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The article focuses on the Ranquel Indians of La Pampa, Argentina, and the strategies they employed to resist government policies seeking to assimilate or marginalize them from the late 19th century through the late 20th century. The author focuses on a period up to the 1970s and explores how the Ranquel tried to revert the impact of the loss of autonomy, marginalization and relocations particularly through social and extended family networks. She describes migratory patterns and working conditions during the late 20th century.

This paper explores the relationships between missionaries (either Franciscan and Salesian) and Indian groups who survived after the military campaigns of the late 1870's in the Pampas. It focuses especially on the role played by these missionaries in the integration of Indians into the Argentine 'nation' and in the 'Territorios Nacionales', performed through--among others--four kinds of tasks: a) registering births, deaths and marriages in collaboration with a poorly developed state, b) educating the main chiefs. sons and daughters in La Inmaculada school, away from their families, c) insisting on their abandoning of previous cultural patterns (such as polygamic matrimony), and d) promoting the Indian's identification with the "nation" in as many instances as possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]