Rural Women’s Invisible Work in Census and State Rural Development Plans: The Argentinean Patagonian Case

Abstract

This article reviews the invisibility and the recognition of rural female work in the Patagonian region of Argentina over time. The analysis is carried out based on (a) the systematisation of research articles (b) a historical study of censuses, and (c) the systematisation of rural development plans related to the subject. The article adopts an ecofeminist perspective. The results have been organised into four sections. (1) An overview of the later Patagonian integration; (2) the work of Patagonian women in history; (3) the recognition of rural production in censuses; (4) Patagonian family farming. We found out that the metaphors that relate women with the land are used to deny both rural female work and the family land use. One of its consequences is that Patagonia has become one of the most affected by extractivism. We conclude reviewing the forms of economic and political recognition, which could intervene in future planning.

1. Introduction

Feminist theories recognise that women’s work is invisible in different ways. Mellor [1] argues that there exists an imposed altruism, that implies women themselves often threaten their own work recognition [2]. Mellor identifies the circumscription of feminine work to limited space and unbounded time, which also is unpaid or an altruistic work. In contrast, male work is understood in the context of unlimited space, with defined time and acknowledged by a reward. In Patagonia ‘altruism’, as a non-valuation argument, takes on a dimension which allows us to think about the aspects of the denial of Patagonian rural female work. For example, Leon [3] shows that with regard to women’s work in Latin America, the vast bulk of rural female work was unpaid and women who had the most regular economic activity profile are those who were highly educated, not married or have no children.

The most significant number of women involved in certain occupations are in some degree an extension of women’s domestic role such as teaching or nursing. León observed the largest percentage of women workers in urban areas. Thus, her paper perpetuates the omission of rural effort as work. What kind of female work is rural work and what particularities does it show in Argentine Patagonia?

This article considers that the limits to the recognition of rural female work are not only due to social discipline but also respond to structural conditions, which lead us to pay attention not just to the hierarchical organisation of society but also to review contextual conditions of the region.

Patagonia, understood as a whole settlement and environment, is a frontier region [4]. It was described in Argentinean State documents by intersecting the borders between human, animals, and plants [5]. This is because a significant part of the population, the native people, were defined as animals or even as ‘natural hazards’. The forest was taken as a moral reference of the society that is trying to change. The trees became the symbol of social behaviour because botanists described plants incorporating human characteristics, that is, an attitude that is at the same time desirable for the population; ‘Cypress, the winner’ or ‘larch, the majestic’ are examples [6]. In the configuration of the Argentine State, this use resulted in a public policy called ‘positive environmental fatalism’ [7], p. 403.

The role of women, and the devaluation of their work, do not escape the weight of this environmental determinism. From this point of view, we address topics related to agricultural and livestock spaces in the socio-ecological systems of arid lands of the steppes. We seek to show that the recognition of female work and family farming (named in Argentina as family agriculture) face us with the necessity to incorporate ethnic and colonial elements typical of the region of Patagonia, since the analysis of feminine work involves hiding variables linked to racist or social-class discrimination [8]. This situation demands the recognition of particularities that we analyse considering that land and landscapes involve the female experience of work.

Núñez [9] appeals to the idea of land feminisation to show how the dependence of the Patagonian population was linked to a specific understanding of the landscape. To see the impact of the historical lack of assessment of female work in family farming, we must go through the meaning given to the territory to rethink the current implications of these processes in one of the most vulnerable sectors of the productive national framework, that of the family farming.

Within feminist literature, there are many studies related to the invisibility of rural women´s work [10]. In gender studies, Patagonia add the question around the particular situation of women and work located in border territory [11,12]. Patagonian women, as the colonisers of the American West or Australia, have been distinguished as especially strong and autonomous [13], whose strength, superlatively recognised in literature and romance, is diluted in terms of political or economic recognition [14].

The article proposes that, in case of rural feminine work in Patagonia, it was necessary to anchor women devaluation in the devaluation of the environment. From an ecofeminist perspective, the concept of woman and the concept of nature should be seen articulated [15], where the sense of one and the other are fed back into the same logic domain. Then the rural and urban conceptions of women allow us to explore the particularities of Patagonian space.

From this perspective, we describe from the lack of recognition they have in censuses’ history, scientific research, local development studies and analysis of productions at the family level, crossing these observations with current official perceptions about rural producers. As a result, we found an articulation between the permanence of female subjects as subaltern and the limited valuation of family farming, which can be a starting point to rethink development policies.

