In 2025, Argentina’s president Javier Milei signed a decree restraining Latin-American migration and access to citizenship. The far-right libertarian affirmed in Davos that Argentina became great thanks to European migration and that opening the doors to unlimited migrants would imply a reversed colonization. This is one of many attempts to erase the settler-colonial founding of Argentina, where the Spanish crown and later the independent national state have consistently engaged in genocide and erasure of Indigenous and Afro populations. These communities were forced to assimilate into whiteness to survive, a tendency further reinforced by the country’s effort to attract European migrants in order to sustain the project of a ‘modern’ white European country. This identity is still prevalent today, infusing public narratives and the positionality of the country within Latin America. Argentina presents itself—and is often perceived—as a white country, with no Indigenous or Afro populations. It is also gazing towards a supposed white Europe rather than towards its multi-ethnic regional neighbors. Yet Indigenous and Afro communities have survived and exist in the present Argentina. Many have intended to untangle how settler colonialism and this racist matrix manifest, yet it is less common that scholars attend to the specificity of racialization in Argentina. This is what Vivaldi contributes with her new book, Urban Indigenous Assemblages. Qom Mobilities and the Remaking of White Buenos Aires. At the crossroads of sociology, anthropology and geography, she analyzes indigeneity and racialization through an in-depth ethnography. The book follows members of the Qom community who established their own neighborhood in the periphery of Buenos Aires, after migrating from their territories in Gran Chaco, North of Argentina.

Using the framework of assemblages, Vivaldi analyzes how the Qom community produces indigenous territorialities—forms of appropriation and political control over space—that stretch across the city and countryside. She uses the concept of indigenous assemblage, a specific form of subaltern assemblages, to observe the heterogeneous connections shaping the Qoms’ day-to-day. The book is structured around five chapters, each focusing on a specific aspect of Qom life within an urban context. The first chapter presents trajectories of migration, undoing the linear narrative of forced displacement or migrations merely for economic purposes. The second chapter, focusing on The Villas (the shantytowns), is central to the understanding of the analysis of indigeneity and racialization in Argentina. The third chapter centers on the creation of the barrio Qom (Qom neighborhood) in the greater periphery of Buenos Aires and its meaning for the indigenous community. Chapter four focuses on the specific encounters that the barrio renders possible, particularly between white middle-class humanitarian actors and the Qom inhabitants. Chapter five maps the ways the barrio Qom is entangled with different communities and places through human and non-human connections. 

Challenging the common idea that the Qom community only migrates under forced displacement, Vivaldi unveils how affect, constrained by relations of power, drives mostly unplanned movement and encounters which reshape community relationships in the region of origin and in the place of destination. She observes the community’s strategy to obtain urban land in the form of their own barrio (neighborhood) and how they constantly recreate authentic indigeneity from there, a ‘piece of Chaco in Buenos Aires’. This allows them to leverage encounters with white humanitarian middle-class urban actors while, as a corollary, whiteness is reinforced as ‘sensitive, charitable and progressive’. The explanation of these strategies and trajectories illustrates how indigenous assemblages produce specific Qom territorialities through relations beyond ethnically delimited spaces, groups and economies, where the community establishes relative control over space.

The heart of the text invites the reader through a historicization of the spatialization of race in Buenos Aires explaining two specificities: the erasure of the mestizo identity through forced white assimilation, and the spatial formation of the category of ‘negros’ (blacks)—one ‘associated with the shantytowns and subaltern groups, which signals a distant indigenous and sometimes Afro ancestry, even as it negates such identifications’ (p.58). Negro is thus the local category that refers to the racialized urban subaltern, as well as to groups that mass migration from Europe and politics of erasure have not been able to completely eliminate. The category was developed as the project of the white European nation unfolded in the Twentieth Century, through mechanisms of spatial exclusion that allowed for white workers to leave the shantytowns while ensuring the nonwhite populations would remain. The villas were later associated with danger and criminality, suffering intense policing. They became a space inhabited by the non-white poor as much as a spatial device racializing its inhabitants as ‘negros villeros’. It is within this specific racial formation that Ana Vivaldi tries to untangle the spatial strategies of the Qom to escape the stigmatized category of ‘negro villero’ through a renewed performance of authentic indigeneity within the urban context. Vivaldi shows how the indigenous neighborhood becomes part of a strategy of spatial and racial differentiation from the ‘negros villeros’, territorializing ‘an assertion of non-white dignity’ (p.100). In doing so, the barrio challenges the country’s racial categories and consolidates itself as a node for larger assemblages.

One of the main qualities of this work relies on its in-depth ethnography, serving in a very nuanced way the author’s goal to make visible and de-romanticize indigenous trajectories and territorialities in Argentina. Vivaldi also presents a beautiful example of how to deploy positionality, making it explicit and engaging its contradictions, while establishing a long-lasting relationship of respect and collaboration with the community. Another contribution is the careful interrogation of the racial spatialization of the city in Argentina, highlighting how the exclusion of indigenous people and nonwhites from the city—and their relegation to shantytowns—perpetuates the project of white European nation-making. Vivaldi problematizes this entrapment by detailing how the Qom community creates openings that challenge the stratification of space to reproduce life beyond European whiteness. The barrio Qom is therefore a place of de-territorialization and re-territorialization, sedimenting urban indigeneity even when doing so requires performance. One of the questions the book opens is that of the indigenous urban youth—the ones who were not born in the original region of Chaco—and who do not have the same possibilities to embody indigeneity as their parents and elders. The author shines light on new practices emerging from this specific position, such as their engagement with hip-hop or soccer, traditionally associated with the ‘negros villeros’. Indigeneity appears fractured by generational divides proper to these urban trajectories, and the Qom youth has to find new ways to situate themselves within the moving racial and spatial structure of the country—maybe moving closer to the groups stigmatized as ‘negro villeros’. 

Coline Chevrin, City University of New York

Ana Vivaldi 2026: Urban Indigenous Assemblages. Qom mobilities and the remaking of White Buenos Aires. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.

Views expressed in this section are independent and do not represent the opinion of the editors.