Creatures of Fashion: Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia

By John Soluri

Today, the mention of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego conjures images of idyllic landscapes untouched by globalization. Creatures of Fashion upends this, revealing how the exploitation of animals—terrestrial and marine, domesticated and wild, living and dead—was central to the region's transformation from Indigenous lands into the national territories of Argentina and Chile. Drawing on evidence from archives and digital repositories, John Soluri traces the circulation of furs and fibers to explore how the power of fashion stretched far beyond Europe's houses of haute couture to entangle the fates of Indigenous hunters, migrant workers, and textile manufacturers with those of fur seals, guanacos, and sheep at the "end of the world."
From the nineteenth-century rise of commercial hunting to twentieth-century sheep ranching to contemporary conservation-based tourism, Soluri's narrative explains how struggles for control over the production of commodities and the reproduction of animals drove the social and environmental changes that tied Patagonia to global markets, empires, and wildlife conservation movements. By exposing seams in national territories and global markets knit together by force, this book provides perspectives and analyses vital for understanding contemporary conflicts over mass consumption, the conservation of biodiversity, and struggles for environmental justice in Patagonia and beyond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9781469675732

John Soluri

John Soluri is associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University.

Book preview

Cover: Creatures of Fashion, Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia by John Soluri

Creatures of Fashion

FLOWS, MIGRATIONS, AND EXCHANGES

Mart A. Stewart and Harriet Ritvo, editors

The Flows, Migrations, and Exchanges series publishes new works of environmental history that explore the cross-border movements of organisms and materials that have shaped the modern world, as well as the varied human attempts to understand, regulate, and manage these movements.

A complete list of books published in Flows, Migrations, and Exchanges is available at https://uncpress.org/series/flows-migrations-exchanges.

Creatures of Fashion

Animals, Global Markets, and the Transformation of Patagonia

John Soluri

The University of North Carolina Press CHAPEL HILL

© 2024 John Soluri

All rights reserved

Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Soluri, John, author.

Title: Creatures of fashion : animals, global markets, and the transformation of Patagonia / John Soluri.

Other titles: Flows, migrations, and exchanges.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2024]

| Series: Flows, migrations, and exchanges | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023047040 | ISBN 9781469675718 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469675725 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469675732 (epub) | ISBN 9798890887504 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Animal industry—Patagonia (Argentina and Chile)—History—19th century. | Animal industry—Patagonia (Argentina and Chile)—History—20th century. | Animal industry—Political aspects. | Animal industry—Environmental aspects. | Indians of South America—Violence against—Patagonia (Argentina and Chile) | Animal populations—Patagonia (Argentina and Chile)—History. | Patagonia (Argentina and Chile)—Commerce—History—19th century. | Patagonia (Argentina and Chile)—Commerce—History—20th century. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / Caribbean & Latin American Studies | POLITICAL SCIENCE / International Relations / Trade & Tariffs

Classification: LCC HD9424.A83 P387 20024 | DDC 338.1/7609827—dc23/ eng/20231201

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023047040

Cover illustration from 1943 Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego brochure.

Some ideas and examples discussed in chapter 1, Birthplaces, first appeared in a different form in Fur Sealing and Unsettled Sovereignties, in Crossing Empires: Taking US History into Transimperial Terrain, eds. Kristin L. Hoganson and Jay Sexton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 25–45.

This book will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open, a program developed in partnership between JSTOR, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the University of Michigan Press, and the University of North Carolina Press to bring about equitable access and impact for the entire scholarly community, including authors, researchers, libraries, and university presses around the world. Learn more at https://about.jstor.org/path-to-open/.

