Frontier Processes, Climate Change, and Puestero Culture in Western Argentina

Climate variability has uneven effects on the land use and livelihood strategies of agriculturalists and rural resource users.  As well, rural livelihoods are increasingly implicated in a suite of exogenous, transformative, and mobilizing geographies of globalization.  Navigating these complexities is a challenge for cultural ecological and ethnographic scholarship.  In this paper, we use Cronon et al’s (1992) concept of ‘frontier processes’ as a unifying framework to analyze the various factors affecting western Argentina’s puestero culture.  Puestero’s are pastoralist herders and livestock ranchers who live on the western periphery of Argentina; they practice diverse stocking and land management techniques in a range of ecosystems.  In addition to a prolonged drought event, puesteros in southern Mendoza also contend with new lifestyle desires, out-migration, state-mandated conservation efforts, and property expansion.  As occurred in the US west, these can best be understood in terms of species-shifting, market-making, land-taking, boundary-setting, state-forming, and self-shaping processes.