This work seeks to explore how worker’s recognition and planning of territory not only establishes specific logics of tenure but also relies on an unequal consideration of the population. This work adds the need to consider the work of women structural, in the process of constitution of Patagonian territory. As a summary of works that explore the Patagonian problem from development policies, we study the association of women’s work and the devaluation of the space itself. Its negation as an autonomous space drags as a consequence the strong invisibility of scales of production, which are inserted into the reproductive and are dismissed.

The scale that we will analyse is that of family farming, which is an ambiguous scale of no precise definition in Argentina. However, broadly speaking, ‘Family Farming is understood as a type of production where the domestic and the productive units are physically integrated; the family contributes the predominant fraction of the labour force used in the exploitation, and the production is aimed at both self-consumption and the market … family farming is a way of life, and a cultural matter, which objective is the social reproduction of the family in decent conditions. The management of the productive unit and the investments made in it are made by individuals who maintain family ties with each other. Most of the work is contributed by family members; ownership of the means of production (although not always land) belongs to the family, and it is within it that the transmission of values, practices and experiences takes place‘ [16], p. 5.

Argentina is a country with a great diversity of ecological-productive regions, so the characteristics needed to be a unit of economic organisation differ from region to region. Today, the category of Family Agriculture tries to integrate multiple dimensions (productive, social and cultural) of the subjects, as well as their economic, social and regional heterogeneity. In turn, being in a capitalist context, it does not necessarily assume a mode of production of capital accumulation.

According to Law No. 27,118, which is entitled as ‘Historical Repair of Family Farming for the Construction of a New Rurality in Argentina’ Sanctioned in 2014, a family farmer is defined as one who carries out productive agricultural, livestock, forestry, fishing and aquaculture activities in rural areas and meets the following requirements:

(a) The management of the productive enterprise is carried out directly by the producer and/or a member of his family;

(b) He is the owner of all or part of the means of production;

(c) The job requirements are mainly covered by family labour and/or with complementary contributions from employees;

(d) The family of the Farmer and Farmer resides in the field or the town closest to him.

(e) To have as primary economic income of his family the agricultural activity of his establishment.

(f) The Small Producers, Small-holders, Peasants, Chacareros, Settlers, Medieros, Artisanal Fishermen, Family Producer and also the landless rural farmers and producers, the peri-urban producers and the communities of native peoples included in sections (a), (b), (c), (d) and (e).

Producers of Family, Peasant and Indigenous Agriculture shall be characterised by the enforcement authority for their priority inclusion in the actions and policies derived from this law, taking into account the following factors:

(a) Self-consumption, Marginal and Subsistence Producers.

(b) Production Levels and Destination of Production.

(c) Place of residence.

(d) Net and Extra-property Income.

(e) Level of Capitalisation.

(f) Family Labour. Complementary Workforce.

(g) Other elements of interest.

In terms of family farming, Patagonia is interesting because it has very large area (1.043 million km²), mostly arid, and contains the largest populations in the world dedicated to grazing. Besides, it has vast areas of fruit production, which in many regions clash with hydrocarbon extractions, hydroelectric power generation, vast national parks and areas of tourist interest. The female effort, from female farmers to prostitutes, is present in the region’s literature. However, all this is omitted in the processes of measurement and design of development policies.

Throughout this writing, we will study the case of rural women, while the effort of both is especially hidden in this marginal context. The results have been organised into four sections. The first section presents an overview of the later Patagonian integration and the idea of sterile land, elaborated from the first scientific studies that analyse the space, to contextualise the territorial particularities where women developed their tasks. The second section shows the work of Patagonian women in history, taking censuses as sources. The third one inquires the recognition of rural production in censuses. The fourth explores family farming in Patagonian land, showing how the official measures of production sustain the invisibility and devaluation of rural Patagonian women workers.

