This article addresses the current processes of ethnogenesis in the province of Santiago del Estero from a perspective focused on the historicity of ethnic identities. Faced with certain denialist positions of indigenous identities, considering them without historical continuity, or those situated in the pure subjectivity of the actors, the work problematizes the forms of visibility and invisibility of the indigenous during the 19th and early 20th centuries to understand identities as emerging from power relations and the conditions of possibility for their legitimacy in the present. In this sense, it problematizes the construction of current ethnicity based on the role of the state and the parallel activation of Indian memories of the local peasantry. Methodologically, we worked with various documentary sources and based on previous ethnographic work carried out with sectors of the peasantry.