To Dad, my first guide to South America, and to Mom, my first editor

Contents

List of Illustrations and Maps

INTRODUCTION

Patchworks

A Material History of People and Animals in Patagonia

CHAPTER ONE

Birthplaces

CHAPTER TWO

Displacements

CHAPTER THREE

The Labor of Reproduction

CHAPTER FOUR

The Work of Fashion

CHAPTER FIVE

The Wild Side

CHAPTER SIX

Making a Place for Guanacos

EPILOGUE

Exposed Seams

Reworking People and Animals in Patagonia

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations and Maps

ILLUSTRATIONS

Oxen pulling carts laden with wool bound for Rio Gallegos, Argentina (1908) 4

A 1910 photo of an unnamed Selk’nam woman juxtaposed with a 1944 portrait of Matilde Inkiol, a Selk’nam woman in Tierra del Fuego 12

Hunters armed with clubs and guns approach a group of seals (ca. 1890) 29

Woman in a Green Dress by Claude Monet (1866) 37

Selk’nams wearing guanaco furs in Tierra del Fuego (ca. 1900) 53

Assembly of Indigenous people at the Salesian Mission on Dawson Island (1907) 59

The Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego’s Estancia Cameron (ca. 1940) 73

Portrait of unnamed shepherd mounted on horse with dogs (ca. 1940) 77

Sheep owned by the Sociedad Explotadora awaiting shearing in Magallanes, Chile (ca. 1940) 88

Workers dipping sheep in order to prevent scab (sarna) in Magallanes, Chile (ca. 1940) 93

Shearer removing fleece in Magallanes, Chile (ca. 1940) 113

Classifying wool on estancia of the Sociedad Explotadora (ca. 1940) 114

Sorting wool in an English factory in the early twentieth century 118

Aonikenk woman painting guanaco skins (ca. 1900) 134

Unnamed Aonikenks wearing quillangos over button-down, woven cloth shirts (ca. 1907) 135

Traders and Aonikenk in Santa Cruz, Argentina (1908) 142

More Wise Buys (1940) 146

Map depicting Lote 1, a plot of land that became Torres del Paine National Park (1959) 161

Female guanacos with newborn chulengos grazing among springtime blooms of mata negra in Torres del Paine (ca. 1990) 166

MAPS

I.1 Southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego 6

3.1 Ecologies of southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego 80

Creatures of Fashion

INTRODUCTION

Patchworks

A Material History of People and Animals in Patagonia

While touring Tierra del Fuego in 1906, Argentine naturalist Eduardo Holmberg visited La Candelaria, a mission run by Italian Catholic Salesians who ministered to dozens of displaced Indigenous people while managing thousands of introduced sheep. In a report published by Argentina’s Ministry of Agriculture, Holmberg related the Salesian’s efforts to teach Indigenous people new livelihoods. Describing a group of Indian women spinning yarns, Holmberg noted that they had "exchanged their quillangos—robe-like garments made of guanaco fur—for smocks and skirts."¹ He also reported that the Salesians employed Indigenous men as sheep shearers: A man of European race can shear one hundred sheep per day. An Indigenous shearer does not finish more than fifty but the savings in wages results in similar profits.²

In relating Indigenous women’s shift to Euro-American attire, Holmberg recorded a material outcome of the violent occupation of Tierra del Fuego freighted with symbolism: new forms of dress signaled that Indigenous people had the potential to assimilate into the Argentine nation state. In his description of the shearers, the naturalist captured another significant change in ways of living: foraging and hunting organized around clan relations had given way to jobs raising livestock based on a racialized, wage labor system. Underlying the imposition of woven textiles and wages on Tierra del Fuego’s Indigenous inhabitants were profound changes in the ways that people in the region lived with, and from, animals.

The interstructured worlds of Patagonia’s people and animals underwent consequential changes in the second half of the nineteenth century following the arrival of interloping fur seal hunters seeking quick profits, and officials from the Argentine and Chilean nation-states who promoted fur trades as a means of establishing territorial sovereignty. These outsiders subjugated, often violently, diverse Indigenous peoples. They ruthlessly hunted native fauna, and they introduced livestock for purposes of capital accumulation and territorial power. The commodification of animal furs and fibers helped to bankroll settler colonial projects while integrating southern Patagonia into sprawling networks of investors, workers, animals, and goods. By following furs and fibers from hunting shacks and shearing sheds in southern Patagonia, to the tanneries and textile mills of the North Atlantic, Creatures of Fashion explores not only how commodification changed relationships among and between people and animals, but also how the animality of fur and fibers shaped their lives as commercial goods ranging from luxurious coats to unassuming socks.³ This ranch-to-rack approach seeks to broaden familiar understandings of fashion by revealing the work that it performed far from the houses of haute couture.⁴

