Cruzando la cordillera: La frontera argentino-chilena como espacio social (review)

In The Mediterranean and the World of the Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II (University of California Press, 1996), Fernand Braudel showed that the sea connected, rather than separated, the lands and peoples that surrounded it. Braudel's powerful image could easily be applied to the Andean cordillera between Argentina and Chile; according to the contributors to this book, this imposing mountain range united, rather than divided, the two nations. Indeed, the artificial border delineated in the nineteenth century had little meaning for the peoples living on either side. Only in the middle of the twentieth century did these states implement policies that first curtailed, then severed, a long-lasting relationship based upon a common precolumbian past, trade, investment, migration, and a sense of local identity that was more Chilean than Argentine.

The book's main thesis is that Argentina's control of the border areas remained weak well after the consolidation of the national state in 1880. It was only in the 1930s that—after a long period of neglect that had allowed Chilean entrepreneurs, ranchers, merchants (legal and otherwise), and migrants to move freely in and out of Argentine territory—the government in Buenos Aires decided to step in and enforce the existence of the border. This general thesis contradicts long-held assumptions about the might of Argentina's nation-state and the completeness of the integration of its interior areas into its expanding domestic market and national institutions at the end of the nineteenth century.

Trade was the main link between the peoples on both sides of this porous border. The Araucanian Indians inaugurated a cattle trade circuit through the Andes that was assumed by landowners and merchants after Patagonia's violent incorporation into Chile and Argentina. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chile remained the main market for livestock raised in Argentine territory from Tierra del Fuego to Jujuy. At the same time, Chilean investments poured into Patagonia, as several chapters on land and livestock purchases in Neuquén, Río Negro, and Chubut show. In southern Patagonia, large Chilean companies that were centered in the bustling port of Punta Arenas monopolized wool trade and transportation to Chile's market. Only in the late 1920s did both nations enforce high tariffs that put an end to a still-flowering cross-border trade. In the wake of this economic protectionism, national markets prevailed.

Tightening trade regulations did not stop migration, especially of Chileans to Argentina, where their numbers grew in the 1930s and 1940s. The development of the oil industry, and of trade and administrative posts in cities on the Atlantic side of Patagonia, encouraged Chilean workers to move to urban centers there. As Susana Torres shows, integration with local society was partial at best. Binational marriages were common, as were marriages to other migrants (largely southern European), but lingering racial stereotypes and derogatory terms (chilote) hindered full assimilation.

Argentina's neglect of the border area allowed the development of a "borderland" identity. Diego Escolar makes a compelling case for the shift of identities from Chilean to Argentinean in the town of Calingasta (San Juan). Before the 1940s, the town had an unmistakably Chilean flavor: its population, trade, festivities, memories, and even indigenous past harkened back to Chile. By the 1940s, however, rising nationalism in both countries rendered this state of affairs no longer admissible. The town was Argentinized by means of "seduction" (the extension of social welfare) and institutional coercion (the school system, the army, and customs) in the context of expanding domestic labor and commodity markets. A shift of identities (or allegiances, one might say)—from Chilean inhabitants in Argentine soil to Argentine citizens—strongly reflected these changes. In the wake of this process of Argentinization, all traces of an Indian past were erased.

Susana Bandieri has done...