An Ecology of Exile: Patagonia, the Ushuaia Penal Colony, and Rethinking the Nature of "The End of the World"

Patagonia has been called a “landscape of the imagination.” Encompassing the southernmost stretches of South America, this vast geographic region of more than one million square kilometers has been mired in myth since Antonio Pigafetta’s travel accounts in the early sixteenth century. Subsequently, Charles Darwin, Francisco Moreno, Bruce Chatwin, and other explorers, travelers, and writers recycled and reinforced a durable lexicon that categorizes Patagonia as desolate, monotonous, and prehistoric. Literary scholars have acutely analyzed these narratives, deconstructing what has been called the “imperial geographical imagination.” And yet, if we attempt to un-imagine Patagonia, what is a lexicon through which to engage the region from a different perspective, one that is not imperial? This paper supplies one alternative by exploring a sub-Patagonian history of the Argentine penal colony in Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego (1902-1947). In 1932, Colonel Charles Furlong stated, “Few sections of the globe are less generally known or intrigue the imagination more than the cold Land of Fire.” That same year, prisoners in Ushuaia were experiencing “la época de terror.” My paper looks at the diaries, poems, and publications by those exiled to the penal colony. I provide a history of the prison and discuss this heterogeneous group situated in one corner of Patagonia to disrupt, but not to dismiss, the enduring language of traveler narratives. Prisoners’ writings offer alternative understandings and vocabularies that complicate the region’s mythical status as “the end of the world.” These accounts reveal how Ushuaia’s isolated location facilitated a degree of impunity for officials, guards, and wardens who violated Argentine laws and the nation’s progressive rhetoric. This social and cultural history reveals the ways in which Patagonia can be simultaneously mythic and mundane, as it has been deeply entrenched in the many, and often violent, mechanisms of modernity.