This article explores the construction of a memory of the “puna de Atacama” space through the Andes mountain range, since the second half of the twentieth century to the present time. A memory that creates validity and wakefulness for exchange practices between settlements from both sides of the Argentinian Chilean border. Through an ethnographic approximation to the oral memory of mule drivers and observation of new expanding exchange spaces (trade fairs), we analyse the way some exchange, practices had validity, their subsequent deterioration as of the seventies and eighties severe frontier policies, and their present time, mediated by the appearance of the new native organizations that demand the legitimacy of a cross-border Atacama space. As you will see, exchange dynamics transform: on the one hand the settlements mobility and integration to other labour markets dislocate the original family relationships, and on the other hand, we see the geographic productive space overflow, cause by the insertion of new (Asian) products with no attachment to the traditional economies. All that, in the context of contemporary ritualization and provision of capital of these practices by their new organizations.
Garcés, A., & Maureira, M. (2018). From family to ethnic organization: networks for a cross-border spatiality in the Puna of Atacama. Revista Chilena De Antropología, (37), 230–248. Retrieved from https://revistasaludpublica.uchile.cl/index.php/RCA/article/view/49514
