This dissertation examines the establishment of state institutions, the role of state agents, and the emergence of a self-conscious, municipally-based civil society in northern Patagonia in the six decades after it was conquered and incorporated into Argentina.

In Patagonia, the Argentine government embarked on an ambitious project of forging a society from above, by creating new state institutions and encouraging new settlement. But these ambitions soon ran aground thanks to limited funding and political gridlock. What emerged instead was a ramshackle combination of authoritarian central administration with significant local autonomy that I call the “skeletal state.” Underfunded police officers, an overworked judiciary, and aloof governors made up the state presence in the frontier, with courts playing a central role as guarantors of social order. The “skeletal state” arrangement became remarkably resilient, as state agents proved flexible in overcoming scarce resources and institutional fragility, establishing legitimacy through legal action and ad-hoc extralegal responses to settler demands. The effectiveness of the “skeletal state” was intrinsically linked to the settler’s need for it, as both developed simultaneously.

Chapter One details the establishment, interaction, and trajectory of state institutions, looking closely at how state agents learned to operate within and beyond the system’s constraints. Chapter Two looks at how local and regional authorities attempted to discipline and acculturate the surviving indigenous population of the region. Prejudices, suspicion, and exigency shaped how state agents treated individuals perceived as indigenous, even as they tolerated the survival of indigenous communities in remote rural areas. Chapter Three follows the arrival of immigrants from Chile, Europe, and the Middle East to northern Patagonia, tracing their settlement patterns and the uncertain process by which they resisted, subverted, and sometimes allied themselves with the state. Chapter Four centers on family conflicts to explore how private affairs affected public perception of individuals, and the consequences of these conflicts on reputation-based social networks, which were critical to accessing justice in the frontier. Chapter Five examines the emergence of a municipal political identity (“vecino”) which was tirelessly cultivated by prominent and plebeian settlers alike. Vecinos, and the social networks they built, were a restraint on state power—blocking investigations, filing complaints against “bad police,” and agitating in the national press, providing resources and infrastructure for police to operate, acting as justices of the peace, housing runaways, and collaborating in investigations. Chapter Six surveys cases of the illegal practice of medicine to argue that these social networks were ultimately used to challenge the legitimacy of state-appointed authorities on the frontier, as communities banded together to defend healers and uncertified doctors against state prosecution.

The establishment of a functioning state apparatus on the frontier ultimately depended on the ability of state agents to creatively navigate the limited resources of the “skeletal state” and settler’s active desire for state presence. This reciprocity was not only unusual, it was also an ironic turn for a nation-building project that had imagined a strong state as the prerequisite for a vibrant civil society and proven suspicious of settlers’ ability to safeguard democratic principles.

This dissertation traces the interplay between understandings of the Argentine nation and constructs of Jewish ethnicity between 1955 and 1983. It begins with the celebrations surrounding the supposed triumph of the "liberal nation" after the overthrow of Juan Perón in 1955, and continues through the years of rapid transitions between civil and military rule, massive labor unrest and social protest, escalating violence, and finally the brutal military dictatorship of 1976-1983. It argues that these were crucial years in which Jewish activists forcefully discarded previous understandings of the nation and radically reformulated, several times, what it meant to be Jewish and Argentine.

This process echoed wider debates about the Argentine nation, but Jewish activists consistently ascribed particular meanings to different visions of the nation, whether liberal, national populist, revolutionary, or authoritarian. These understandings formed the basis for new articulations of membership and constructions of Argentine Jewishness. Through this all, the dissertation contends, the community's own complex generational politics catalyzed change. Beginning in the early 1960s, Jewish youth activists launched a rebellion against the community's central institutions, claiming that ethnic values must be made compatible with mentalities of native-born Argentines and new understandings of the nation. Rather than rejecting these innovations, the older generation often grappled with them, forcing the meanings of Jewishness in Argentina to the fore over and over again. At the height of revolutionary foment, the older generation even embraced the youth's radical definitions of Jewishness, though it later worked to silence them as social violence escalated in the mid-1970s. While the national context and the community's own dynamics are thus fundamental, this work also underscores many ways that the process of constructing ethnicity and rethinking the nation were tied to trends in the broader Jewish diaspora, involved in its own processes of remaking the meaning of Jewishness and Zionism after the establishment of the State of Israel.

With the interplay between national, communal, and diasporic processes, this dissertation offers three key contributions. The prevailing myth surrounding Argentine immigration is that by World War II the "melting pot" had forged a new Argentine culture and made ethnic identity irrelevant. By contrast, this project contends that the rapid political changes and shifting national consciousnesses in the years after 1955 created particularly fertile ground to debate, remake, and reformulate the intersection between being Jewish and Argentine. This project also speaks to ongoing debates about the relative importance of nation and diaspora in the making of ethnic identity: even as Jewish activists were keenly attuned to constructions of ethnicity emanating from other parts of the diaspora, they consistently accepted or rejected them in accordance with their understanding of themselves as Argentines. Finally, it adds the ethnic community to the realms where Latin American youth activists remade cultural categories in the 1960s and 1970s, but also complicates the image of rebellious youth and recalcitrant elders by pointing to a varied interplay between the two.

This dissertation examines Argentina’s late twentieth-century transition from military authoritarianism to democracy in the broader context of the globalization of ideas about international human rights. With a focus on events between 1955 and 1983, I explain how Argentines came to create and support a human rights-based conception of the rule of law and, specifically, the criminal prosecution of their country’s former de facto leaders.

I approach this question by reconstructing an aspect of Argentine legal and political culture that has been overlooked in existing scholarship: public debates led by the country’s prominent and politically diverse lawyers over constitutionalism, revolution, national security, and universal rights. Integrating national history and the history of globalization, I argue that the remaking of Argentine democracy was part of a late twentieth-century globalization of legal order whereby legal advocates and their nonlawyer allies wielded international human rights norms not to transcend the state, as is frequently claimed, but to transform it. This national transformation, constrained by the political and legal legacies of state violence, ultimately produced a paler version of democracy than many Argentines had once envisioned but one that nonetheless served to restrain the violence of the state against its citizens. Human rights were themselves transformed in the process: a law and politics of resistance to the state became instead the state-sponsored initiative to try perpetrators of “dirty war” abuses, an initiative that continues today, along with resistance to it.