The commodification of animal furs and fibers was accompanied by heightened concerns for protecting both fur-bearing native animals as well as exotic livestock. Creatures of Fashion explores this paradox by tracking more than a century of attempts to regulate hunting or create habitats for native fauna in the form of national parks such as Chile’s Torres del Paine. Conservation initiatives were driven by a mix of actors and institutions whose motivations for conserving fauna were multiple and sometimes clashing. Efforts to protect fur-bearing animals often took place on local, national, and intercontinental scales, a reflection of both the migratory behaviors of animals and the far-flung character of markets. Both the commodification and conservation of animals in southern Patagonia were transboundary affairs.

In examining the commodification and conservation of animals, I take as a given that animals are lively: they do not merely inhabit social ecologies, they help to make and transform them. History is always about more than people or humankind. Departing from that point, Creatures of Fashion presents stories of socioecological conflict and change generated by the material and symbolic exploitation of animals by diverse people. The concept of commodification certainly does not capture the full range of relationships among people and animals in Patagonia, but evidence indicates that the transformation of animals into fashionable goods was the most consequential relationship over the past 150 years. This is a story of the how certain people gained immense power from and over certain kinds of animals.⁵

Creatures of Fashion is intended not only for readers who care about relationships among people and animals, but also for those who are drawn toward places and people without history to invoke Eric Wolf’s memorable, ironic phrase.⁶ For centuries, outsiders have described Patagonia as lying on the misty edges of history. The region’s name itself is shrouded in mystery and misconceptions: based on sixteenth-century reports by Magellan’s expedition of a land inhabited by giants, later writers erroneously suggested that Patagonia derived from its native inhabitants’ big feet (patagón in Spanish). A more likely explanation, however, is that Magellan’s crew, impressed by the tall stature of the Indigenous people that they encountered, drew inspiration from a character—the Giant Patagón—from European tales of knighthood.⁷ Mytho-historical animals have also filled outsiders’ perceptions of Patagonia. The mylodon or giant sloth—a creature that went extinct thousands of years ago—lived on in the imaginations of twentieth-century publishers in the United States who financed journeys to Patagonia where writers searched in vain for a living mylodon.⁸ In the early twenty-first century, historians, journalists, and conservationists continue to depict to Patagonia as a final frontier or last wild place.⁹

This book joins other recent scholarship to challenge such conceptions of the region by providing a clear-eyed view of how southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego became thoroughly integrated into a world of nation-states, empires, and capitalist markets via the exploitation and conservation of animals.¹⁰ I argue that Patagonia’s particularity is best explained not by its isolation but rather the opposite: the convergence and circulations of people, animals, and goods from near and afar. For example, fur seal skins taken by crewmembers of a New England-based sealing vessel were auctioned in London and re-exported to the United States or Russia. Wool from sheep bred in New Zealand and raised on an estancia in Argentine territory, was often shorn by migrant workers from Chile before being exported to London for auction and subsequently made into stockings in Germany. The analytical lenses used are both wide-angle and zoom in order to focus on local and trans-local dynamics in order to sharpen analyses of globalization by moving in and out of the particular places where the production, circulation, and consumption of commodities had consequential effects.¹¹

To place Patagonia in a transboundary framework is not intended to deny the importance of nation-states or empires in the region’s history. As scholars of international relations have documented, boundary disputes between the governments of Argentina and Chile played a leading role in driving state initiatives to promote colonization in the nineteenth century, as did the lurking presence of imperial Britain, which took control of the Malvinas/Falkland Islands in 1833.¹² Throughout the nineteenth century, the region attracted government-sponsored scientific and mapping missions from Europe and the United States. In Argentina, Euro-American elites like Julio Roca called for immigration from Europe while carrying out a series of military campaigns against Mapuches and other Indigenous nations between 1878 and 1885. At nearly the same time, the Chilean military occupied Mapuche communities in southern Chile.¹³ Both Argentina and Chile organized small military expeditions that reached Tierra del Fuego in the late 1870s and 1880s.

