Patagonia, a region in the southern tip of the Americas where the Andes meet the ocean in present-day Argentina and Chile, takes its name after Europeans thought it a land populated by giants, based on the large footprints left by Indigenous peoples’ footwear. Nineteenth-century Argentinian and Chilean intellectuals defined it as a desert, characterized by the absence of the rule of law. But it was far from “empty”; it was inhabited by a plurality of Indigenous peoples in the nineteenth century (and well before). Throughout the course of the nineteenth century, Patagonia became increasingly populated by transnational fur seal hunting corporations that threatened the very existence of the seals, selling their furs in London and other European markets. At the same time, a type of New Zealand sheep flooded Patagonia, along with a flurry of settlers who aimed to extract wool for foreign markets, threatening the existence of the native camelids called Guanacos, which had been central to the sustenance of Indigenous peoples. By the end of the twentieth century, Patagonia had become the basis of a national and transnational rebranding that shifted the representations of landscapes long inhabited by Indigenous peoples from deserts to a national hallmark—a treasure to keep because of its nature. It had become an icon—indeed, also a famous brand—evoking beautiful landscapes and the thrill of the outdoors at both sides of the Argentina–Chile border. The transformation of Patagonia from desert to national park took around a century.

Similar to Patagonia, Iguazu was a border region; it was a section of a larger territory in Rio de la Plata claimed by both the Spanish and Portuguese empires—both of whom went to great lengths to map it and draw a border—but which was in fact the homeland of a plurality of mobile Indigenous people. Over the course of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, Iguazu came to be valued by state officials precisely for its exuberant nature—a landscape that could showcase the national values of Argentina and Brazil. The “greater Chocó,” in the Pacific coast of what is today Colombia, and the interior of Brazil also were deemed “difficult” and “marginal” by officials and settlers tied to the Spanish and Portuguese empires. Because officials recurrently thought them as empty of state institutions and populated by peoples they deemed barbarous, they developed schemes to overtake them. These contested territories were borderlands, “spaces where different peoples came into contact, but where no single group could have absolute control” (Roller, 9).

What does the history of South America look like when seen from the borderlands? How did these landscapes seen by government agents as “deserts” come to be imagined as places for tourism and natural parks, and how did this affect Indigenous livelihoods? The books reviewed here challenge the most entrenched tropes about Latin American history by focusing on Patagonia, Rio de la Plata, the interior of Brazil, and the greater Chocó from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. All of them in one way or another revisit the spatial narratives that have trained us to think about Latin American history in terms of expanding states and retreating frontiers—the former often described as “centers” and the latter as “peripheries,” characterized as populated by “uncontacted” Indigenous peoples. Instead, these books provide a creative model for new kinds of spatial history: one in which power interactions between empires, states, settlers, and Indigenous and African peoples are messy, multilateral, and unexpected; in which nonhuman actors and the environment are key players shaping the expectations and actions of humans and affecting the course of history; and in which “uncontacted” Indigenous peoples are savvy and strategic players, commanding the extent and dynamics of their interactions with encroaching states and empires. These books also reveal the extent to which the histories of these so-called marginal territories are global, with deep connection to national and transnational processes. In doing so, they offer a useful methodological toolkit for a spatial history.

All the books under review develop novel approaches to sources. Juliet B. Wiersema and Jeffrey Alan Erbig, Jr., show cartography was central to the imperial efforts to control borderlands; Erbig, Jr., Frederico Freitas, and María de los Ángeles Picone use mapping as a form of visualizing historical data to illuminate changing imperial and state projects at the borderlands; Heather Roller untangles Indigenous peoples’ political strategies by revisiting and juxtaposing materials drawn from colonial archives over a wide temporal framework; and John Soluri taps transnational archives to explore how global trade networks have reshaped the histories of Patagonian animals and landscapes.

Here I will focus on some of those valuable methodological lessons, using maps both as evidence and analytical instruments to render visible the limited reach of imperial and state action and the overwhelming presence and political agency of autonomous peoples of Indigenous and African descent; sensibility toward the sophisticated political strategies of people commonly considered “marginal” or “uncontacted”; attention to the central role of animals; and a nuanced understanding of the continuous attempts of empires and states to draw borders, demarcate territories, and control movement, to transform territories such as Patagonia and Iguazu into natural parks admired for their nature. In so doing, they open new perspectives into Latin American history as seen from the borderlands.

