Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [51]
That reminded me of what the man in the gaucho store had said. “I’ve seen a few books that say that gaucho culture is dead,” I said.
“There are huge cities now,” she replied. “Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Mendoza. In the cities, yes. But in the villages, outside the city, the culture still remains important. The customs are entirely from the gauchos. It’s a time period that’s a part of our history, so people want to learn.”
Below us the dancers split apart, and the men started clapping. “This is an escondido,” Paula said, switching subjects to explain the dance. “One dancer can’t see the other. The other is hidden. So to help the other dancer find him, he makes noise.” The women circled in on their clapping partners, and everyone started dancing again.
Paula’s students performed later on. When they came back to sit down, I asked her about their stomping, clapping dance. “It was an escondido, right?”
“You’re learning!” she said, looking pleased. “You have to keep teaching these dances,” she said, looking on as the next group started. “They were forgotten through the last century, but people started to learn them and teach them again. Now we have to teach each generation.”
On stage, yet another group of kids negotiated the tricky footwork of the gaucho dance. The clock struck midnight, and I looked out over the crowd, still very much jumping. It looked like it might turn into a typical Argentine social occasion—which meant it would probably go until 5 A.M. I hadn’t slept since the four hours in the bus terminal, so I caught a ride back downtown from a pharmacist who had to get back to work. As we left, the live music had just started.
The next day I took a bus into the more rural mountains outside Bahia Blanca, following Darwin’s overland route. As I traveled, I pondered the gaucho dance, and I thought about Paula telling me that it was important to keep the old ways remembered. Argentines, at least in places like Bahia Blanca, seemed to be doing that for the gauchos. But what about the Indians? As I arrived in the small resort town of Sierra de la Ventana, I walked out to see if I could find out more about the people lamented by the Port San Julian historian, Pablo Walker, and others, as mostly forgotten.
There wasn’t much information out there. In Darwin’s time, the significant tribes in Patagonia included the Mapuche and Tehuelche. But the Mapuche were linked mostly with southern Chile, where they’d resisted colonization not just by the Chileans and Spanish, but by the Incas as well. Unconquered into the late 1800s, the Mapuche eventually were forced into a reservation system that still exists in Chile. The Tehuelche, meanwhile—the people encountered in Port San Julian by Magellan—were associated more with southern Argentine Patagonia, where a few thousand still live. These were the tall, powerful Indians generally mentioned by European explorers. But the northern Tehue lche, who differed linguistically from the southern groups, disappeared by the end of the nineteenth century, killed by the Spanish or absorbed into Mapuche societies.
Darwin, who encountered both northern and southern Tehuelche, had predicted a grim future for all the Indians, writing in his diary that at the rate Rosas’s extermination campaign was carried out, “in another half century I think there will not be a wild Indian in the Pampas North of the Rio Negro. The warfare is too bloody to last.”
The Indian wars didn’t act on Darwin’s mind the way slavery did, and he wasn’t a champion of indigenous rights. For one thing, although he sympathized with them, he still feared an attack. Almost all fireside conversations, he reported, eventually ended up in discussions of Indian raids. He had two trips outside of Bahia Blanca interrupted by scares, although both turned out to be false alarms.
When he got a chance to study friendly Indians, he was fascinated. “My chief amusement,” he wrote from one military camp, “was watching the Indian families as they came to buy little articles