The laboratory of identities and the uses of the past: operations to forge a border memory in Río Cuarto, 1956-1961

Abstract

Towards the middle of the 20th century, in a society marked by a border past, as is the case of the city of Río Cuarto, in the south of the Córdoba province, a series of commemorative social practices and monumentalisation projects oriented to an identity redefinition were publicly offered. Progressively, a laudatory and self-assertive discourse of the “civilising” imposition of the cross and the sword on a local scale began to become more powerful and get a definite sense. Coming from inner circles and family networks, and to approve historical happenings and values which would be ‘offered’ for the historical identification of the entire city, social practices of remembrance anchored in marks restricted to a representation of the “Desert” were both made effective and projected. In this respect, the project of building the monument to the “Heroes of the Desert”, together with other significant commemorative actions such as the circulation of the epic song “Heroic village” and the performance of the rite of the “retreat from the desert”, are evidence of that identity laboratory which, in the hands of important figures with power and cultural prestige, worked legitimising readings of the past and the present. This work attempts, in such respect, to document and historicise those memorial operations retrieving their discourses and interpreting the actions of the actors involved in them.