Title: Gendered crossings : women and migration in the Spanish Empire /
Authors: Poska, Allyson M.
Year: 2016
Subjects: Women immigrants Latin America Social conditions.; Women immigrants Latin America Economic conditions.; Women immigrants Cultural assimilation Latin America.; Latin America Emigration and immigration.; Latin America Emigration and immigration Social aspects.; Europe, Southern Emigration and immigration Economic aspects.
Abstract: Patagonia was never hospitable to European settlement, but between 1778 and 1784 the Spanish Crown sent more than 1,900 peasants there in a disastrous attempt to colonize the remote South American coast. The narrative begins in the Old World, tracing the colonists' journey to the port at La Coruña. There they received food, housing, and medical care as they waited for ships to take them across the Atlantic to Montevideo, a journey that included horrific storms and at leas one encounter with English corsairs. A few peasants settled temporarily at the Patagonian outposts of Fuerte del Carmen and Floridablanca. But before the last ships reached the Americas, the Crown abandoned the project owing to financial problems, disease, harsh weather, and the prospect of mutiny. The peasant colonists were resettled in new towns outside of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, where they raised families, bough slaves, and gradually became integrated into colonial society. At every stage, their gendered experiences were informed by their contacts with other settlers, Indians, and Africans, as well as conservative Bourbon social policies and the complications of frontier life.
Contents: Rethinking empire: gender, enlightenment, and the Patagonia project -- "It will be very advantageous to have some families": gender and the recruitment of the colonists -- Women and children at port -- Women, children, and the transatlantic voyage -- "A nursery of vices": masculine crisis in Patagonia -- Gendered lives at the edges of empire -- Far from Patagonia: gender on the Spanish frontier -- From peasants to slave owners, from colonists to Vecinos.