Sketching Social Mobility in the Gold Rushes of California and Patagonia:Bret Harte and Manuel Rojas Rachel Vanwieren When gold was discovered in California in 1848, the news quickly spread around the globe, prompting adventurers to move to the region and try their luck at getting rich quick. Some of these miners later migrated to other places in search of gold, including Patagonia in the 1880s.1 Like the forty-niners themselves, Bret Harte’s tales of the California gold rush also traveled, forming part of a worldwide imaginary of the California gold rush. In the case of Manuel Rojas – born in Buenos Aires to Chilean immigrant parents –, the tale inspired a budding writer. In the early 1920s, after reading one of the translations into Spanish of Harte’s work and traveling to southern Patagonia as part of a theatre troupe, Rojas wrote a story about panning for gold in Patagonia titled “Leyendas de Patagonia.”2 The story won a literary prize in the Buenos Aires magazine Caras y caretas and was published in a collection of stories by Rojas in 1926. In “Algo sobre mi experiencia literaria,” Rojas recalls, “[p]or los días en que escribí … [“Leyendas de Patagonia”] había leído los Bocetos californianos de Bret Harte, y bajo su influencia bauticé a dos de mis personajes con nombres de individuos de ese libro: Kanaka Joe y Pedro el Francés” (50). While Rojas openly recognized Harte’s influence in his choice of topic and in the naming of some of the characters in his story, his portrayal of the frontier world of gold panning differs in significant ways from Harte’s. Nevertheless, Rojas’s story has not been studied in relationship to Harte nor in relationship to its Patagonian gold rush context.3 In this article I compare Rojas’s story “Leyendas de Patagonia” to two of Harte’s stories, “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “Outcasts of Poker Flat,” both of which are part of the collection that Rojas read. “The Luck of Roaring Camp” centers [End Page 281] on a mining camp’s collective attempt to raise an orphaned baby according to society’s moral standards, and in “Outcasts of Poker Flat” a judgmental town throws out morally questionable characters that later prove their worth when they are isolated in the mountains by a snowstorm. In Rojas’s story, Argentine and Chilean mestizo and indigenous characters team up in a locally led group and compete with a foreign led group of adventurers for cattle smuggling and gold panning opportunities in Patagonia. I explore differences in how the two authors portray social mobility by showing what the characters hope to obtain from their participation in the gold rush, their attitudes about the societies they left behind, and the goals of the unique new communities they form. In Harte’s stories the characters strive to improve their position in society, showing their nostalgia for stricter social and moral hierarchies. In contrast, I argue that Rojas is skeptical that gold panning and other frontier adventures would change a person’s socio-economic status or even that this would be desirable. Rojas’s adaptation of Harte’s work is marked by the difficulties that indigenous people and immigrants faced in late nineteenth – and early twentieth-century Patagonia while trying to improve their lives. Most of Rojas’s later and better known works explore the struggles of marginalized individuals in Chile and Argentina in the early – and mid-twentieth century. As is evidenced in histories of Latin American and Chilean literature, Rojas’s early story “Leyendas de Patagonia” has been studied very little in comparison to his well-known later work, such as his novel Hijo de ladrón (Promis, Anderson Imbert, Alegría). Despite the apparent distance of “Leyendas de Patagonia” from the twentieth-century workers Rojas typically portrayed, this story about Patagonian gold panners expresses Rojas’s anarchist ideals by cautioning workers about the dangers of materialism and encouraging them to reap the benefits of collaborating with an independent community of workers of diverse origins. I. Social Mobility in California and Patagonia Harte’s treatment of the issue of social mobility...