Within the framework of a research project on genetic ancestry in the city of Córdoba, Argentina, we conducted an ethnographic study aimed at contributing to this field from an interdisciplinary perspective (or from one that bridges bioanthropology and social anthropology). In this article, we analyze a group of participants who approached us with the intention of seeking, confirming, or legitimizing a possible Indigenous or Afro-descendant ancestor through DNA analysis. In a country shaped by a national narrative that has long promoted the invisibilization, and supposed extinction of these identities, we first address the fragmented memories, silences, and suspicions that emerged in participants’ testimonies. Secondly, we examine the racialized and ethnicized markings that surfaced when reflecting on these identities, and how such suspicions were also intertwined with certain practices, preferences, and “connections”.

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This article offers a critical review of the notions of “upbringing” or uywaña, explored in diverse ethnographic studies from the Andean region, focusing on the everyday and ritual forms of coexistence observed among several Aymara families in the Region of Arica and Parinacota (Chile). These forms of coexistence are understood as practices that recreate and revitalize convivial relations between people and living environments, which unfold amid the eco-cultural inflections and fractures shaped by their participation in national Andean formations, as well as the ecological transformations caused by climate change. Following Tim Ingold’s (2022) invitation to “let ourselves be educated” by Aymara families, we propose an anthropology that, although emerging from fragile and asymmetric interactions, conceives mutual upbringing as a web of human and more-than-human correspondences. These correspondences serve as pathways for to thinking—and imagining—the reproduction of life in times of tension and crisis.

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From the European invasion of the Andes in 1532 and the establishment of colonial society, there was an intense struggle over memories: between the memories collected and rewritten by Europeans and those that the Andean populations sought to preserve. In the former, androcentric bias rendered women and the spaces they had occupied in pre-Hispanic Andean societies invisible. The latter, on the other hand, struggled to construct narratives that restored the protagonism women had once held. This was possible because Andean men and women managed to retain a certain degree of enunciative autonomy, despite colonial restraints, and because they used their own recording systems, such as the qeros, to inscribe their own stories and memories, thereby escaping colonial control. From a sample of 37 sixteenth-century qeros we were able to rescue visual narratives depicting female subjects, sometimes alone or sometimes accompanied by male figures. We identified three new sets of visual signifiers corresponding to colonial-era Andean memories in which female subjects play a significant role. Drawing on colonial lexicons, we propose that the enunciative category of Andean memories was the concept of runa, which referred equally to men or women, and women and men, and that it was Spanish chroniclers and authorities who masculinized the term, thereby rendering the female subjects invisible or erasing them entirely from these narratives chroniclers and authorities who masculinized the term, making the female subjects invisible or erasing them from these accounts.

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José Gil de Castro (1784-1841), nicknamed “El Mulato Gil”, and José Romero (1794-1858), known as “Zambo Peluca”, are two prominent afro-descendant figures in 19th-century Chilean history, whose lives and visual representation invite reflection on the foundations upon which the nation was built. Both were sons of enslaved mothers—one a painter born in the Viceroyalty of Peru, and the other a soldier born in the Captaincy General of Chile—and each embodies and exceptional testimony that makes it possible to discuss not only the construction of the republican order but also its racial discourse and imaginaries. Members of the Battalion of Infantes de la Patria, both men developed noteworthy trajectories that reveal the processes of recognition and invisibility experienced by people of African descent in Chile. Based on a comparative approach, this study emphasizes the visual dimension, highlighting the paradox that Gil de Castro—creator of the most iconic portraits of the nation’s founding figures—became known as the “faceless portraitist” as he left not a single image of himself; whereas Romero stands as the only Afro-descendant honored with multiple portraits. This contrast reveals the complex relationship between image and power during an era in which only a privileged few were granted “the right” to visual representation.

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