossession and racism over native peoples in favor of European immigrants. Even so, there were different evaluations of the immigrants who settled in the territory incorporated into the Argentine nation-state. These, in turn, materialized in differences in access to rights regulated by practices and customs of the state administration. Although the regulations of our country did not initially differentiate the nationality of the immigrants expected to build the myth of "Argentines descend from the ships", in practice a series of assumptions about the desirable settlers and progress operated to generate an unequal society. For this reason, we will carefully investigate the mechanisms between society and the state and within its administration that led, first, to interpreting a security problem in the presence of the gypsies and, second, in the imminence of attacking and persecuting them with (i)legal methods.