Moving Patagonia: Contemporary Rural Dwelling through estancias, puestos, and puesteros

Patagonia is known as a remote place with difficult access in the southern part of Chile and Argentina. However, its rural dwellers deploy diverse mobility practices in order to reproduce their social life. The rigid private latifundia property regime known as estancias, geared towards the production of sheep farming, is supported by a range of rural workers who are unable to reside permanently within rural territories, generating a process of deterritorialization. In this process, some workers are forced to dwell in a mobile manner, seeking work possibilities in various estancias; others have decided to abandon their rural territories and migrate to cities. In this chapter, we describe the dwelling and mobility practices of a unique rural mobile inhabitant: puesteros. These rural workers live in remote places within already distant estancias, in housing units known as puestos, where they take care of sheep and the fields. Puesteros live in Patagonia's most isolated areas, where roads are yet to be paved and housing is quite precarious. The results of this research help us to identify how remote places are dwelled in Patagonia, as relational territories weaved by the mobilities of people, animals, objects, and places, in different timespace scales.