Juliet B. Wiersema’s The History of a Periphery and Jeffrey Alan Erbig, Jr.’s Where Caciques and Mapmakers Met use maps and mapping as the basis for unraveling how empires sought to dominate people and spaces in the Pacific coast of present-day Colombia and Rio de la Plata during the eighteenth century. These were very different landscapes. The Pacific lowlands were a heterogeneous region composed of humid tropical rainforests in the Andean foothills with scattered colonial settlements inhabited by a variety of sovereign Indigenous groups and, increasingly, by communities of enslaved and free Africans and African descendants. In contrast, the lowland plains of Rio de la Plata in South America, along the territories of modern Uruguay, northern Argentina, and southern Brazil, were mostly wet grasslands crisscrossed by rivers and small hills, with abundant feral livestock, inhabited by Indigenous groups that Europeans called tolderías after their form of portable encampments consisting of toldos (tents).

Despite their different geographies, the Pacific lowlands and Rio de la Plata plains were landscapes of scarce colonial control. Wiersema describes it as a “periphery,” even as “the periphery of the periphery”: a fluid, shifting territory that continually frustrated colonial ambitions (6). Erbig reveals that Rio de la Plata was an Indigenous ground, dominated by diverse set of peoples whose names were recorded in European archives as Bohanes, Charrúas, Guenoas, Minuanes, Yaros, and others. Officials of the Spanish and Portuguese empires used maps and mapping in these diverging contexts to claim sovereignty and delineate plans for occupation. Both Wiersema and Erbig reveal the intense political activity underlying representations of space that otherwise appear neutral or apolitical.

While the maps of both regions convey the competing claims over these landscapes, what I found most interesting is that maps played a different role in the Pacific lowlands and Rio de la Plata. In the eighteenth-century Pacific lowlands, maps were evidence of the lack of imperial control and of spasmodic projects to establish rule that were, however, continually frustrated. In contrast, in eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Rio de la Plata colonial mapping was instrumental in the process that shifted control from Indigenous tolderías to European empires.

Wiersema’s analysis focuses on manuscript maps of restricted circulation, which were produced to support specific colonization projects in the Pacific lowlands. These maps, set in concrete contexts, served a range of purposes, including evangelizing Indigenous communities, restricting movement, repelling English merchants, installing imperial nodes, and promoting Spanish occupation. Their limited circulation underscores their function as practical tools for administrative reports, land disputes, and infrastructure proposals. Murindo and Cupica were, for example, two short-lived yet strategically located villages that Spanish administrators intended to populate with Indigenous peoples. Through the enticement of gifted tools and clothing, Spanish aimed at consolidating Spanish rule while hindering English trade. Sombrerillo was home to about 200 free Blacks and libres de todos los colores (peoples of all colors). The Franciscan missions on the Yurumanguí and Naya Rivers, had a devastating, cataclysmic impact on Indigenous communities. From these ephemeral places and scenes, Wiersema gives us a sense of the delicate equilibriums, disputed landscapes, and contrasting visions that characterized the Pacific lowlands in the eighteenth century as depicted in imperial maps.

Building on previous works in the history of cartography, Wiersema avoids seeing these maps as objective representations of space; she rather treats them as political projects that promoted colonization plans, aiming to gather support for concrete imperial ventures and encapsulating tangible visions of what the Pacific lowlands could become. For Wiersema they reveal “a brief moment on the space-time continuum” (5). They depicted ephemeral settlements that gained traction in some junctures, to then dissipate and pave the way for other projects. In this way, these circumstantial manuscript maps adequately represented Spanish imperial presence in the Pacific lowlands, in its constantly shifting form and limited capacity.

In contrast, Erbig shows that, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a transition from borderlands to borders shifted control away from Indigenous peoples to the Spanish and Portuguese. The missions, Spanish and Portuguese settlements, and tolderías all relied on cattle herding that spread over ample, overlapping territories in seasonal migrations. In the eighteenth century, the establishment of the Portuguese city Colônia do Sacramento and an increasing Spanish demand for the cattle-derived products, specifically hides and jerky, the latter used to provision enslaved populations in the Caribbean, triggered imperial disputes. These frictions over imperial sovereignty led to the development of more definitive lines of demarcation between the two empires.