2. Material and Methods

We seek to understand how the structural elements that have configured the historical expression of female work are impacting the recognition of family farming as a significant element of Patagonian development. The problems of recognition of female work are transferred to the territory itself and lead to the current considerations of family farming as areas located in Patagonia and organised around domestic efforts. To reflect on these problems, we start by asking how Patagonia was integrated as territory, and also how to measure what exists in terms of population, landscapes and resources. We propose to start the analysis from a historical perspective. After that, we ask about the present, both in censuses and in work recognition. Therefore, we will refer to the extensive literature in Spanish, since most of the results of the social sciences related to Patagonia have not been published in English. At this point, the sources are presented as an original contribution, practically unknown in publications outside of Latin America, despite the relevance of the territory regarding people and spaces affected by the problem. We clarify that we have maximised the references in English to facilitate the dialogue.

We have organised these sections in Data Sources; Theory; Outcomes; Implications for the recognition of women rural work and implications for the recognition of family agriculture.

2.1. Data Sources

We initiate our study from a historical perspective. First, we present the process of territorial integration of Patagonia [4,17]. In this section we will review military and scientific sources associated with the Patagonian conquest to start from the terms with which the territory was undervalued [18,19,20], both in relation to the environments and in relation to the populations.

For this goal we will start with the first national census, in 1869, until the present [21,22,23,24,25,26], analysing the way in which census recognition logics have varied. We understand the need to review the censuses as one of the most significant academic results, in which the State and policies consider what exists in dialogue with local producers’ different senses of land. The quantitative modifications are reviewed in already published works [27].

We include the main State sources from this period by including the analysis of the National Congress debates during the process of incorporation of the Patagonia territory into the Argentinian state, to identify the terms in which this process was developed [28]. We also consider scientific, technical and military sources that characterised the region, while presenting a particular recognition of female work and rural activities at the domestic level, both from primary sources [18,19,20,29], and from secondary ones of authors who dedicated themselves to systematising the military sources of the army campaigns to Patagonia [30].

The analysis of production in Patagonia is done following three cases. The sources are related to human trashumance in the north of Neuquen province [29,31,32], the production of cherries in the parallel 42° Andean county [33,34,35,36,37,38,39], and the national agricultural censuses [24,25,26].

The specific question on family agriculture has been recently studied in Argentina [40,41,42,43,44,45,46] and also in Patagonia [33,47,48,49,50].

As we pointed out, they are almost unknown works in Spanish, even within Latin American studies. The effort of this article to bring these references closer to the debates in English publications can help to review global subaltern dynamisms.

2.2. Theory

Twenty years ago, McDowell [51] criticised the ethnocentrism of many of the key categories employed by feminist geographers and challenged feminist researchers to develop a theory that allows thinking in terms of differences and diversity. Much closer in time, Nzegwu, Bockover, Femenias and Chaudhuri [52] argue that the gender category effectively allows us to recognize space practices that are not so western. Already within the question of the invisibility of female work, the long tradition of existing studies finds its own line in the face of the question of rurality [2,10,53,54,55] that puts the senses of femininity in tension, and with it the gender relations established in these scenarios.

This article is still responding to those challenges for the concealment of the work of Patagonian women and their productions in censuses and development plans of their particular territorialisation in national reviews of the case in the existing bibliography. The work of Patagonian women seems limited to a practice that is not completed in a dialogue with the work of women in general. We have connected co-temporal invisibility and devaluation seeing diversity transcending the strictly human. We achieved this connection by inquiring how landscapes and people are seen or hidden from similar logics [15,56,57,58,59]. From a place so little considered in gender studies, such as Patagonia, diversity emerges giving clues about how gender, work and territory make sense in practices that transcend the limits that state recognition seeks to impose.

Hence, the question about the type of theory that allows identifying the particularity of a case so little studied cannot be taken as insignificant. Lewis and Simpson [60] analysis of the theory of performative effect observed that theory constitutes the ‘conditions of possibility’ [61]. Theories shape the world [62]. Within the theories, the construction of ontology is central, and many times the debates ignore that not only the discourses but the way in which materiality is conceived is crossed by biases of inequality. Femenías [63] points out the need to explore the construction of the history of submission from the deconstruction of theories that sustained it and give value to the struggles to overcome that inferiorisation.

Social and environmental issues are culturally appropriated and signified together. The possibility of an imposed altruism, suggested by Mellor, is supported on arguments associated with people, but also, with territories and landscape and economical orders. In our study case, Patagonian lands are territories of extractive capitalism [64], and the selected sources allow us to recognise how the description of the land is transferred to people.

