Cattle driving is a spatial practice that has important economical and ritual meanings for Andean peasant’s communities in the Chilean northern Patagonia. These communities pre-existed the establishment of the border between Argentina and Chile. Patagonia was discursively constructed as a wild yet resourceful frontier, where pioneers could contribute to the “manifest destiny” of their nation, bringing civilization as far as Tierra del Fuego. Through this colonization process, the Chilean state imposed a north/south vertical axis that became the hegemonic spatial order of the nation and silenced east/west social relations, historically connecting both sides of the Andes following mountain pathways and rivers’ basins.
Based on the ethnographic study of of the cattle-drivng journey from the border village of Paso El León to Cochamó, on the Pacific coast, this paper sohows how these arrieros or troperos defies the spatial rules of the nation, maintaining cross-border social relationships and practicing alternative forms of territoriality, inhabiting a space that was, and still is, shaped to divide nations and exploit its resources. We will see how the continuity of dynamic of territorial marginalization and the presence/absence of the State has affected this social practice along the history of the community. In this sense, this presentations shows the relation between the origins of cattle-drive and the colonization of Patagonia in the XIX century and how, in recent years, the possibilities to maintain the gaucho culture are related to limits defined by some of the key actors of the “post-frontier” context: tourism, conservationism and extractivism.
