Last month, University of Idaho Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies Ashley Kerr published a book about gender and racial science in Argentina from 1860 to 1910. We sat down with her to discuss her book.
Titled, “Sex, Skulls and Citizens: Gender and Racial Science in Argentina, 1860 to 1910”, Kerr said she never planned on writing a book at first, but found a story nobody was talking about.
Could you tell me a bit about the book you’re getting published?
Argentina is different from a lot of Latin American countries in general perspective, in that people think of it as a very European white country, and it is. It is something like, people identify as like 97% European, which is a lot compared to other countries in Latin America. And so, I was sort of looking at how we got that identity, because there were Indigenous people living in Argentina when the Spanish arrived. And it’s a combination of policies designed to both physically and culturally eliminate Indigenous people in the 19th century. A lot of immigration and science was a big part of that.
What made you decided to write a book?
I never planned on writing a book at first. We can for tenure and promotion in our department write articles or write a book. But as I started investigating, there was this story that nobody was telling, and nobody was talking about all these women that were involved. They’re Indigenous women that were brought to live in a museum before the museum opened to the public. We have pictures of them, but nobody ever talked about what their experiences were like. So I started to ask questions I couldn’t answer in some cases. Did any of these women have children while they were living in the museum? Those that had small children, were they still able to breastfeed them? How did women interact with these male scientists? Because there are these weird comments in the records from the 19th century.
Could you tell us more about the museum in Argentina you mentioned?
It’s called the Museo de la Plata, The La Plata Museum, and that’s the Natural History Museum in Argentina. This group that was taken there, they had actually met the founder of the museum when he was traveling in Patagonia, and a decade later taken prisoner in the effort to reduce the Indigenous population and brought to the city. He claims he rescued them by taking them out of where they were kind of being held hostage and taking them to live in his museum, but he also viewed it as a chance to do science on them. A couple of them died when they were in the museum, and he then takes them, cleans their skeletons and puts their skeletons on display in the next room. Which is really horrifying and of course we did the same thing in the US, so this is not just an Argentinian story. But those remains were on display until the 1950s, I think. Now they’re still in the basement of the museum, and there’s a legal process ongoing to try to return the remains to their communities.
Why Argentina?
After I graduated from undergraduate with a degree in Latin American Studies, I got a Fulbright English Teaching assistantship in Argentina. So, I went and they sent me to Patagonia to this tiny little oil drilling town in the middle of nowhere, very far from everything else. And a friend took me out one day she was like, “Oh, I know this place where we can find all of these … arrowheads. There are hundreds of them on the ground.” And so we went, and I started being curious about who the Indigenous communities were in Argentina that I’d never been told about, because I had been told that Buenos Aries is the Paris of South America, and the Argentinians are really Italians, and so I sort of started investigating that. Moving out to Idaho for the job here kind of added this other level to it, which is what Argentina was trying to do politically with their Indigenous communities was explicitly modeled on the US.
Where can you buy the book?
They can buy it through the Vanderbilt University Press website or Amazon.
Kali Nelson can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @kalinelson6