Balibar [65] indicates that frontier regions contain institution-limits because frontiers are seen as fixed. Institutions in the frontier, and the frontier in itself, are needed by States as stable frames; therefore, the reference for change resides somewhere else. This subalternity, which implies that change itself is linked to the management of an external change conceived as more important, leads us to think about the similarity with the feminine. Patagonian women were presented as a framework that enabled the possibility of development of another—the male—at the same time that this meant their own stability [14].

2.3. Outcomes

2.3.1. Implications for the Recognition of Women Rural Work

Research on women’s work in Argentina has reviewed mostly urban scenarios, linking access to work with the construction of citizenship [66]. Among other results, it is worth remarking that until 1926 women lacked rights to the point that the work of married women was illegal, and from there it is analysed how the laws incorporated labour as a right [67]. Consequently, our article moves toward the analysis of rural female work, not so much from the laws but public policy tools such as censuses and development plans. This is to show that differences in aspects of citizenship, such as the right to access work, deepened in rural areas.

The first two sections of this work are focused on the question about rural female work. It is observed that it acquires certain particularities in Patagonian cases since Patagonia is mainly a rural region. The difficult conditions of women’s work in rural contexts is one of the main lines in feminist decolonial studies [68], because of the relevance of families’ rural practices in those geographies. From a broader framework, Agarwal [54,55] argues that difficulties of rural Indian women are linked with the conception of female obligations. No matter what, they were conceived a natural resource; consequently, self-exposure is a social requirement. In Latin America, rural studies reach similar conclusions [41,42,69]. But as we indicated, it is a region where women colonists have been presented as highly empowered. The possibility of denying the work of women recognised in memories and poetics introduces a particularity that makes the case interesting.

Although León [3] recognises that rural female work suffers a major devaluation than urban female work and labour in Latin America, her effort, like that many others, did not mention the structural inequalities in land distribution in the continent and its impact on gender relationships [70]; or in the unequal economic evaluation of the effort [43], because these intersections are limited in rural studies. This denial happens even though in Latin America, feminism started to be contemplated by presenting a philosophical thesis about this topic as early as 1901 [71] indicating that the issue of inequality was not only given by material conditions but because of how inequality became normal [72].

2.3.2. Work and Implications for the Recognition of Family Farming

To develop the understanding the recognition of family farming, we appeal to the idea of land feminisation [9], because it allows us to realise the stereotyped male recognition of the landscape as a structure of social ordering. Baydar [56] observes that hetero-patriarchal understandings of space based on masculinist premises have largely ignored women and queer subjects who may subvert or alter normative spatial practices. We add the need to recognise the historical depth of these processes.

The described conclusions on historical rural female work intersects the difficulties in recognising actual female work in family farming. One of the reasons was that prejudices such as subalternity and women’s dependence when measuring the country are transferred from the conceptualisation of women to the territory. The Patagonian case allows us to reveal how, even in scenarios where rights were extended, territorial recognition did not change, which still impacts on invisibilities of female work, especially at the level of current family farming.

This is associated to another debate. Researches of economic recognition in Patagonia show that it is affected by conditions of subaltern integration that facilitate an extractive land use [64,73], but that detracts from efforts in general. Political geography considered that extractivism has been possible from the recognition of territories of sacrifice [64], and where family agriculture is ignored.

We will show that Patagonian women bodies have similarities with the idea of the territory of sacrifice; they were needed and, because of that, were doomed to disappear. Struggling Patagonian women of the early 20th century have been recognised as necessary but problematic. The activities they developed were of such relevance that it was impossible not to recognise them. Women and their work were considered indispensable to survive; but, at the same time, they were proof of the failures of the State. If the State had been present correctly, it would have placed women different from the frontier ones, similar to a fragile bourgeois denounced by liberal feminism [14,48,74]. Hooks [75] denunciates white feminism, indicating that in the search for highlighting, its weakness and oppression deny the exercise of inequality in a racist manner or, in the case that concerns us, in a geographic one.

Patagonia, inserted into the country characterised as an area of extensive livestock and exploitation of energy resources, was particularly affected by the devaluation of its population and by an unusually marked demand towards reproduction for the very possibility of subsistence. Because in addition to being rural, Patagonia is cold, and this generates a higher load of resources aimed at heating. It is also arid, with which water and obtaining food is a central issue [76].