After the 1750 Treaty of Madrid and the 1777 Treaty of San Idelfonso—which defined a 10,000 mile boundary between Brazil and Spanish America—the Portuguese and the Spanish designed joint ventures to establish those boundaries. These expeditions travelled through territories commanded by Indigenous peoples (tolderías). Despite Spanish efforts to “reduce” tolderías to fixed settlements under the surveillance of Spanish friars and officials, the tolderías maintained their autonomy and dominated the landscape. Spanish and Portuguese officials were unfamiliar with the Native ground that Indigenous people mastered well. This lack of knowledge prevented them from naming these places accurately, forcing them to describe them instead with vague terms that alluded to the structure of Indigenous peoples’ mobile dwellings—hence the name tolderías. European cartographers paid taxes to cross and to lodge on Indigenous ground. Yet, the maps they produced did not include the presence of those who governed the territory. Instead, they created distinct clear-cut lines between the Spanish and the Portuguese. These acts of erasure were the most basic expression of colonialism. In the Spanish and Portuguese colonialist rationale, the mobile tolderías could not be legitimate sovereign polities. Europeans depicted tolderías as barbaric relics of an earlier stage of human development, left out of maps and excluded from the negotiation tables where the inter-imperial treaties were outlined and the borders were drawn.

While a focus on imperial cartography reveals how European empires used mapping and spatial projects to control territories dominated by Indigenous peoples or people of African descent, these maps consistently fail to provide a clear idea of the political principles and practices of autonomous Indigenous peoples. This latter dimension is precisely the focus of Heather F. Roller’s book, Contact Strategies: Histories of Native Autonomy in Brazil. It centers the political experience of Indigenous peoples, mistakenly described as “uncontacted,” to show that many such Indigenous peoples of the interior of Brazil not only had previous experiences of engagement with imperial and state officials but very often “dictated the pace and forms of that contact.” Roller blows up stereotypes of “uncontacted” peoples entirely, showing that contact and isolation were not oppositional but cyclical. This meant that autonomous Indigenous peoples developed elaborate strategies to opt in or opt out of their engagements with Portuguese authorities, missionaries, traders, and settlers. Indigenous peoples learned from previous encounters and exchanges with colonial agents and developed collective decision-making processes to select when and in what terms to initiate or refrain from contact.

Of course, you do not just run into the perspective of an “uncontacted” Indigenous group by reading European narratives and reports in European archives. Given the sparsity of the written record, Roller designed an innovative and provocative methodological approach. Contact Strategies focuses on two Native groups, the Mura in the Amazonian River Basin and the Mbayá-Guaikurú in the Paraguayan River Basin, tracking changes in their contact strategies over the longue durée from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, weaving them together with contact stories from across Native Brazil. This eclectic methodology allows Roller at the same time to provide deep, contextualized incursions into Indigenous strategies at particular times while also setting them within a broader repertoire of political action in the longue durée.

If Roller provides insights into the elaborate political strategies of autonomous Indigenous groups, María de los Ángeles Picone’s Landscaping Patagonia and Frederico Freitas’s Nationalizing Nature turn to the continuous state attempts to produce space and nature by drawing borders, demarcating territories, fostering or limiting settlement, and controlling movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whereas Erbig and Wiersema had unraveled eighteenth and nineteenth use of maps as technologies for imperial projects of territorial control through drawing borders, fixing nodes, and regulating settlement and movement, Freitas and Picone show the same attempts for establishing borders and territorial control in a period of nation-states, rather than empires, when the institutions, technologies, and semantics of borders and borderlands underwent a profound transformation. Picone and Freitas reveal the deep ideological and infrastructural transformation that remade the territories of Patagonia and Iguazu into natural parks, admired for their nature, which eventually led state governments to remove settlers and embrace tourism in the mid- to late twentieth century.

In Nationalizing Nature, Frederico Freitas examines how Brazil and Argentina transformed the Iguazu Falls, within the broader Rio de la Plata region—once a territory dominated by tolderías—into national parks between the 1930s and 1980s. Freitas shows that the creation of Brazilian and Argentinian national parks in Iguazu must be understood amid the geopolitical competition between the two countries, shifting policies aimed at securing borderlands, and the evolution of global conservation views. The book traces the dialogical construction of the Iguaçu National Park in the Brazilian side and the Iguazú National Park in Argentina as they both built upon each other’s advances and competition. It shows how the same single geographic region was nationalized by two countries in sometimes parallel but sometimes diverging ways as they attempted to establish sovereignty, promote development, avoid internal dissent, and protect nature.

