Rather than assuming that borderlands were merely transitional spaces destined for incorporation, the panel asks how they functioned as key sites of experimentation. How and why did borders begin to matter differently in this period? Were late nineteenth-century borderlands fundamentally distinct from earlier frontier formations, or did they represent new configurations of long-standing dynamics? By treating borderlands as historically contingent rather than analytically fixed, the panel invites a reconsideration of space, power, and sovereignty in a global age of national territorial consolidation.

While the papers draw on cases from North and South America, the panel is organized less around geographic comparison than around shared analytical concerns, with each contribution examining specific dimensions of borderlands in this transformative period. Spanning the mid- to late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, the papers trace changes over time in the ways borderlands were governed, imagined, and contested. They address different configurations of state, imperial, and Indigenous actors across the Americas.

One case revisits the territorial dispute between Guatemala and Belize by focusing on the mid- to late nineteenth century, when Maya political entities actively challenged imperial and state efforts to control land and expand extractive industries, shaping the very process of border definition. In the same period but further south, another paper examines independent Mapuche and Tehuelche communities in the Pampas and Patagonia, analyzing how they engaged new market dynamics and reworked territorial practices in relation to Argentine and Chilean state formation. Moving into the early twentieth century, a contribution on southern Chile explores how political elites sought to integrate an archipelagic landscape whose fragmented geography challenged ideals of territorial continuity and national integrity. Finally, a study of northern Patagonia during its administration as an Argentine National Territory investigates how settler expansion and institutional consolidation reshaped frontier society, with particular attention to racialized masculinity and patriarchal authority under a regime of limited citizenship.

The panel’s discussant, whose work on Latin American borderlands speaks directly to the period and themes addressed here, will help draw out comparisons across the cases and further develop the panel’s broader analytical interventions.

This panel will interest scholars of borderlands across the Americas and beyond, as well as historians of state formation, Indigenous politics, territory and space, and contested sovereignty.