Punta Arenas and Ushuaia: early explorers and the politics of memory in constructing Antarctic gateway cities

Abstract

The paper draws on narratives by and about some early Antarctic explorers. Three themes are broached. The first concerns early explorers and their expeditions that passed through Punta Arenas and Ushuaia as gateways to Antarctica. The second considers discovery, naming, mapping, navigational charting and other activities reflected in narratives and how these were retrospectively and selectively used by the two host states Chile and Argentina in rival geopolitical imaginaries to be projected into Antarctica. Related is the discursive maintenance of a cultural heritage that in the two cities is nowadays exploited in boosting science and tourism to help refurbish rival gateways into Antarctica. A subsidiary theme touches the past emergence of Punta Arenas and Ushuaia as seats of territorial power and gateway towns shaped by specific historical preconditions in a double-edged process. The expansion and consolidation of power with concomitant local networks of transport, trade and communications in Tierra del Fuego that linked into global networks was one side of a process the other side of which included annihilation of an aboriginal people. This latter is an aspect that worried some of the early explorers but remains rather invisible in today’s celebratory commemorations of past events in our own age of globalization when modern entrepreneurs promote the contemporary gateway function. One, thus, finds a selective gaze at work when memories of past events, narratives of polar exploration and traces in material cultures are mobilized both in the production of geopolitical imaginaries and in promotion of eco- and polar heritage tourism.