Most Irish visitors to Buenos Aires will be familiar with Quilmes, the domestic lager named after the city a short distance to the southeast of the capital where the original brewery was founded in the late 19th century. With its sky blue-and-white labels, a cold bottle of Quilmes seems as quintessentially Argentinian as Maradona, Evita or the tango.
But Quilmes also represents another side of the nation’s history, one not featured on the Argentinian tourist board’s promos. It’s the name of a mostly forgotten people from the northwest of the country whose resistance to Spanish colonial rule in the 17th century ended with thousands of indigenous men, women and children being sent on a 1,450km forced march from their Andean stronghold to Buenos Aires. The few hundred who survived were put to work building the port through which would pass millions of white European immigrants in the centuries to follow.
The Quilmes are one among many indigenous peoples who populate Patria. Part history, part travelogue, part call-to-arms, Laurence Blair’s starting point is the forgotten indigenous and Black nations who resisted the European coloniser. Such as Palmares, a kingdom of formerly enslaved Africans founded in the Atlantic rainforest at the end of the 16th century, or Wallmapu, home to the Mapuche who, for centuries, staved off Spanish colonial armies in the south of Chile.
Interweaving reportage with an admirably researched historical narrative, Blair argues that South American history is littered with nations that have been “dreamed up, dismembered, or disappeared altogether”. But that the ideas of these nations continue to shape the modern-day continent and offer solutions to its many problems.
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Infused with the spirit of Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, and with a professional journalist’s eye for detail, Blair reports from the front line of the centuries-long war between big business – loggers, ranchers, mining interests – and the indigenous communities who continue to resist, all the while connecting the past with the present.
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For example, foregrounding the participation of Africans and indigenous soldiers in the 19th-century wars of independence is not just “a matter of correcting the record”, Blairs argues, “it has revolutionary implications for how the region sees itself today”.
