Symbolically, Chilean Patagonia has been doubly marginalized: overshadowed by Argentine Patagonia, and at the same time, forgotten by Chile for its cultural differences. The Chilean gaucho who inhabits Patagonia has no echo in the national cultural imaginary: neither huaso nor Chilote nor Mapuche, gaucho worlds and lifeways, marked by their historical contact with Argentina, have made Patagonia unclassifiable for the patriotic and geopolitical needs of a country obsessed with the search for a national identity.

Within the grand space that Patagonia occupies in South America, Chile claims an irregular strip of coastline plunging south. Within this territory, the region of Aysén occupies some 108 000 km2, with only 81.000 inhabitants, who were only joined to the rest of the country by road some 30 years ago. Claimed by environmentalists as one of the three least contaminated regions on earth, Aysén's economic, political, and ecological peculiarities have placed it at the center of a conflict that pits ecologists, technocrats, capitalists, and peasants against one another.

The HidroAysén project, which proposes to build five hydroelectric dams on the Pascua and Baker rivers in southern Aysén, altering pristine watersheds and their ecosystems while opening the region up to further resource extraction, has garnered the interest of national and international environmental groups and sympathetic celebrities. Little of their attention to the region, however, has been paid to the lives of those who first settled the region or their heirs today, Chilean gauchos.

With the work I am presenting here I have sought to produce a photographic document of the lifeways of Chilean gauchos and their relationship to the natural and urban landscapes in which they live, contextualizing it within the threat of the hydroelectric project by seeking out the spaces that the construction of the dams would irreversibly alter.