Social Science Research Council

"'Where Night Finds Him, He Lives': Music, Regional Identity, and the Border Among the Gauchos of Chilean Patagonia"

Music has always figured prominently both in the gaucho lifestyle and in various incarnations of romanticized, urban gaucho iconography. In the early twenty-first century, the gaucho profession, long an emblem of Argentine nationalism, is practiced almost exclusively in southern Chile, in the Región of Aisén. Throughout the region's history, a convenient proximity to towns across the Argentine border and near complete isolation from central Chile to the north have fostered trans-Andean cultural and economic ties and have put the region in a liminal position between the two countries. The recent completion of a highway has connected Aisén to Chile's cosmopolitan center, simultaneously threatening the viability of the gauchos' small-scale cattle-ranching economy and increasing regional and national interest in the gaucho as a figure of local patrimony. The current industrialization and nationalization of Aisén is redefining and reinforcing the Chilean/Argentine border whose physical and cultural-practical permeability first led to the prominence of the gaucho profession in Aisén. Throughout the current period of change, music has remained a principal locus for negotiations of identity in both the lives of the gauchos and the ideological construction of "gaucho-ness" in the urban imagination. In this dissertation, I will inquire into the ways in which the gauchos of Aisén and local urban citizens use gaucho traditional music to negotiate and define the Región of Aisén and its relationships with Argentine Patagonia, Chile's cosmopolitan center, and the border that separates the two nation-states.