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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 narrative. In the Argentine Dry Chaco, two such regimes now overlap: a pastoralism built by Criollos, settlers of mixed Spanish and Indigenous descent, and an emergent conservation regime organised around jaguar reintroduction, protected areas, and ecotourism. Starting with the animals each regime tends, cattle in one and jaguars in the other, we ask how regimes enact power through the more-than-human relations that hold them. Cattle were the medium through which Criollo households claimed the landscape across four 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 embrace ferality to different degrees, working through animals that exceed the conditions intended for them. In 2024, rural workers tracking a missing cow found a dispersing jaguar with her carcass and killed him. In that killing, the regimes’ incommensurable ways of holding feral lives met on a single body. Drawing on oral histories and conservation actors' public materials, we show how these animals, and the people who tend and fear them, recast debates about wilderness, dispossession, and coexistence. Attending to these more-than-human assemblages, we show how frontier landscapes are always made at the intersection of colonial histories and multispecies relations, and ask what coexistence means once conservation becomes the frontier maker.