However, if the 19th-Century discourse and images of Amerindians as disappearing predecessors were instrumental in the constitution of the founding narrative of Argentina as a white country without Amerindians, its meaning in the months before the country’s financial collapse in 2001 (the worst economic crisis in its history), is actually related more to the limitations of those very narratives to deal with the demands for identitarian markers in a context of national emergency that also affected historical notions of nationhood (especially the idea of Argentina as the most developed country in Latin America).

Of course there is also the influence of a particular end-of-the-millennium sensitivity that puts Amerindians as signifiers of authenticity and origin. But despite the influence of these global trends, Huellas’s discourse is quite local in its attempt, whereas naïve or cynical, to positivise the instability of ideas of nation-ness during the economic crisis by means of these fantasies of racial crossing. Amerindian-ness, in the post-modern primitivist version of Huellas, is invested with the attributes of the essential, the time-less and the unchanging, which contrasts to the dominant forms of Argentinian identity made fragile, contingent and unstable by the crisis. In the calendar’s text, for example, it reads «We have to find them to find ourselves / And start all over again». [19]