Thus, this issue long travelled from the feminist analysis, and it is discovered as a specific form of devaluation, which projects in the shadows not only impacts on women, like sexed bodies that strive, but on the activity ‘smallholder’ developed by them, and by many men. We can think that this inequality is projected in the social set, whose effort is invisible—and then feminised—while the possibility of development needs to be resolved in other spaces, locating the local population in a tutelary dynamism. In studies about the abandonment of rural practices, the main problems of rural practices has been seen in the economic concentration and the crisis of the capitalised familiar production; the great property, the large estate and the concentrated rent; the situation of the peasants and indigenous people; the preservation of the environment and the common natural goods; the living and work conditions of the workers and rural labourers; and the set of the specifically agrarian expressions of the dependent condition of the country [77,78]. In general, gender aspects are not mentioned.

The motivational aim of this article is to provide arguments to reflect on the existing public policy. The research objective is to show how Patagonian female rural work has been hidden over time, and the way aspects of the territory have been denied, which results in the legitimisation of land use that continues to despise family farming. The proposition guiding this work is that an approach that relates the recognition of space to the recognition of women is an original way to challenge development policy to dismantle structural paternalistic order.

The mentioned historical censuses are in the National Institute of Statistics and Censuses: INDEC’s repository, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The secondary sources are presented in the reference section.

3. Results

3.1. The Patagonia, the Later Integration and the Sterility

The Patagonian case has particularities. Argentina is a country with complex territorial integration. Girbal-Blancha [17] indicates that Argentina could be divided into three regions linked with their logics of territorial integrations (Figure 1). (1)The central zone that includes Buenos Aires and the Humid Pampa, base of country organisation since the second half of the 19th century, in grey; (2)The provinces with a political organisation inherited from the Spanish colonial period and confronted against Buenos Aires for territorial control until the second half of the 19th century in white, and (3) The historical National Territories, which were areas outside the Spanish domain, under control of native people, without political rights in the Argentinian state, in black. Figure 1 shows these different aspects.

Until the mid-19th century, regions 5–10 were mentioned as Independent Indigenous America [20]. Argentina, as a country, only influenced some ports on the Atlantic Ocean. In those years, several scientific expeditions toured the area, but one of who impacted the most was Darwin aboard the Beagle. The English naturalist in 1839 presented Patagonia as a ‘cursed land’ condemned to aridity. This idea was taken for the desert imaginary that affected Argentina. As we said, the idea of desert applied more to a government program than to an environmental condition. Basically, 70% of the Argentine lands are arid, but that is not synonymous with a desert. It was the influential thinker Domingo Faustino Sarmiento [79] who developed this idea in 1845, when he wrote: ‘the problem of Argentina is the extension, the desert surrounds it everywhere´. By desert, he referred to the space occupied by his political opponents which he located on the site of barbarism.

The same metaphor was transferred to Patagonia to explain the territory to be conquered. The idea of a cursed infertile land was added, not because of its conditions but its inhabitants. Thus, at the end of the 19th century, the Argentinean State conquered the regions in black by a military campaign called ‘The Desert conquest’. From the State´s perspective, the savage nature of Patagonia could only be controlled and organised by the State. The metaphor with which the Argentinian state is presented, refers to a ‘father’ who protects the region that, released to its nature, only hurts itself [80]. In official debates, the Patagonian land appeared as a rich supply of resources for national development and the making of in-depth studies of the region was seen as crucial for the future of the country [28]. This ‘virginal space’s fertility’ depended on the masculine hand of the producers and the male perspective of the State regarding public policies among other things because as we mentioned, in those years, women in general, had substantial legal obstacles to access recognised work.

In Patagonia, issues around the native people valuation are also crucial to analyse. Many studies recognised strong racist elements in the constitution of Argentinian identity [81]. But, a more attentive reading from a gender perspective shows that the idea of ‘Indian race’ did not involve a human group [82]. In Patagonia, the native people race was presented with a masculine connotation, because the males were the ones who acted and held ethnic belonging. Francisco Moreno [18], one of the leading explorers of Patagonia during the 19th century, describes the lack of native men’s capacity to produce, which contrasts with women´s effort. ‘Indian’ women lost their ethnic character when presented as mothers. The idea of differentiated ethnic recognition, according to race, is not new. Concerning black women in Latin America, Gilliam [83] points out that the difference between male and female slaves is sexualised so that violence over them becomes romance; in consequence, they are denied in the independence processes. In the story about Patagonian women, regardless of ethnicity, the overvaluation of care, which brings us the idea of ‘altruism’ cited by Mellor [1], poetically conceals the difference between male and female. Above all, it hides the effort of women as workers or warriors, denying the very possibility of recognising them as active agents of development or conflict.

