From the Depths of Patagonia

"The Ushuaia Penal Colony and the Nature of "The End of the World

Bibliographic Data

ID2804629
AuthorsRyan C Edwards (0000-0002-4220-7566, corresponding author), Ryan Edwards
Year2014
Volume94
Issue2
Pages271-302
Publication date2014-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-2641262
OpenAlexW2315260468
LanguageEN
Citations received6
References cited40

This article engages the relationship between prison and place on the island of Tierra del Fuego, in southernmost Patagonia. While Patagonia has piqued popular imaginations for centuries through traveler narratives, these accounts have been reduced to a limited lexicon categorizing the region as prehistoric, desolate, and windswept. Similarly, the Ushuaia penal colony (1902-1947), located on the Beagle Channel, has been narrowly cast as the "Argentine Siberia." I unpack these evocative labels through an examination of journalist accounts, prison personnel correspondence, and the writings of prisoners exiled to Ushuaia, recuperating more situated visions within this mythic landscape. Some authorities considered Ushuaia a natural prison where engineers could design a modern penitentiary and implement rehabilitation techniques through labor and isolation. I explore the tension produced between these elemental and modern carceral forms and argue that the penal colony was an open-door panopticon, where punishment and routines were aligned with environmental factors that extended beyond the prison walls and thereby complicated progressive criminology. Prisoner labor in the town and the surrounding forests rarely rehabilitated the condemned, and it instead created a dependent prison industry that helped develop a region that for decades had posed settlement problems for Argentine statesmen. This dynamic relationship between the prison, town, and landscape created a carceral ecology within which different actors and elements played various yet entangled roles. As perceptions of Ushuaia were informed by one's status and form of confinement or relative freedom, we see divergent as well as overlapping understandings of the region rather than a monolithic landscape at "The End of the World

Art · Criminology · Literature · Narrative · Panopticon · Political science · Politics · Prison · Punishment (psychology) · Sociology · Vision · Alexander von Humboldt Studies · Anthropology · Historical and Scientific Studies · History · Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights · Law

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