Argentina is the only country in the Americas that has successfully
erased the presence of Indians, Africans, and mestizos from its
national story. Official documents, reports, and censuses have
largely omitted any references to the country's non-European
inhabitants, mirroring official policies that once included the
extermination of indigenous peoples and continued to encourage
Europeanization well into the twentieth century. In Captive Women,
Susana Rotker exposes this concerted act of forgetting by looking
at a historical phenomenon that has been expunged from the national
record: the widespread kidnapping of white women by Argentine
Indians in the nineteenth century.
Captivity narratives form a major part of the early colonial
literature of the United States, but Argentina has no such
tradition. These narratives contradict Argentina's carefully shaped
self-image, one historically based on the absence of aboriginal
peoples and the impossibility of miscegenation. Captive Women uses
close and imaginative readings of military documents, government
treaties, travel journals, essays, and memoirs to explore the
foundations of Argentina's strategies of silence and its negation
of uncomfortable historical realities.
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