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Paper short abstract:

In this paper I discuss the role of Swedish migrants in the expansion of settler colonialism in the Argentine and Bolivian Chaco in the early 19th century. I draw attention to their overlapping use of categories such as travelers, migrants and settlers discussing their theoretical implications.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I discuss how social interactions between Swedes and Indigenous Peoples played out and were viewed as of the arrival of Swedish migrants to Latin America in the early 20th century. I investigate settler perspectives on these interactions by analyzing accounts and written memories from first generation settlers. This is done by applying ethnological and ethnographic methods in the analysis of archival and published sources. I focus specifically on the understudied case of Swedish migrants in the border area between Argentina and Bolivia in the early 20th century before the outbreak of the Chaco war between Bolivia and Paraguay (1932-1935). I have noticed that the category of “traveler” has historically invisibilized these practices of migration and settlement and downplayed their role in the expansion of settler colonialism in the Argentine context. My research sheds light on this particular strand of mobility from Sweden to Latin America discussing it in terms of the subjective experiences of travel and settlement as well as the cultural, social and spatial borders of settlement. This includes investigating how travel, migration and settlement was narrated and remembered by first generation Swedish settlers as well as finding out with whom the settlers interacted and which social categories were deployed in order to make sense of their new environment. On the other hand, this paper seeks to contribute theoretically to the discussion on what implications the overlapping of categories such as “travelers”, “migrants” and “settlers” have when analyzing entanglements between migration, settlement and dispossession.