Oxen pulling carts laden with wool bound for Rio Gallegos, Argentina (1908). Note the arid, treeless landscape. Charles Furlong Papers. Courtesy Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College Library.

The history of geopolitical tensions between Argentina and Chile and violent subjugation of Indigenous inhabitants helps to explain the mid-twentieth-century emergence of a historiography whose narratives functioned primarily to legitimate Argentine or Chilean sovereignty.¹⁴ More recently, a new generation of historians have convincingly challenged nationalist discourses by paying greater attention to both Indigenous removals and long-distance connections created by capitalist investments and trade that financed the colonization of southern Patagonia.¹⁵ Creatures of Fashion builds on this scholarship by focusing on how animal-derived commodities simultaneously built regional and global connections.

Both the Argentine and Chilean states created administrative territories in southern Patagonia that were simultaneously within and without their respective nation-states.¹⁶ The territories lacked political autonomy and were governed directly by national governments. The ambiguous position of Magallanes in the vision of the Chilean state is revealed by the rich archival holdings for the then-territory held in the archive of the Ministry of Foreign Relations, formerly the Ministry of Foreign Relations and Colonization. In nineteenth-century documents, Chilean officials routinely referred to Magallanes simply as the colony (la colonia).¹⁷

In Argentina and Chile alike, violent acts committed by state and non-state actors, along with government auctions of land declared to be public, removed Indigenous inhabitants but failed to encourage settlement by large numbers of Argentine or Chilean citizens. The sparsely populated national territories remained under the direct rule of distant central governments that appointed local administrative and judicial officials who generally arrived on steamships from Buenos Aires or Valparaíso. The paradoxical outcome of rival efforts by Argentina and Chile to colonize southern Patagonia was the formation of a livestock economy built on massive landholdings and the near-constant movements of people, livestock, and goods between Indigenous, Argentine, Chilean, and British-controlled territories.

Most of the action in Creatures of Fashion plays out south of the Santa Cruz River in land and waters that include the southern portion of the province of Santa Cruz, Argentina; the province of Magallanes, Chile; Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago divided between Argentina and Chile; and littoral zones between Isla de los Estados in the South Atlantic and Isla Desolación in the Southeast Pacific whose abundant marine life rendered them a zone of contact between native people and outsiders (see Map I.1).

Of course, for Indigenous Aonikenk (who inhabited the mainland divided today between Santa Cruz and Magallanes), Selk’nam (grasslands of Tierra del Fuego), Yamana (coastal zones of Tierra del Fuego), and Kawéskar (littorals of Straits of Magellan), southern Patagonia/Tierra del Fuego was anything but remote—it was home.¹⁸ Placing Patagonia in a transboundary framework requires integration not only in a world of global capitalism but also in Indigenous geographies. Although not intended to be an ethnohistory, Creatures of Fashion recounts the dramatic loss of Indigenous lives and territorial power. In southern Patagonia, members of Aonikenk, Kawéskar, Selk’nam, and Yamana nations died resisting invasions of their territories, or from diseases introduced by interlopers and colonizers. Between approximately 1870 and 1900, Indigenous populations fell between 80 and 90 percent; survivors lost territorial sovereignty and, to a great extent, their ways of living with animals.¹⁹ 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.

MAP I.1 Southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego.

Commodifying Animals in Patagonia

Southern Patagonia is not home to the off-the-charts biological diversity found in tropical regions, nor the charismatic megafauna—think elephants, lions, or giraffes—that roam African savannas, but many of Patagonia’s terrestrial animals, including ñandús, huemuls, and tuco-tucos (subterranean rodents), are endemic species found nowhere else in the world.²⁰ Today, the region is the primary habitat for large mammals, including guanacos, whose geographical range in South America has diminished greatly in recent centuries. Patagonia’s littoral zones are very rich in marine life: undersea kelp forests nurture fish and mollusk populations that have sustained large populations of fur seals, sea lions, and other marine mammals in addition to a plethora of birds, including several kinds of penguins.

