In many ways, Argentina appears as a quintessentially Atlantic nation. Both in self-conceptualizations and scholarly ones since the 19th century Argentina’s history faces eastward toward the Atlantic, rooted firmly in the port of Buenos Aires, its legacy of European immigration, and its tight connections to North Atlantic capital throughout the first century of its existence. This Atlantic-facing narrative has had substantial consequences on how we understand the country, from assumptions about the centrality of Buenos Aires in state-formation processes in the nineteenth century to the inevitability of national unification to the place and priorities of infrastructure projects. Those assumptions and the narratives that reinforce them become difficult to sustain when relocating our narratives closer to the Andes mountains and Pacific Ocean. This panel seeks to tease out new foundational narratives for an Andean- and Pacific-facing Argentina, one that rests less on the traditional views of Atlantic-centric paradigms and more on the perspectives of transnational processes in the Pacific, indigenous actors, and geological sciences. Such a reassessment of Argentina’s Atlantic-centric paradigm illuminates histories that better connect Argentina to its Andean neighbors, where economic developments linked to high altitude geographies and indigenous history are more prevalent in their histories, and to the Pacific World, where processes of globalization appeared radically different from the Atlantic World.

These papers develop the narratives of an Andean- and Pacific-facing Argentina through recasting different well-tread moments in Argentina’s national history as having been grounded in places far flung from the traditional history. Rooted firmly in the Mapuche spatial references (rather than Spanish ones), Geraldine Davies Lenoble’s paper traces out the historical development of indigenous territorialities over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her paper ultimately asks us to reconsider the centrality of Mapuche politics and economics in the transformative period of the mid-nineteenth century. Kyle Harvey’s paper builds on the concept of geographical centrality in historical narrative construction by focusing on the political development of the western provinces of Cuyo through their economic and social relationships to Chile and the Pacific Ocean in the nineteenth century. Ultimately, his paper makes the case for understanding the foundational civil conflicts of the mid-nineteenth century as centered not in the region’s relationship to the Atlantic port of Buenos Aires, but rather the Pacific ports of Valparaíso, Coquimbo, and Carrizal. Javier Cikota’s paper denaturalizes the power of the Atlantic by revealing the contingencies that influenced projects to reshape the Andean region of northern Patagonia in the early twentieth century. Specifically, his paper examines a hydroelectric project in the Andes to make the case that the ideological drive of national elites was less important in determining the outcome and shape of the project than the locally situated Andean dynamics among bureaucrats and foreign agents.

Ultimately, these papers lay claim to the centrality of geographies that fall outside of Argentina’s traditional Atlantic-facing narratives. We do not see these places merely as complicating, but rather as demanding a new understanding of the region’s history and the spatial orientations that underpin it.