Soil, Seeds, and Roses: Plantation Afterlives in an Argentine Soybean Frontier

Abstract

In the Argentine Chaco — a world hotspot of agribusiness-driven deforestation — descendants of European settlers ( gringos) who built manual cotton plantations on Indigenous land and labor in the twentieth century, have since been displaced from farming by the “soy boom.” Nevertheless, plantation legacies persist in the racialized plant-relations of these actors today, and in their conflicted — and often acquiescent — attitudes to agribusiness. Drawing on emergent theories of the “Plantationocene,” this essay examines how three settler interlocutors grieve the loss of plant-worlds that soy agribusiness has displaced, with a focus on living soil, cotton seeds, and potted roses. I show that these multispecies attachments perform a double role: while they sensitize these actors to the ecological fallouts of the soy boom, they also reinforce settler colonial plantation logics of racialized progress that ultimately feed their acquiescence to that agribusiness model.