that the enslaving fate of the Amerindians captured during the Conquest of the Desert meant a setback of almost a century : " It seems incredible such a dishonorable slavery after the generous act by the Assembly in 1813 " ( p . 11 ). Valko repeats the idea to compare our so-called glorious early abolitionism with nothing less than the Emancipation Proclamation ( 1863 ) in the United States : " Let us not forget that slavery was abolished in Argentina by the Assembly of the Year XIII , while the great country of the North only concretized it in 1862 ( sic ) with Lincoln and it costed him a three-year civil war and even his own life " ( p . 77 ). Given the narrative plot , he needs to refer later to the other large non-white group pre-existent to the making of the nation : The Afro-Argentineans of the colonial trunk , who shared with the indigenous people the misfortune of being hated by hegemonic groups in power . Valko devotes a few paragraphs to them ( pp . 81-83 passim ) starting with a thoughtful reflection : " Now , the Amerindians are not alone as a target of racism . In this gallery of absences , if we pay due attention , we find a second absent . The black people are also an absence " ( p . 81 ). Then he apologizes for the subject complexity and importance to address it in passing and falls into the trap of the most entrenched commonplaces in the historicist discourse fueled by the antiquated pro-European enthusiasm : Valko states that , for the enslaved , our country was " a less brutal destination than the Central American panning sites , the Caribbean plantations , or the sugar cane mills in Brazil " ( p . 82 ). This myth of the local bonanza is unsustainable for three reasons . It is impossible to calibrate the genocidal acts ; the symbolic mistreatment by prohibiting their languages , religions and cultural practices was no less real than the physical one ; and the myth itself is essentially a certainty coming from writing tables , a biased speculation in favor of a white history à la carte , since historians never took into account the oral memory of the contemporary Afro-Argentines from the colonial trunk in order to know their side of the story ( Cirio , 2010 ). Given the theoretical and methodological advance in disciplines such as oral history , with more than half a century of valuable work , it is even stranger to keep on arguing issues that would be equivalent to say , for example , that the Conquest of the Desert was not so much destructive , because Patagonians had no temples , palaces and monumental pyramids for being shot down and thusly the damage was less . The authors mentioned above , all of them contemporaries , clearly exemplify the alarming gap between theory and practice , between ethics and the reproduction of perished discourses in line with outdated national ideals . I reiterate that I am neither analyzing authors from the past with parameters from the present ( an improper exercise of revisionism ) nor whimsically bringing up novel or peripheral researchers with short-range occasional publications . On the contrary , I am dealing with front-line professionals with brilliant careers and great predicament among their peers and the public .
2 . An epistemological variant from America concerning October 12 Why should we use geo-historical terms such as pre-Columbian and post- Columbian , pre-Hispanic or post- Hispanic America ? Why is it so usual if there is another yardstick for measuring the European cultural periods ? After all , the Europeans are there and we , the Americans , are here . And given that the European invasion of the American continent also changed the Old World once and for all in a
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