At the heart of the book is a shift in the paradigm of what the parks meant, which has parallel trajectories across the border. As both countries “used the parks as instruments for border nationalization” (8), decision-makers oscillated between promoting development and protecting nature as the parks’ main function. The landscape at both sides of the border was populated by peoples of Indigenous and mixed descent, usually Guaraní speakers, who worked for logging and yerba mate production enterprises. Significantly, Freitas “could not find evidence of Indigenous communities living in the area of the park at the time of its creation” in Iguaçu (269). It was imperative for Brazilian and Argentinian governments to establish presence over the borderland, rather than only nominal sovereignty. For this reason, initially in the 1930s the Iguazu parks diverged from the trajectory of national parks elsewhere. While US parks aimed to remove all of the population and Mexico aimed to create inclusive spaces for traditional communities, “policymakers in Argentina and Brazil designed their national parks to attract settlers to ‘nationalize’ border zones” (12). Argentina took the lead, with plans to promote settlement and yerba mate cultivation, with some even arguing that the park should be modeled after the plazas of Buenos Aires, and Brazil followed, promoting colonization and expanding the park under the banner of a state-sponsored ideology “March to the West” of the Getúlio Vargas regime.

By 1960, hundreds of families lived on farms and towns within Iguazú and Iguaçu. Iguazú had attracted Polish immigrants who arrived in Argentina after fleeing World War II, and Iguaçu had a population of settlers of German descent who had purchased deeds from land speculators and squatters—some grew soybeans, rice, beans, maize, wheat, and potatoes along with raising chickens and pigs, and others were hunters who often were accused of crossing over the border to poach in the Argentinian park. It was with the military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s that both countries gathered force to ban logging, hunting, or planting crops on park grounds and ultimately removed park settlers, pushing instead for the conservation of fauna and flora species as the new focus of the park. The result was, as Freitas’s evocative title puts it, the nationalization of nature. At both sides of the border, Iguazu became a territory devoid of individual settlers but welcoming large economic conglomerates running hotels and touristic services. The semantics and infrastructure of this border region had changed to reflect new national values.

A parallel process took place in Patagonia. María de los Ángeles Picone’s Landscaping Patagonia: Spatial History and Nation-Making in Chile and Argentina focuses on Patagonia’s transformation in Argentinian and Chilean imagination from “desert” to national park from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. From then on, Picone stresses policymakers’ spatial discourses, outlining a trajectory that in its broadest arc resonates with that of Iguazu, as they debated whether to attract or detract migration and development. In Picone’s words, “portrayals of the Patagonian Andes often oscillated between versions of the Desert as a political program to annihilate unwanted inhabitants and behaviors, and the image of fertile valleys, as a trope for the potential greatness of the nation” (6). Picone examines in detail how national governments produced the Patagonian space by sending scientific commissions to draw borders and then promote and control settlement, regulate movement, design the built environment, and promote it as a space for leisure and enjoyment of the outdoors.

As in the case of Iguazu, the Argentinian and Chilean governments competed with and mirrored each other. In the mid-nineteenth century, Patagonia was mostly inhabited by Indigenous groups such as the Mapuches and the Aónikenk. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Argentinian and Chilean incursions and military raids debilitated their control. In the 1890s, they launched a commission to draw a border in the old Mapuche territory, which they now claimed their own. Interestingly, both governments had agreed that the line of the border ran along the highest peaks of the Andes. Ideally, this meant tracing an exact line cutting through the highest peaks, but in practice drawing these lines was confusing, as those peaks were not perfectly aligned, therefore opening much room for interpretation, debate, and ultimately disagreement between experts of the two countries. In some areas, the expeditions even found “nothing in that region that can be considered a ridge” (37) that they could use for the demarcations.

The Argentinian and Chilean governments then introduced legislation to promote settlement, as they portrayed Indigenous peoples as “incorrigible enemies of the nation” (48). The author finds this approach resonated with the model of “settler colonialism” in which governments gave large grants of what they called “vacant lands” to holding companies to promote settlement, especially of European immigrants, who they hoped would “civilize” it by dispossessing Indigenous peoples. The cast of characters that appears in the book includes Norwegian, Russian, Australian, Belgian, and Welsh settlers. To encourage this mobilization, government officials aimed to construct infrastructure, such as roads and railroads, in the complicated Patagonian topography. They also hoped to purge Patagonian settlements from any “bad elements,” making sure settlers not only were law-abiding citizens but also were physically fit and morally adept. This included establishing border police, recreational shooting clubs, and even a Boy Scouts organization. In the first half of the twentieth century, the national Argentinian and Chilean discourses shifted to promote the sense of the Patagonian landscape as a pristine, beautiful nature available to the male tourist gaze. Ironically, the parks’ infrastructure was built to highlight modernism in architecture.

