La Capilla “Inmaculada Concepción” y el entramado de poder en el Bariloche de las primeras décadas del siglo XX

Abstract

This work is about the formation of the first Catholic group around the construction of the chapel "Inmaculada Concepción" in Bariloche (1907), as a space for the visibility of economic power and social prestige. The founding commissions of the chapel were formed by members of the company Chile Argentina, representing neighbors of the incipient urban population of San Carlos and missionaries of the Salesian Congregation coming from the mission founded in Junín de los Andes in 1892. The chapel is the symbol of the Catholic origins of the town linked to the urban elite that operated as the identity matrix of the city, distributing power and creating territoriality. The religious territory superimposes power constructions that expand and cross it through scales that function as constructions and expressions of social processes. This proposal is framed in studies that combine religion, power and territory and aims to analyze the spatialization of space this singular space as a communal process through two agencies that build power: the Salesians and the pro-temple commission for the construction of the chapel conformed by the "characterized neighbors". We propose for the analysis of written documentary sources, conceptualizations coming from the critical geography about the process of territorialization and specifically about the geography of religion, which are complemented with categories of social processes in the conformation of agencies in the territory. In the first place, we will give an account of the creation of a Catholic territory in a binational space through the territorialization of the Salesian agency and the social, political and economic conformation of the incipient town of Bariloche. In the second section, we will focus on the chapel "Immaculate Conception", through the framework of power agencies in the territory: the territorial State, its representatives and law enforcement, the Catholic Church and the Salesian Congregation, the Pro Temple commissions and the company Chile Argentina to which the majority of its members belonged.