Hannah Greenwald

This project examines the relationship between race, citizenship, and land tenure in nineteenth-century Argentina and the Americas. As the Argentine army seized and occupied Indigenous lands at the end of the nineteenth century, the national government passed a largely forgotten piece of legislation that aimed to grant land titles to non-Indigenous rural squatters, who were reconceptualized as “old settlers.” As multiracial rural populations tried—and usually failed—to become legitimate landowners, they generated a substantial paper trail. This documentary record provides a unique window into shifting understandings of race and patriotism, which conditioned rural people’s access to property in the aftermath of the state’s territorial advance. Using documentation from Argentina as a starting point, this project provides new insights into the hemispheric process by which rural squatters became quintessential symbols of national valor while Indigenous peoples came to be viewed as transient interlopers on their own lands.