Description:

In 1884 the first sheep farm or estancia was established in Tierra del Fuego; over the following decade they multiplied all over the island, driving out the native Selk’nam people, who until then had had little contact with Europeans. To put a stop to the state-endorsed genocide the Salesian Order established two missions on the Chilean and Argentine sides of Tierra del Fuego, but in spite of their best intentions these became virtual extermination camps. Meanwhile, Anglican missionary Thomas Bridges and his son Lucas experimented with a new model, an estancia where the native peoples could be trained in the skills needed to benefit from or at least cope with European colonization while retaining their identity and traditional practices.
Carlos Gamerro is an Argentine writer and literary critic. He is the author of Las Islas (1998); El sueño del señor juez (2000); El secreto y sus voces (2002); La aventura de los bustos de Eva (2004); Un yuppie en la columna del Che Guevara (2010) and Cardenio (2016). His fiction has been translated into English by Ian Barnett and published by And Other Stories, The Islands (2012); The Adventure of the Busts of Eva Perón (2015). In 2015 his book of essays Facundo o Martín Fierro. Los libros que inventaron la Argentina won the Argentine Book Fair Prize for criticism.