These four papers draw upon a wide variety of primary source material—including criminal records, court cases, international diplomatic correspondence, monuments, and fine art—to trace the construction of gendered and racialized identities, showing how this process entrenched or reformulated social hierarchies on a local, regional, and national scale. Sarah Walsh’s paper discusses the Roto Chileno war memorial in Santiago, Chile, as a site of national racial identity formation. She reads the memorial’s racialized representations of masculinity and military history as part of a burgeoning discourse on Chilean national Whiteness. Hannah Greenwald’s paper similarly considers narratives of national racial identity in Argentina and Chile. Her paper examines the ways that elite, urban discussions of race in Santiago and Buenos Aires clashed with lived realities of interethnic relations and mestizaje in the southern borderlands. Kyle Harvey looks to the province of Mendoza, Argentina, where the erasure of racial categories in official documents led to the creation of new markers of social differentiation, such as nationality and foreignness. He shows how, in particular, the category of Chileanness took on new meaning in this border region. Javier Cikota examines the dynamics of class and gender in a northern Patagonian frontier town, using two criminal cases of rape to explore the various ways that settlers employed the concept of “fatherhood.” He argues that competing understandings of manhood and patriarchy served to both bolster and limit the reach of Argentine state power over frontier areas.

Taken together, these papers speak to the relationship between identity construction and broader processes of military conquest, state formation, and settler colonialism. Additionally, this panel brings together analyses from Argentina and Chile, highlighting the interconnectedness of Argentine and Chilean history and the relational construction of identity on both sides of the Andes.