Yanquis in the Desert: Scientist, Bureaucrats, and the Development of the Argentine Borderlands around 1910

An Industrial city, meticulously designed by the American geologist Bailey Willis and his band of foreign experts at the foothills of the Andes, harnessing the hydrological power of the glacial rivers, and tightly integrated through rail to the region it would lord over, faded into ignominy almost as soon as it was conceived. After half a decade of tense, halted relationships with the bureaucrats in the Ministry of Public Works, Bailey Willis left the country to avoid jail, taking his plans with him. What can this “City of Caesars” tell us about the ways in which the Argentine Liberal state imagined the Andean valleys of northern Patagonia, about how they hoped to orient the region to the Atlantic, and why those plans were shelved and forgotten for twenty years. By highlighting the transformative, yet unheralded, role of mid-level bureaucrats, and centering the complex relationship they had with foreign agents at the heart of the story, this paper suggests that Argentine development of the northern Patagonia frontier was contingent, rather that ideologically driven.