We can argue that in the 19th century, women’s work capacity was not recognised because it was not commercial. In 19th century’s sources all trade and production were conceived through male management [18,79]. In official arguments, race was taken to make evident the inadequacy of that native settlement [84]. Settlements and activities are presented as masculine in official descriptions and public plans. This situation has two consequences, one on the territory which is explained as a border of the correct development because there is a centre that contrasts as a role model [17]. On the other hand, the feminine work of native peoples is not seen as incorrect, but neither is it human, allowing to interpret that feminine work operates as another resource of the territory [30,74]. Thus, the initial legal issue was transferred to other orders that increased inequality.

If we review the introduction of scientific studies during the Desert Campaign, we have a clue to understanding the constitution of work recognition in Patagonia. Alberto Ebelot, at the beginning of the zoological study, mentioned:

‘It was necessary to conquer these 15,000 leagues so real and effectively, to cleanse them of Indians so completely, so unquestionably, that the scariest of the scary things of the world, the capital destined to revive the livestock and agriculture enterprises, had itself to pay homage to the evidence, which did not feel suspicion in springing on the footprints of the expeditionary army and to sealing the taking of possession by the civilised man of such dilated regions’ [19], p. XI.

The actor of change was the capital because the purpose of every activity was commerce. After the conquest, the principal activity was sheep breeding, managed by international trading of British founds [20,38]. From this, a territory that was presumed to be capitalist required specific actors who not only devoted themselves to production but also became actors of the trade. Those actors could not be natives nor women.

Since the conquest itself, the female work was hidden, even when they were paid for their duties, the recognition on land that was given to the soldiers was not granted to the four thousand women that accompanied the military campaign in 1879. At the end of the conquest it was denied that they had done work for the State [30], but even that the effort was evaluated as masculine [14]. In the State stories, women are described more as things than people. This has an impact on their efforts not being valued as work, even when there was a salary payment. This becomes so extreme that at the end of the 19th century, when the military counted the stolen things by natives in frontiers farms, they mention horses, work tools and also women and children in the same category [30]. In Argentina until the middle 20th century women did not have political rights, not even full access to their civil rights. Married women had serious limitations for the practice of their individual liberties [85]. It has impact in Patagonia, where the State paid for work which was illegal. In consequence, to hide women’s work meant to hide the State contradictions.

Now, the reason why women could not be seen as economic actors was supported by a national construction that contained Patagonia but was not limited to it. The boundaries between ‘economy’ and ‘culture’ share paths with the differences between the productive and the reproductive, and that is a global issue [86]. Besides, the landowner scale, promoted by the Argentinian State at the end of the 19th century, was consolidated as the base of Patagonian land organisation. In that context, only extensive farms and capitalised producers were recognised [78]. It was not only a strategy of devaluation of women but also of a way of thinking about work and property. Picone [87] analysed crimes in the territory, observing that women were particularly vulnerable to theft and expulsion from their lands. In our study, the information provided by censuses introduces the idea of a vulnerable land. This is based on generating descriptions that economic agencies deny and management capacities in family units and especially in women.

3.2. The Measure of Work of Patagonian Women in Censuses’ History

The measure and the representation of women are feminist issues because the objectivity, in a strong sense, has been a tool of androcentrism [88]. From there, we discuss national censuses, because many spatial senses installed social links that enhance sexism and racism into landscapes using numerical arguments elaborated from censuses data.

3.2.1. Historical Censuses

The censuses have been the most important tools to register what the State accounted as existing in the territory. The first Argentinean censuses were signed by the principle responsible authority. Diego de la Fuente was the author of the first census of 1869 and the second one in 1895. The 1869 census ignored information of Patagonia, a situation that was solved with the 1895 census, made after the desert campaign. Alberto Martínez was in charge of the next census in 1914.

