Pilgrimage and communion in Juan Pablo Riveros De la tierra sin fuegos

Abstract

This article, dealing with De la tierra sin fuegos, attempts to elucidate some of the main ideas concerning the poetical encounter with three disappeared cultures of the austral region of South America: the Selknam, Yámanas and Qawashqar. We propose that Riveros creates a fiction of the journey towards the other and imagines the traveler in the image of the ethnologist Martin Gusinde. The journey implies a passing through the Fueguian archive and it becomes a pilgrimage which culminates in an act of communion. The return to the past brings forth the manner in which atrocities continue to be repeated: the extermination of the Fueguian peoples and the military violence during the time the book was written.