“Improve Their Condition While Making Them Useful”: Colonia General Conesa and the Dynamics of Settler Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century Argentina
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-1-2023
Department 1
History
Abstract
In 1879, as the Argentine army prepared a military campaign against Indigenous groups in the Pampas and Patagonia, the national government created an Indigenous colony called Colonia General Conesa. Conesa's inhabitants were expected to build homes and cultivate crops under military watch and become “useful” Argentine citizens in the process. This short-lived assimilationist project, which the government abandoned three years later, illuminates the rapidly shifting dynamics of Argentine settler colonial ideology. Although Argentine officials initially saw Conesa as an expedient resolution to the nation's so-called “Indian question,” the dissolution of the southern frontier line in the early 1880s necessitated a shift toward new strategies that emphasized the complete physical and discursive erasure of the region's Indigenous peoples. Conesa's history, situated within the broader context of interethnic relations in Argentina's southern borderlands, sheds light on the development of Argentine settler colonialism and exemplifies how Indigenous people were written out of the nation's history.
DOI
10.1215/00182168-10216482
Recommended Citation
Hannah Greenwald; “Improve Their Condition While Making Them Useful”: Colonia General Conesa and the Dynamics of Settler Colonialism in Nineteenth-Century Argentina. Hispanic American Historical Review 1 February 2023; 103 (1): 101–137. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-10216482
Required Publisher's Statement
This article is available from the publisher's website.