In Argentina, aboriginal music and dance—as part of what UNESCO has called “intangible cultural heritage“—has been overlooked for a long time. During the construction of Argentina as a nation, especially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European-derived societies and cultures were the privileged models in our country. In that period, the national government sponsored the wave of European immigration and, at the same time, the military persecution of aboriginal peoples and their forced assimilation to “Western Christian civilization.” One of the consequences of this history, mostly in the cultural imagination of the urban middle classes, was the pervasive thought that “Argentinians are descendants of the ships”—a popular saying referring to the ships that brought “our grandparents from Europe,” mainly from Spain and Italy.