Landscaping Patagonia

328 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 26 halftones, 11 maps, 2 tables, notes, bibl., index

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-8613-4
Published: February 2025
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-8614-1
Published: February 2025

David J. Weber Series in the New Borderlands History

Hardcover Available February 2025, but pre-order your copy today!

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In late nineteenth-century Latin America, governments used new scientific, technological, and geographical knowledge not only to consolidate power and protect borders but also to define the physical contours of their respective nations. Chilean and Argentine authorities in particular attempted to transform northern Patagonia, a space they perceived as "desert," through a myriad of nationalizing policies, from military campaigns to hotels. But beyond the urban governing halls of Chile and Argentina, explorers, migrants, local authorities, bandits, and visitors also made sense of the nation by inhabiting the physical space of the northern Patagonian Andes. They surveyed passes, opened roads, claimed land titles or leases, traveled miles to the nearest police station, rode miles on horseback to escape the police, and hiked the landscape.

María de los Ángeles Picone tells the story of how people living, governing, and traveling through northern Patagonia sought to construct versions of Chile and Argentina based on their ideas about and experiences in geographical space in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By repositioning the analytical focus from Santiago and Buenos Aires to northern Patagonia, Picone reveals how a wide array of actors, with varying degrees of political, economic, and social power, assigned distinctive—and sometimes conflicting—meanings to space and national identity.

About the Author

María de los Ángeles Picone is assistant professor of history at Boston College.
For more information about María de los Ángeles Picone, visit the Author Page.

Reviews

"In this masterful, field-changing work, Picone integrates Chilean and Argentine political, spatial, and environmental history. The Patagonian landscape takes center stage as Picone brings to life the people who inhabited this ecologically and culturally expansive region."—Emily Wakild, Cecil D. Andrus Endowed Chair for Environment and Public Lands, Boise State University

"A delightfully creative analysis of the making of modern Argentina and Chile along the valleys, mountains, and communities of their border in the southern Andes."—Mark Healey, author of The Ruins of the New Argentina

"By deftly interweaving stories of place-making by settlers, travelers, and authorities in Argentina and Chile, Ángeles Picone dismantles enduring views of Patagonia as an empty space. With its blend of historical and spatial analysis, this book pushes borderland studies in new directions." —John Soluri, author of Creatures of Fashion