These marine and terrestrial animals shaped not only Patagonia’s ecologies but also the cultures of the people who inhabited southernmost South America. Indeed, the first people to reach Patagonia some 12,000 years ago are likely to have journeyed to the region by following in the tracks of earlier animal migrations.²¹ Archaeological evidence indicates a long history of people structuring their material and symbolic lives around hunting animals.²² The ancestors of the Selk’nam and Yamana peoples who inhabited Tierra del Fuego ate a wide range of animals, including copious quantities of shellfish, in addition to guanacos, tuco-tucos, fur seals, and the occasional whale.²³ They dressed primarily in the furs of guanacos that they hunted with the assistance of dogs.

The scale and meanings of hunting animals in southern Patagonia changed dramatically in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when North Atlantic fur seal hunters began visiting the region.²⁴ After a midcentury pause, fur seal hunters, based in local and foreign ports, renewed their activities in the 1870s, preying on terrestrial colonies of fur seals before resorting to pelagic hunting in the early twentieth century. Commercial fur sealers took advantage of the reproductive cycles and practices of their prey, turning birthplaces into killing zones. During the overlapping birthing and mating seasons, fur seals congregated on rocky littorals, giving hunters an opportunity to access and kill large quantities of marine mammals that spent much of the year in the ocean. The work of hunting was risky, and its financial rewards far from guaranteed. Perhaps because of those reasons, sealers focused on short-term profits and paid little heed to nurturing future populations of the animals that grew the coveted furs. All told, over a fifty-year period, commercial hunters killed at least 200,000 South American fur seals.

The hunting of fur seals, along with a terrestrial fur and feather trade with Aonikenk groups, played a critical role in transforming Chile’s penal colony of Punta Arenas into the region’s leading commercial port. The level of trade and wealth in Punta Arenas increased many times over following the introduction of sheep for wool production. By the end of the nineteenth century, sheep ranches (estancias) stretched across both Chilean and Argentine territories. The grasslands of Tierra del Fuego—what Selk’nam people called párik—gave rise to one of the largest ranching operations in the world: the Sociedad Explotadora de Tierra del Fuego. Formed in 1893, the company took possession of a few million acres of land on which it annually raised hundreds of thousands of sheep for wool and meat. The size of the Explotadora’s holdings was unmatched, but the company was only one of many very large sheep ranches that operated throughout southern Patagonia. By the early twentieth century, millions of sheep grazed, grew millions of pounds of wool and flesh, and reproduced themselves.

The expansion of sheep ranching gave rise to a new social ecology in southern Patagonia predicated on the reproduction of managed animals. In contrast to hunting societies whose members generally claimed rights to an animal only after killing it, ranchers’ wealth was tied to animals that they nurtured—living stock—whose capacity for reproduction was simultaneously a source of wealth production for their owner(s).²⁵ The mobility of animals required that ranchers find ways to identify and/or contain their stock. In order to manage their livestock’s mobility and take advantage of the massive land grants typical of southern Patagonia, ranchers utilized a late nineteenth-century technological innovation: wire fencing. By installing wire fences, ranchers not only managed the movement of their flocks with a relatively small labor force, they also controlled the reproduction of flocks by facilitating the division of sheep based on age, sex, breed, or health status.

After an initial period of procuring sheep from the Falkland Islands/Malvinas, some large ranching firms, including the Explotadora, began importing rams (reproductores) and ewes from New Zealand, England, and Australia in order to breed flocks that could thrive in southern Patagonia’s social ecology and produce wool fibers for North Atlantic markets. By the mid-twentieth century, the most well-capitalized sheep firms in southern Patagonia applied principles of genetics to their breeding operations, including keeping genealogical records of pure bred sheep. Pedigree rams and ewes became commodities unto themselves, sold to domestic and international buyers for breeding programs.