The 1869 census indicates that measuring the materiality of the country is also measuring morality. This data was presented as ’the first inventory of living elements that integrate nations’. The document also indicates that ‘statistic measures revels organic, physical and moral, social and political conditions’ [21]. This census differentiated male and female professions. In male professions, it mentioned ‘male healers and female healers’. It also indicates that Buenos Aires had the main professionals in scientific and liberal professions. It also compared the results with Chile, highlighting that it had thirteen thousand percentage more agriculture, and twenty-three thousand percentage more miners [21], p. XLIV.

The female work was mentioned as ‘seamstresses, washerwomen, weavers, ironers, cigar-makers, tampers, etc.’ [21], p. XLV. The women workers were seen as a population which ‘waits with uncertainty the sustenance of the wage’. The female work, in opposition to the male one, was a mark of weakness. In this case, prostitution was measured, taking as evidence of the extreme female fragility. This data was not taken in subsequent censuses.

As mentioned before, the first census did not take Patagonian data. Cerdá [89] indicates that this census makes explicit a social way to consider working woman, seen as fragile and weak. Cerdá identified the way that these censuses hid primarily rural female work, actually in emblematic activities for women, as was the work in the grape harvest.

The second census in 1895, entitled ‘Census of Wealth and Population’, registered population data as well as biophysical, agricultural, industrial and commercial data and presented, for the first time, results from Patagonia. It repeated the devaluation of female labour by highlighting that the male population is larger than the female population; the author indicated that this was ‘…undoubtedly advantageous taking into account the work of men, more active and better paid, which contributes to a greater degree than that of women to the aggrandisement and prosperity of the nation’ [22], p. XXXVIII.

The 1895 census remarked some measures that started to value women. Thereby, the basic scholar instruction was mentioned as a significant characteristic to look at, divided by sexes, ‘since it is known that in many nations, by giving a great preference to the male sex, the most beautiful part of humanity is deprived of the benefits of instruction, leaving the mothers of future generations in ignorance’ [22], p. LXXXV. So, the recognition of the feminine was not linked to development, but for being the mothers of future generations.

The conceptualisation of women was built around the idea of mother and wife with a nationalistic emphasis. Foreign women were considered more hardworking than Argentinian women: ‘the foreign woman always helps her husband in daily work and thus becomes an element of production and not a heavy burden’ [22], p. CXIII. In opposition, the opinion on local women was defined by their relationship with their husbands: ‘The Argentines, on the other hand, are not so hard-working … they find it less easy to form a family … in which, in general, the woman is only conservative of the goods produced by her husband’s work’ [22], p. CXIII. We can think that, unlike the native women who lost their ethnicity when they were seen as women, the European and North American foreigners did not do it in the same way since their ethnic origin was linked to their different work capacity, even when this work was under-registered.

The census hides the intention behind the number in the pursuit of seeing the existence of everything. Looking at how the data was released, we can recognise that there was a differentiated hierarchy in the assembly of the questions that intersected the racial, sexual and national hierarchy in the survey design.

The occidental over the native, the foreign over the national, men over women, and the urban over the rural were assumptions of the censuses, which displays national land planning policies. Cerdá [89] asks why these first censuses did not consider many women working in viticulture when the grape harvest was an almost exclusively feminine activity. In fact, the 1895 census recognised concern for the large number of women without profession: ’This shows that it has not yet been possible to give a useful and directly remunerative direction to the work of women, who, deprived of their own means of subsistence, must be entrusted to the protection of man’ [22], p. CXLII. Thus, the paternalistic idea of protection resulted in a non-recognition of female labour, which resulted in survey methodologies. Figure 2 shows how the way of measuring changed the number of people recognized as workers. This graph shows how the percentage of working women decreases from the end of the 19th century until the end of the 20th century, when it begins to grow.

Manzano [27] analysed female work from 1869 to 2010 censuses. He observed that the participation of women in the working world was more significant in the first two censuses, and then it decreases. We found percentages of working women similar to those of 1869 only in the 21st century.

The first census observed fifty per cent of women up to fourteen years old as workers, whose professions were female healers and prostitutes. The second census excluded those activities and unified male and female professions in the same table. Accordingly, all population was considered in the same group of employments. However, the census introduces a difference related to territorial integration. The distinction between male and female workers, and also natives or foreign ones, was made only in historical provinces. In National Territories like Patagonia, the list of professions was also put in rows; in the double entry tables that present the data, the types of work intersect with the name of the territory, without any other distinction.

