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Abstract

Indigenous struggles over places are a response to the spatial reconfiguration that is part of an ongoing process of colonization. This thesis explores how urban indigenous people contest social exclusion through everyday place-making. I analyze how the residents of the Lote 68, an indigenous neighborhood in the city of Formosa (Northern Argentina), cope with their position of marginality within the city, by simultaneously embracing a project of "progress" and by reappropriating the nearby bushes within rural private properties. The interviews and participant observation I conducted among this group show that their use of space disputes the hegemonic notions of aboriginality that articulate it as a poor, backward and a welfare-dependent identity. Conversely, the bush is a place that offers Lote residents a way of coping with unemployment, but more importantly, permits them to re-appropriate the notion of aborigen (indigenous person), recreate meaningful forms of socialization, and ultimately generate an alternative access to the city.