Reproducing very large flocks of sheep obligated ranchers to cull their flocks on an annual basis to prevent overstocking of pastures. Initially, unwanted or excess sheep were rendered for tallow, but ranchers and meat packing companies built several packing plants (frigoríficos) in southern Patagonia in the 1910s where workers slaughtered hundreds of thousands of animals whose chilled or frozen flesh was primarily consumed in Britain. Although wool remained the region’s prime export commodity, the production of meat and food-related byproducts was an important part of the southern Patagonia’s livestock economy.²⁶

The work of raising and reproducing enormous flocks of sheep was carried out by a remarkably small number of men; women were generally prohibited from working or living on sheep estancias in southern Patagonia. The prevalence of English investors contributed to the tendency to appoint English-speaking ranch administrators and employ shepherds who migrated from locations scattered across the British Empire including Ireland, Scotland, Falkland/Malvinas Islands, New Zealand, and South Africa. In order to manage their flocks, shepherds relied on trained horses and dogs that usually outnumbered people on ranches. Dogs not only helped a handful of shepherds to manage thousands of sheep, they also provided companionship for men who might spend weeks in isolation. This triad of migrant men, horses, and dogs was crucial for carrying out the routine work that enabled the profitable reproduction of sheep.

The kinds of work and the social composition of workforces found on estancias in southern Patagonia changed dramatically in the summertime when tasks like shearing, wool packing, and dipping (bathing sheep in antiparasitic solutions) created demand for seasonal labor. Migrants crossed continents and even oceans to engage in the relatively well-paid work of shearing. Hundreds of workers annually traveled by steamship from the island of Chiloé located more than 600 nautical miles to the north. Reproducing a migrant labor force for estancia work was a source of frequent social conflict; wage disputes and strikes were commonplace. In 1919–21, ranchers and government officials collaborated in the violent suppression of organized labor in southern Patagonia. Police raided the offices of labor organizations in Punta Arenas, Chile, and Rio Gallegos, Argentina. In Santa Cruz, ranchers enlisted the aid of Argentine police and military units to repress anarchist-influenced strikes and workplace takeovers. The unrest ended when soldiers executed hundreds of strikers, mostly migrants from Chiloé, who were buried in unmarked, mass graves. By situating the Patagonian Rebellion in the material contexts of ranching work in southern Patagonia, Creatures of Fashion complements earlier scholarship that highlighted international political and economic contexts. Anarchist movements and wool prices shaped the strikers’ world, but so too did quotidian hardships of living far from the company—and reproductive labor—of loved ones.²⁷

The massive expansion of sheep ranching did not put an end to terrestrial hunting in Patagonia but rather served to increase the scale and scope of hunting activities. Livestock owners, as they did in many parts of the late nineteenth-century world, enlisted workers to wage war against predators including puma, fox, and wild dogs, as well as herbivores both native (e.g., rodents and geese) and introduced (e.g., European hares and bunnies).²⁸ Ranchers called for the extermination of guanacos—the region’s largest grazing animal—contending that the camelids spread diseases and damaged fences in addition to competing with sheep for pasture. In addition, the migration of sheep shearers and other seasonal workers coincided with the prime hunting season for summer skins (pieles del verano), creating opportunities for migrants to supplement wages earned on estancias with income from hunting. Shipping networks that formed largely around wool exports facilitated the flow of furs to North Atlantic markets—often via Buenos Aires—where demand for fur fashions rose during the first half of the twentieth century. Finally, the marginalization of remaining Aonikenk communities shifted commercial guanaco hunting from a largely Indigenous-controlled activity oriented around the production of quillangos, to the settler-dominated export of chulengos or what US importers referred to as guanaquitos—the unprocessed skins of newborn guanacos.²⁹

Hunting and ranching activities in southern Patagonia were tightly knit to distant places where animal furs and fibers were traded, processed, and turned into fashionable apparel. Along with many other rural regions in Latin America, life in southern Patagonia changed due to the unprecedented late nineteenth-century expansion of the global economy. The work of commodity brokers and traders, textile manufacturers, and fashion designers indirectly yet decisively transformed living animals into creatures of industrial fashion.

