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Presentation short abstract

In the Argentine Chaco, cattle-rearing pastoralists and jaguar-rewilding conservationists form two coexisting multispecies regimes. We show how each enacts frontier power through its animals, and ask what coexistence means when conservation becomes the new frontier maker.

Presentation long abstract

Frontier landscapes are made through the layered work of competing land-use regimes – multispecies arrangements of people, animals, capital, and narratives that organise how a territory is used. In parts of the Argentine Dry Chaco, two such regimes now overlap: a pastoralism regime founded in the nineteenth-century by Criollo settlers, and an emergent conservation regime organised around jaguar reintroduction, protected areas, and ecotourism. This article starts with the animals each regime tends, cattle in one and jaguars in the other, to explore how regimes enact power through the more-than-human relations that hold them. Cattle were the medium through which Criollo households claimed and worked the landscape across generations, their feral grazing turning open grasslands, long maintained by the Indigenous peoples they displaced, into dense forest. Jaguars are now the medium through which a transnational rewilding enterprise produces a different kind of frontier, intensively surveilled and capitalised. Both rely on ferality to different degrees, working through animals that exceed the conditions set for them. Through oral histories with Criollo pastoralists and the public materials where conservation actors narrate themselves, we probe how cattle, jaguars, and the people who tend and fear them are bound together, recasting familiar debates about wilderness, dispossession, and coexistence. Attending to these more-than-human assemblages, we show how frontier landscapes are made at the intersection of colonial histories and multispecies relations, and ask what coexistence means once conservation becomes the frontier-maker.