Missionary women in Indigenous Chaco Missions in the 1970s-1980s

Abstract

The article explores the role played by Catholic and Protestant missionary women in the projects of social, political and economic promotion deployed within the framework of a network of indigenous missions with ecclesial roots, that was conceived in the Argentinian Chaco region during the decades 1970 and 1980. It is based on testimonies and documents obtained in ethnographic fieldwork with missionary women, who worked in those years at Instituto de Cultura Popular (INCUPO) and at Junta Unida de Misiones (JUM) in the northwest of the Chaco province, Argentina. This article seeks to reveal the insertion trajectories, roles and transformations that the missionaries promoted by incorporating a gender perspective in their work, both within their institutions and in social and political participation of indigenous women in Chaco in the framework of community development projects.