The Virile Nation: gender and ethnicity in the construction of Argentinian Pasts. GARP4

In July 1996 I attended the closing ceremony of the annual exhibition held at the Argentine Rural Association., the organisation that embodies the interests and identity of the country's agrarian sector and in particular of the land-owning elite. The ceremony culminated in a dramatisation of the ordeals endured by ordinary soldiers during the 'Conquest of the Desert'. This was a protracted war aimed at eradicating the Indian presence from an ever increasing territory, a task that was completed at the end of the nineteenth century, providing more land and resources to underwrite the elite's aspirations of nationhood and progress.

As evening fell the outline of the cavalrymen who filled the arena became fainter until the only evidence of their presence was the swaying movement of the torches they carried.