“In the pampa we’re all gauchos...” Ethnography of cattle-drive in the North Patagonia frontier

Abstract

The Andean communities of Chilean Northern Patagonia preexisted the establishment of the Chile-Argentina border and their cattle-drive practices defies the rigidity of Nation-State limits and its north/south geographical vocation. Using an ethnographic and participative perspective, this article aims to describe the experience of a cattle-drive journey from the border village of Paso El León to Cochamó, on the Pacific coast. The paper shows how arrieros from Paso El León appropriate and inhabit a space that was shaped to divide nations and exploit its resources. Every year, the cattle-drive ritual renews the constitutive elements of a deeply territorialized border experience: it shows the fluid character of national identity and highlights a peculiar way of inhabiting the territory (based on a social order that involves the interdependency between humans and other-than-humans). This article also shows the relation between the origins of cattle-drive practices 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” actors: tourism, conservationism and extractivism.