Nation-state, frontier and militia: assaults and resistance. Córdoba 1860-1870

Abstract

During th e second half of nineteenth century, the problem of th e ‘inner frontiers’  was one of the conflict fronts to the expansionist aspirations of the Argentinenation-state in consolidation. The study of the social dynamics of the frontier and its actors tended to be relegated by a historiography that considered thedisappearance of that world as an unavoidable process. Even though, in the last twenty years, historic anthropological research has studied frontier society, building a complex vision of political, social and economic relations of the various actors involved, there are little known aspects of the state advance that involved rural populations of the campaign countryside. In this work, we will make a first approach to the National Guards system, a provision of military services system that subordinated some sectors of th e civil population to military defense activities in the frontier line as well as in other inner and international fronts ....