QUEERINGS, TETHERS: THE ENTANGLED TRAJECTORIES OF TÚPAC AMARU TANNER VARGAS

“El Cantri,” as the indigenous Organización Barrial de Túpac Amaru calls it [1], is a radical social housing project on the outskirts of San Salvador in the northern province of Jujuy, Argentina. What began as an ambitious, self-organized response to economic crises soon became a sociopolitical force of indigenous idealism and economic exception that advocated for expanded labor rights, increased social mobility, and sustainable economic status. [2] The project grew in scope during a period of “consolidation” from 2003 to 2016, after which its hyper-centralized leadership and organization were criminalized [3] and the sustaining government funding frozen. [4]

This essay explores the outside tethers of economics, politics, and social cultures governing the onset and outcomes of the Tupac Amaru development. [5] The research utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to outline the organizational crucial moments and actors that aided in maintaining their initial success. By investigating the project’s negotiation of social, queer, and visionary urbanisms, this paper expands upon the unique aspects of Tupac Amaru towards new ground in urban theory. The paper (1) reconsiders what it means to build and nurture indigenous communities today, (2) unpack the effects of queering normative development mechanisms as that multiplicitous identity, and (3) speculate upon the potential benefits of socially-driven design frameworks that foster slower, self-reliant cultures of care.

This paper argues for engaged methods of making which construct and maintain cultural and architectural relationships in parallel. It hypothesizes that similarly “othered” communities can make infrastructure adjustments—co-produced with designers, planners—so as to better prepare for the antagonistic manipulations of outside tethers. Focus will be placed on the role of designers in cultivating cultures of care that, over time, foster resilient sociocultural connections and promote diverse practices of embodied knowledge and methods of making. By working to expand notions of design agency, co-production of space, and queering of practice, the allied design disciplines might work to advocate for contemporary communities at similar risk of oppression. This paper argues that the current trajectory of “El Cantri” cannot be separated from the movement’s intersectional identities of “otherness” along queer, black, poor, and indigenous identities, [6] and that urban designers might co-produce independent urban frameworks that maintain bottom-up practices of community building while preparing for hostile tethers.

Keywords

Indigenous, Idealism, Housing, Bottom-up, Identity.

Urbanisms

Social Urbanism, Queer Urbanism, Infrastructural Urbanism.

Notes

1. Justin McGuirk, Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture (Brooklyn: Verso: 2014).

2. Melina Gaona, “Experience, city & identity around the neighborhood organization Tupac Amaru,” Doctorate, Faculty of Journalism Social Communication (January 4, 2017).

3. Melina Gaona, “Condiciones y características del surgimiento y desarrollo de la organización Tupac Amaru en Argentina,” Rev. Rupturas 8, no. 2: Costa Rica (2018).

4. Lawrence Blair, “Argentina’s Milagro Sala: Criminal, or ‘Political Prisoner?’” Americas Quarterly September 11, 2017.

5. Fernanda Valeria Torres, “Territorialization process of the Tupac Amaru Neighborhood Organization,” UNICEN: Estudios Socioterritoriales (2018).

6. Costanza Tabbush and Mariana Caminotti, “Gender Equality & Social Movements in Postneoliberal Argentina: The Organización Barrial Tupac Amaru,” Latinoamericano 23, no. 46 (2015). 147-171.