Presenter: Santiago Bestilleiro Lettini is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American History at Georgetown and a Junior Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks. His work focuses on the Río de la Plata region and its connections with the Atlantic World. He is currently writing a dissertation that examines the Río de la Plata grasslands in the long nineteenth century from a political, economic, and environmental perspective.
Abstract: This project explores the trajectory of the grasslands that currently cover eastern Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil from 1760 to 1920. While these plains, commonly known as Pampas, constitute a transnational and pre-national territory, their division into different countries has led historians to study them within the resulting political frameworks, overlaying natural and political borders, and overlooking the common features that made them ecologically coherent before and despite the emergence of those entities. “The Greater Pampas” examines how the interaction of regional and transregional processes between the crisis of the Iberian empires and the end of the “export boom” led to profound transformations in this territory’s ecology, economy, and society. Through the incorporation of primary sources from this and other regions (the United States, Great Britain, Spain), this dissertation also examines how the grasslands contributed to the processes that reshaped the Atlantic World in the long nineteenth century.