Recasting Nature: Territorial Imagination in Southern Chile

One of the issues that kept Chilean authorities up at night since Independence was territorial integrity. Like others in Latin America, they shared the view that a united, connected national space constituted a strong nation-state. Chilean scholars have longed examined that political elites turned to the construction of a north-south railroad that would articulate the national territory. However, the southernmost third of the country is comprised by tens of thousands of islands and islets separated by natural channels.

This presentation follows the debates about the landscapes of southern Chile as their topography challenged imaginaries about a constitutive territory. Drawing on congressional minutes, scientific publications, and literary depictions, it reconstructs how Chilean political elites grappled with the problem of governing an archipelagic south in the first half of the twentieth century. These actors conceived nature in southern Chile as a malleable canvas on which territorial continuity could be projected. That projection took several shapes, this paper focuses on three of them.

First, I analyze the distribution of land leases at the turn of the century to a handful of men in the context of a larger portrayal of southern territories as distant, desolate, and isolated. Second, I turn to the attempts to build a canal in the late 1930s as a continuation of the longitudinal railroad that had sown Chile together along its north-south axis. Finally, I turn to the timid development of the tourism industry to illustrate a shift in means but not in goals in making the territories of southern Llanquihue, Aysén, and Magallanes part of a national landscape. All in all, the paper shows that only by treating southern nature as a pliable canvas could Chilean elites reconcile an unruly archipelago with the ideal of a continuous national territory.