A Pacific-Facing Argentina: 19th-Century Social Change and Political Conflict from Western Argentina’s Pacific World

The formative political conflicts that took place in Argentina in the mid-nineteenth century are often cast through the lens of partisan stakes and the centralizing power of the capital, Buenos Aires. In this history, the western provinces of Argentina, such as Mendoza and San Juan where this paper is based, were hubs of conflict, harboring some of the last hold outs against the impending liberal order and the rule of Buenos Aires over the new republic. Thus, the place of the provinces is often relegated to the role of resistance and being allies or foes of distant political forces. In effect, the stakes of these conflicts have been defined through a porteño gaze toward the interior and the interior’s gaze back.

This paper seeks to reorient the focus of conflict and change in the mid-nineteenth century. Rather than examining these conflicts through Atlantic-oriented lenses, this paper sets it sights across the mountains to Chile and the Pacific Ocean. There, this paper finds a different, previously underappreciated set of stakes and causes to the intense political conflicts in western Argentina. Using the 1866-67 Revolución de los Colorados and a reimagining of the classic figure of the caudillo, this paper explains this rebellion as a product of the opportunities and uncertainties surrounding copper mining in northern Chile and the trans-Andean commercial connections it engendered by tracing the history of one of the rebellion’s Chilean financers. By understanding this financer through the lens of caudillismo, the paper ultimately suggests that rather than seeing the caudillo and western Argentina as parts of a story of receding and outdated political ideas and movements, we ought to understand these figures and places also as harbingers of a liberal, capitalist future.