In the aftermath of the so-called Conquest of the Desert, what was the society and state that emerged in northern Patagonia? Javier Cikota provides a compelling response to this question by focusing on the contestations and negotiations among different actors, including nationally appointed officials, local police, Indigenous people, merchants, non-licensed medical practitioners, and teenagers, and how they produced community and state legitimacy in frontier spaces. He threads the needle between two frontier theses, that of Frederick Jackson Turner and that of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento. Where the former celebrates the national identity made on the frontier, the latter bemoans it as a threat to civilization. In finding his place between the two, Cikota explains processes of state formation and liberal citizenship through the voices, actions, and intimate relationships of the people who lived in and governed the communities scattered across northern Patagonia. As a result, he puts himself in good company with others who recently have moved beyond narratives that seek to deconstruct the lofty discourses and projects of nation-state makers. One is left, therefore, with the sense that state formation and legitimacy within communities should be measured for what they were, rather than against what states had imagined them to be.

Cikota narrates the frontier’s establishment and decline in Patagonia from the late nineteenth century into the Great Depression to show that frontier governance was flexible and adaptive to the senses and practices of citizenship, belonging, and community that emerged there, even if they were not always formally institutionalized. He focuses on justice, and to that end, he employs judicial records from Neuquén and Río Negro to construct six chapters on different aspects of frontier society and state formation. These include the establishment of frontier government (Chapter 1), Indigenous dispossession and persistence (Chapter 2), patriarchy and state formation (Chapter 3), adolescent marriages (Chapter 4), local expressions of citizenship among vecinos (Chapter 5), and contestations over medical practices (Chapter 6).

Cikota’s convincing analysis is at once broadly accessible and nuanced, delicately but directly addressing difficult subjects, such as Indigenous displacement and sexual violence, without shying away from the deeper scholarly stakes embedded within those histories. He provides readers with explicit explanations of his analytical methods and foregrounds intellectual conversations. Whether outlining the difficulties in recovering Indigenous voices and histories in documents meant to erase them, weighing the extent to which we can and should read agency in the marriages of adolescent girls, or exploring the nuances of patriarchy and state authority on the frontier, Cikota manages both to invite discussion among those familiar with the historiographical fields with which he engages and to assist students who could benefit from guidance through complex histories. This ensures his book will be well received by different audiences.

Connections among the frontier that Cikota describes and the economic aspects of those places, such as land tenancy, labor relations, and commercial networks remain outside of the book’s scope. The study will be important, however, to anyone studying frontier economies. His analysis demands that we consider the place of reputation, informal social ties, and familial relationships in the circulation of child labor or the non-institutional forms of exercising citizenship in the development of property rights in a settler-colonial context. As such, Cikota’s insights into state and society formation on the frontier should resonate beyond the specific questions he addresses throughout the book.

Ultimately, Cikota’s contribution is a welcome one. It reminds us that place matters. State formation happened in place. Liberal citizenship developed in relationship to particular places. Our assumptions about Argentine national norms also emerged in place, namely Buenos Aires. Patagonia, as Cikota illustrates, was not a failure or deviation from norms conceived of in Buenos Aires, but rather one made in its own place.