Picone stresses that, in creating this kind of spatial discourses, historical actors were not only redefining Patagonia but also construing it as part of the Argentinian and Chilean nation-states. “Landscaping Patagonia” meant producing a landscape that was integrated into the broader discourses of each nation, tied to its systems of mobility and reinforcing its values—a transition from an Indigenous landscape that was designated as a “desert” by government agents to one marked with the presence of both governments and promoted as a touristic destination.

Similar to Picone’s book, John Soluri’s Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia is about the colonization of Patagonia from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. But Soluri takes on a global rather than nation-state framework and chooses a creative lens: the relationships between people and animals. By centering the history of animals in the long process of the colonization of Patagonia, Soluri shatters the idea that Patagonia was an isolated, peripheral region or that its colonization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was carried out exclusively by the nation-states of Argentina and Chile. Rather, the author focuses on the convergence and circulation of people, animals, and goods from regional to global scales.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century, itinerant North Atlantic commercial hunters nearly depleted Patagonia of fur seals. During the same period, Indigenous lands were declared “vacant” and “public” and were auctioned off to private investors. Corporations then introduced enormous flocks of sheep from New Zealand, England, and Australia that grazed on Patagonian grounds, competing with and almost eliminating Native animals that were crucial to Indigenous livelihoods, such as the guanacos. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, Indigenous populations fell between 80 and 90 percent. These were parallel, concatenated processes. In Soluri’s words, “the decimation of Indigenous populations and conversion of the lands and waters where they lived into national territories went hand-in-hand with the rising commodification of animals, and the goods, primarily furs and fibers, derived from animals” (5).

Soluri calls his approach “transboundary” and “patchwork history,” grounding the story at different levels and following peoples and goods through Indigenous and global geographies, thus revealing their entanglements. Following these global transboundary links, we can see how the latest trends of European fashion were connected to the remaking of Patagonian ecologies and the consolidation of capitalist extraction and sheep-ranching colonialism. For instance, Soluri details the life patterns of fur seals in Patagonia, how they surfaced in sporadic islands when mating or birthing, the hunters’ strategies and routines for killing them, and the growing popularity of seal fur apparel among elite women in places such as New York, Paris, and London.

Soluri also shows how the introduction of sheep to Patagonia implied the development of a low labor-intensive pastoralism led mostly by young men from faraway places, such as Australia and New Zealand, who relied on horses, dogs, and fences. Sheep grazing ranchers saw native fauna as “pests,” displacing animals that competed with sheep, such as the guanacos, and killing or trapping those that saw lambs as prey, such as pumas, foxes, and wild dogs—thus affecting the Patagonian environment and Indigenous livelihoods. Indigenous peoples’ raiding of sheep, breaking of fences, and attacking of cattle ranches was a “strategy of territorial defense” (70) to confront these assaults on their lived environment, though it was portrayed by settlers as acts by salvajes (savages). By the early twentieth century, Selk’nam clans had been displaced from grasslands and sent to boarding schools that were in practical terms prisons, as sheep multiplied “from tens of thousands to a few million” in the span of two decades (175). At the sheep ranches, shearers skirted fleece, and the wool was then shipped overseas and auctioned off in London and Antwerp and processed in factories, thus connecting the histories of Patagonia to industrialization and fashion trends in Europe. By the end of the commodity chain, fibers were blended in such a way that it was “impossible to follow the transformation of a given lot of wool into a specific piece of apparel” (121).

Soluri’s “transboundary” methodology allows him to elaborate on the global imbrications and local complexities, shedding light on the connections between the global and local scales that shaped Patagonian social and environmental change and proving that the displacement of Aónikenk and Selk’nam peoples and the loss of hunting territories is inseparable from both growing nation-states but also the expansion of capitalist sheep ranches. By focusing on the interaction between animals and people, Soluri presents a history of Patagonia driven not only by nation-making discourses and state action but also by international fashion trends, desire for consumption and profit, and daily tasks associated with herding and mechanization of production—what he calls the global market.

