Modernity spots in a traditional society. The impact of european settlement in frontier spaces of Argentina and Brazil, 1860s-1870s.

Frontier colonization and European settlement have been landmarks in nineteenth century demographic and economic history of Latin America. This was particularly true in the Argentine pampas and in the south of Brazil. These areas, traditionally specialized in large-scale livestock production, were deeply transformed by this way to modernization. Demographic and productive changes were, in the long-run, astronomical in both cases. This paper tries to analyze the impact of these new settlements on native societies in those countries. As usually the “immigrant” farmer population hoarded up the academic attention, Creole peasants have been neglected as a part of these transformations. This paper will unravel the complex relationships between them. We use two case studies of particular importance, since they were the biggest and earliest colonization experiments. The aim is to compare productive and demographic changes in a time frame that spans between the decades of 1860 and 1870. We pretend to identify the main features and changes that these settlements boosted, using census sources, tax records and probate inventories.