Abstract

WILLIAMS, Fernando. From the Irrigation Canals to the Ameghino Dam: Water, Infrastructure, and Society in the Chubut Valley (Patagonia, Argentina). Rev. hist. am. argent. [online]. 2024, vol.59, n.1, e004.  Epub May 15, 2024. ISSN 2314-1549.  http://dx.doi.org/10.48162/rev.44.055.

The present paper deals with the socio-political implications of the transformation of the Chubut Valley (Patagonia, Argentina) triggered by agriculture as it was developed by a group of Welsh immigrants who arrived in 1865. Attention will be first paid to the irrigation companies formed by the Welsh in order to build and manage a system of canals capable of irrigating the farms. The relationship between the construction and management of this system and the corporate structure formed by the settlers will be addressed as a way of pondering the gravitation that water had in the history of the valley. The paper will then deal with the dissolution of this type of management due to the conflictive advance of a paradigm of centralized state control that would lead to the nationalization of the system in 1943. In addition to the recognition of the agency of water in the history of extra-Andean Patagonia, it will be important to focus on the different objects that made up the infrastructural systems -canals, bridges, dams- and also on the symbolic function that these objects performed, especially as part of context in which the province of Chubut was created in the 1950s.

Keywords : colonisation; irrigation; dam, immigration; welsh settlers.

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