The Work of Fashion

The attention that Eduardo Holmberg paid to the dress of Indigenous women living in the Salesian mission on Tierra del Fuego was not unusual. Clothing or dress was a marker of difference among people in Patagonia. Christian missionaries often commented on the attire of the people that they encountered, and they sometimes juxtaposed photos of Selk’nam or Yamana individuals wearing guanaco furs with images of Indigenous people dressed in woolen or cotton garments.³⁰ Prominent secular voices in nineteenth-century Argentina also made connections between dress and civilization. In his classic essay Facundo, Domingo F. Sarmiento invoked fashion to distinguish barbaric, rural people of murky racial origin from the urban inhabitants of Argentine cities where elegance of style, articles of luxury, dress-coats, and frock-coats with other European garments occupy their appropriate place.³¹ For the future president of Argentina, fashion helped to make citizens in liberal nation-states.³²

Fashion trends, however, rarely heeded national borders. In early twentieth-century southern Patagonia, affluent ranchers and merchants imported silk garments from France and wool suits from England. Migrant shepherds, shearers, and ranch-hands donned ready-to-wear cardigans and wool trousers manufactured in English textile mills, an indication of the transboundary character of capitalist fashions. Indeed, the fur and wool textiles that became European fashion were made from raw materials increasingly sourced from places outside of Europe, including vast quantities of merino wool from Australia, and furs from animals hunted on every continent and ocean.³³

Demand for fur outerwear rose in mid-nineteenth-century Europe and the United States. Seal skin jackets gained popularity in the 1860s and 1870s following the US purchase of Alaska and the seal-rich Pribilof Islands from Russia. Fur seal skins from southern Patagonian littoral zones—often ambiguously called Cape Horn skins in trade publications—converged with far larger quantities of seal skins from Alaska in London auction houses where international buyers bid on lots of animal furs. These included both opulent furs like sable or fur seals, as well as less costly furs including foxes, guanacos, rabbits, muskrats, and myriad other animals. At virtually the same time that Aonikenk-made quillangos entered national museums as artifacts, outerwear made from guanaquitos entered into vogue among middle-class consumers in the United States. By the 1920s, US traders annually imported hundreds of thousands of guanaquitos. The guanaquito trade diminished after 1950, but Argentina continued to export significant quantities through the 1980s.

Twentieth-century fur fashion ranged from ostentatious to subtle, from purity to pure subterfuge. For example, fur seal outerwear had enduring appeal in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States and Europe, but only after skilled craftspeople carried out a multistep process that turned a stiff, bloodied, salt-encrusted skin into a soft, pliable, color-dyed textile. Seal brown referred not to a color typical of a living fur seal, but rather to the hue of a manufactured dye widely used to color fur seals. Furriers sometimes featured the natural colors of fox or guanaco furs, but they also dyed them in order to make them resemble more expensive kinds of animal fur. These tricks of the furrier trade indicate that fur-wearing was not limited to the super rich or Hollywood celebrities. The meanings of wearing furs during the first half of the twentieth century went well beyond displays of opulence or power. The popularity of furs cut across lines of race, class, gender, and political ideology.

A 1910 photo (top) of an unnamed Selk’nam woman juxtaposed with a 1944 (bottom) portrait of Matilde Inkiol, a Selk’nam woman in Tierra del Fuego. These images first appeared side-by-side in a lavishly illustrated tourist guide by Salesian Alberto M. de Agostini. Courtesy of the Patrimonio Fotográfico, Museo Salesiano Maggiorino Borgatello.

The volume and value of fur exports from twentieth-century Patagonia were dwarfed by those of sheep’s wool. The pre-eminence of cotton in industrial textile production makes it easy to overlook the fact that world wool production rose substantially in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.³⁴ This increased output coincided with a hemispheric shift in sheep-raising from the Northern to the Southern Hemisphere: by 1930, some 250 million sheep grazed in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and South America, a notable example of the circulation of an organism for commodity production