Is it Transnational Where There Is No State?

At the turn of the nineteenth century, the boundaries of new states fell into question, and in the subsequent decades they were contested, shifting, and by no means defined until the turn of the twentieth century.  Only a line on a map described and divided the northern deserts of Mexico and the southern expanses of the Great American desert. In South America, Patagonia and the southern pampas, though claimed on paper, was by all intents and purposes unknown territory. In both cases, Indian hostilities had prevented expansion into those regions. Within these territories, however, newly equestrian indigenous peoples were pushed and pulled into the region in a migratory process that led to integration of  diverse indigenous people already there and the emergence of stronger polities. These polities, in many ways new states in themselves, both linked—through raiding and trading—and separated the emerging nation states of the United States and Mexico as well as Argentina and Chile. The migrations to and within Araucanía, Apachería, and Comanchería, were less transnational than national. Though these states ultimately failed in the late nineteenth century, the bifurcation of their territorial range did not occur until the respective nation states of Argentina, Chile, Mexico and the United States had resolved internal civil wars and were able to turn their attention to conquest of these nations.