All the books reviewed here participate in a productive discussion on how to conceptualize the transformations of the South American borderlands in the eighteenth through twentieth centuries and what drove those transformations—whether the types of social and agroecological arrangements, power dynamics, and patterns of interactions of these areas can be adequately described with concepts such as “settler colonialism,” borderlands, or peripheries, and what this says about the nature and enforcement of imperial and state power, about autonomous Indigenous peoples and the newcomers, and their place in larger economic networks. Undoubtably, the incursions of states and empires into Rio de la Plata, Patagonia, Brazil, and the Greater Chocó played a key role. In their own way, each of these authors shows the efforts and varying results of officials of the Spanish and Portuguese empires and the republics of Brazil, Argentina, and Chile to draw lines on paper, demarcate territories, classify human and nonhuman beings, establish or eliminate settlements, regulate movement, and promote their own versions of development and civility in iconic South American geographies. Yet, their impact was not homogeneous. While imperial mapping efforts were ephemeral and of limited reach in eighteenth-century Greater Chocó, drawing the border between the Spanish and Portuguese empires in Rio de la Plata during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries drew power away from Indigenous tolderías and toward state agents. In Iguazu, Argentinian and Brazilian state agents would adopt parallel approaches to build competing national parks and advance state presence, as state agents first promoted settlement only to then work to extinguish those settlements.

For Picone, Patagonia falls squarely into the model of “settler colonialism,” as Chile and Argentina dispossessed and displaced Indigenous peoples. In contrast, Soluri finds that “the concept of colonization or settler colonialism does not fully capture the dynamics that transformed Patagonia” (173), since it does not account for key aspects of these processes such as the transboundary movements of fur seal hunters that nearly depleted Patagonia of these animals. Soluri, in turn, highlights the centrality of sheep ranching in the dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples and ecologies, arguing that sheep ranching should be more widely included in our frameworks of global capitalism and colonialism. In his words: “The wool industry has largely escaped the critical attention that historians and others have given to the connections between the expansion of chattel slavery and capitalist cotton production. Although sheep ranching did not rely on enslaved labor, there is a need to heed calls to reckon with the role that industrial wool production played in decimating Indigenous societies across the Southern Hemisphere’s grasslands” (175).

Whether or not we accept the concept of “settler colonialism” as analytically useful for describing these processes, the history of Patagonia and Rio de la Plata (and Iguazu, more specifically) from the eighteenth to the twentieth century as presented by Erbig, Picone, Soluri, and Freitas is one of dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples. Soluri makes a convincing point by stressing the importance of transnational dynamics associated with the expansion of global capitalism in shaping the spatial histories of Patagonia, including the depredation of seals for their fur, sheep ranching, and the development of touristic business—which should be taken into consideration for other South American borderlands. Such ventures did not always bring settlement, but certainly depletion of fauna and flora, restriction of movement, and weakening of Indigenous economic activities and livelihoods. Roller’s point that Indigenous peoples took notice and strategically surfaced or retreated to engage with empire and state agents should help us envision new methodologies to understand Indigenous political action in these changing contexts while grappling with colonial and postcolonial violence.

The long transformation that remade the borderlands of Iguazu and Patagonia into national parks adds another common layer of analysis: the history of conservation in Latin America. Freitas, Soluri, and Picone reconstruct dynamic and contested conservation efforts with shifting goals, which were often unsuccessful unless they were part of larger socioeconomic schemes. The everchanging ideals and models for natural parks—whether to nationalize nature, inculcate national values, create a landscape for aesthetic contemplation, or preserve biodiversity—meant that the sense and practices for keeping these landscapes or preserving nonhuman species changed. This ultimately produced parks that restricted settlements and aimed to protect biodiversity and promote tourism, especially after the 1970s. Soluri stresses that, while efforts to restrict hunting and avoid biological extinctions in Patagonia “began long before the creation of the region’s first national parks” (15), these voices had limited impact—it was not until prices for fur seal skins and wool declined that fur seal and guanaco populations stabilized and gradually increased (though these populations would not reach their previous numbers).

Finally, Erbig, Freitas, and Picone employ Geographic Information Systems as a means of analyzing documents, visualizing data, and explaining historical processes. These authors mine sources for spatial data, georeference them, and produce creative visualizations that allow readers to see, for instance, the movement of itinerant Indigenous peoples over the projected imperial borders in Rio de la Plata; the expanding natural parks in Iguazu, with its settlements and infrastructures; or the mentions of Chilean touristic sites in travel literature. Through these visualizations, the books reveal the benefits of mapping as a historical method and spatial thinking.

Each of these books has its own brilliant insights; I strongly recommend these titles to those interested in the history of maps and mapping, Indigenous history, environmental history, borderlands history, animal history, and the history of national parks. Furthermore, I recommend reading these books side by side, as they collectively reveal the remarkable diversity of the South American borderlands and the complicated, fluctuating balances of power between peoples of Indigenous, African, and European descent and the multiple strategies and technologies of state control, and how they were defined by their relation to animals, the environment, and global capitalism.