Patagonian ground rules: institutionalizing access at the frontier

ABSTRACT

The settlement of Argentine Patagonia after the genocidal military campaign of 1878–1885 occurred through discursive, legal, and institutional innovations. This article focuses on the emergence and consolidating of formal property by analyzing how access mechanisms are institutionalized through the constitution of law and public authority. Contests around access to land and resources became embedded in institutional structures in a context of legacies that continue to shape land distribution and dispossession. We argue that propertization, this transition from access to property, with its racial grammar, relies on invisibilization of people, reclassification of land, and the threat of violence.

KEYWORDS:

• Regimes of propertization
• racialization
• settler colonialism
• land
• Argentina

Acknowledgements

This has benefited greatly from insightful and generous comments from two anonymous reviewers and from Deborah Delgado-Pugley, Piergiorgio Di Gimianini, Marcos Mendoza, Eric Thomas, Jens Friis Lund, Christian Pilegaard Hansen, Jesse Ribot, Hernan Petrelli, and Christian Lund. All errors remain our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The data collected from Nahuel Huapi NP is augmented with existing work on the region (in particular Bessera 2011; Blanco 2018; Méndez 2006; Pérez and Aguirre 2020; Trentini 2016; Valverde 2013).

2 All interviews and excerpts from documents are translated from Spanish to English by the authors.

3 In 2018, Rasmussen made a Multidimensional Poverty Assessment in Lof Paicil Antriao in collaboration with Marieve Pouliot. Information in this paragraph is derived from the preparatory conversations and community meeting prior to its implementation as well as the work by Pérez and Aguirre (2020) and the ‘official’ community history produced as part of the path toward recognition, the relevamiento territorial (Nahuel 2013).

4 The story has received some media coverage also at the national level and is treated more extensively by Pérez and Aguirre (2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark under grant FSE 7015-00048B and the European Research Council under ERC Grant: State Formation Through the Local Production of Property and Citizenship (Ares (2015)2785650 – ERC-2014-AdG – 662770_Local State).

Notes on contributors

Mattias Borg Rasmussen

Mattias Borg Rasmussen is associate professor at the University of Copenhagen. An anthropologist by training, Rasmussen has most recently done work on conservation and frontier dynamics in Patagonia. Working within the field of political ecology, he is broadly interested in the intersections of resource struggles, local-level politics, and environmental change. Rasmussen is the author of Andean Waterways: Resource Politics in Andean Peru (2015) and the coeditor of Reconfiguring Frontier Spaces (2018) in the journal World Development.

Liliana Figueroa

Liliana Figueroa is a researcher at the National University of Patagonia San Juan Bosco in Comodoro Rivadavia. She holds a PhD in Social Sciences from FLACSO in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her work concentrates on the distribution of public land and dynamics of access and exclusion in Patagonia, both in Cholila and in the urban peripheries on the Atlantic coast.