Carlos S. Dimas, University of Nevada
State Visions: Exploring the Argentine Landscape in the Gran Chaco, 1870-1910
In 1845, the Argentine liberal intellectual Domingo F. Sarmiento published his famous work, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism. The premise of the book is straight forward: the vast and underpopulated interior was representative of barbarism and the legacies of the colonial era, while the globally oriented metropole of Buenos Aires embodied civilization. Sarmiento’s ideas encapsulated the sentiments of Latin America’s liberal reformers of the nineteenth century. Steeped in the positivist discourse of order and progress, elites developed grandiose visions of creating the modern nation-state through economic development, social transformation, and scientific rationalism. In the case of Argentina, the interior presented an enigma. Although intellectuals repeatedly considered the land and its people as “backward”— often through referring to it as el desierto (the desert)— it was also seen as an area prime for socioeconomic development through large-scale agriculture and settler-colonialism.
This talk focuses on the work of Argentine explorers venturing into the Gran Chaco. Today, the region forms part of Argentina’s northeastern border. However, during the colonial period and much of the nineteenth-century indigenous communities populated the Gran Chaco, with many maps referring to the region as “Toba Land.” In the 1870s the Argentine state initiated a process of extending its presence into the peripheries and pushing back internal borders, often using soldiers, engineers, naturalists, and scientists to complete field work. In the northeast, national authorities sent soldiers and engineers to travel across the Chaco to complete detailed reports, often requesting descriptions of the environment. During their travels, many completed basic weather observations to help provide some more detail to their visual observations. Collectively, the reports attempted to draw comparisons and differences between the Argentine “mainland” and the Gran Chaco. Overall, they enthusiastically supported increased exploration of the region’s dense humid forest with “tropical qualities,” to expand Argentina’s environmental diversity.
Carlos S. Dimas is an assistant professor of Latin American history at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. His monograph, Poisoned Eden: Cholera Epidemics, State-Building, and the Problem of Public Health in Tucumán, Argentina, 1865-1908, is forthcoming with University of Nebraska Press. His work has appeared in the Journal of Latin American Studies and the Bulletin of Latin American Research.
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