Erasing Rurality: Conservation and Modernity in Patagonia

In 1934, the Argentine government created a new national park in the Patagonian Andes, on the border with Chile. Far from a symbolic gesture, as earlier iterations had been, this park soon became an object of profound material and symbolic transformations. The park’s center of gravity was the town of Bariloche, about forty miles from the border with Chile. Bariloche worked as a hub for farmers around it that sold cattle and grains to Chilean markets. In the 1930s, Argentine authorities sought to fight the recession by incentivizing industry and agriculture. Yet, in Bariloche and the surrounding national park, the policy entailed re-signifying an intrinsically agricultural landscape into a postal-ready tourist view.

This paper examines how erasure and conservation, two seemingly contrasting practices of spatial transformation, served the modernizing of 1930s Argentina. The National Parks Bureau spearheaded an ambitious plan to turn the agricultural village that was Bariloche into a tourist destination. Part of this plan included the expropriation of farms to open streets, the renaming of streets to commemorate national heroes, and the establishment of a local museum that cemented the role of Bariloche (and Patagonia, more generally) as a nationalizing force in this frontier space. These examples shed light on how the modernizing aspirations of Argentine elites intersected with their views of nature, the nation, and the border. Ultimately, this paper offers a window into an albeit underexamined dimension of the history of conservation.