3.2.2. The Invisibility of Rural Patagonian Women

The first census that showed specific data of Patagonian women workers was the one carried out in 1914. The female work detected in this census had new characteristics. The professions identified were similar to the previous census, but the number of women without a profession increased. That is interesting because the census author asked about this change and gave an amazing answer. He indicated ‘Within the organisation of all civilised people, women have their natural basis in the home … men must think about the needs of the family. But the part that those women take, in the economic life of modern societies, is very large and tends to increase every day, instead of decreasing’ [23], p. 252. The difference with this global tendency was explained through the survey methodology. In this census, female work was not recorded by itself; it was omitted in households with income from male labour. This census maintained the non-legal recognition of the work of the married women, which was illegal. The remarkable point is that even though women’s rights and access to work have been improved since 1926, no census impact is seen until 1990.

The low consideration of female work was not only an Argentinean characteristic. Quay Hutchinson [90] gives evidence that in Chile the censuses had limitations around accurate measures of female economic activities. The author observes that the progressive modernisation of the censuses implied substantial changes in the collection and interpretation of data. As a result, women’s economic activities became increasingly invisible as the 19th century progressed.

So, in Patagonia, the female work, from Argentinean or Chilean States, started to be measured at the same time that the hidden structure was built. The lack of political and economic recognition is a decision that has an impact on the lack of census and statistical attention. All this had repercussions on structural policies that denied female labour, especially in the field.

Even when 1914 census introduced the question of male and female work for Patagonian territory, it excluded any female initiative linked to any other male activity. However, if we analyse Figure 3, we can observe that the denial of effort focused on rural rather than urban jobs. Patagonia was centrally a rural area, but the feminine work censuses were mainly linked to the industry, the services and the handicraft.

These numbers shed light on the gender discrimination behind the survey [27,40,74,89,90]. Of the total number of women in the territory, those who work are a maximum of 19 percent in Neuquén. In a rural area with urbanisations of small towns, whose ‘cities’ at most reached a few thousand inhabitants, the women recognised in their work are urban, those gathered in the small towns that began to grow. So, the rural women´s invisible work is much higher in Patagonia, given that the national percentage of women at work is just under 30 per cent.

If we consider the results since the 1869 census that recognised 50 per cent of women as workers, the denial of the effort of women who are pioneers in a region without infrastructure is even more striking. In contrast, working men reach almost 90 per cent. This is not just a recognition of the population; it is a construction of the territory. Patagonia in 1914 was still being integrated into the national territory. The differentiated attention accompanies a speech that says that the only way to produce is in large farms, placing small family producers in a place opposite to that of development. In 1935, Sarobe denounced that with this argument, the police force is used to propitiate land concentration, a problem that reaches to this day [20]. By 1958, President Arturo Frondizi himself, inaugurating mining works in the region, speaks of the ‘virile effort’ that made Patagonia grow.

But as Sarobe already senses, this is not only a lack of recognition of women, but the entire family productive structure is denied in politics, despite being recognised in the poems. To understand the transfer of female work invisibility to family farming, we observe how the problems in recognition of production, and not only producers, adds elements to the comprehension of that phenomena and its linkage.

3.3. The Devaluation of Patagonian Production

In Patagonia, the recognition of local production at a family scale had its own characteristics. We notice an earlier recognition of rural Patagonian production, because, in fact, Patagonia was conceived as a rural production space even without knowing the field. This definition without knowledge brought problems, since many areas were identified as marginal in productive terms, and many others were marginal in the sense of being a national boundary. Moreover, those conceptions of marginality were mixed.

3.3.1. The Thashumance Case

Daus [29], as the main reference of Argentinean geographical studies from the middle of the 20th century, sought to explore the economies of the marginal regions and took the case of Patagonian goat transhumance practices as one of them. In his description, Daus talked about the zones almost uninhabitable for humans, which were actually inhabited. These humans, who inhabit uninhabitable areas, were those who dealt with that economy that Daus presented as not so reasonable, omitting the necessary family structure to make this possible, or referring it only to indicate that it was not economically relevant at the time.

The type of animal and the type of management justified a lack of recognition that still opens paradoxes. Silla [31], for example, recognises in the transhumance of northern Patagonia a porous identity that tends to be something that does not end up being described as Argentine, Chilean, friend, enemy, thief or merchant. It is presented as an enemy of moral patterns and rationality. Therefore, the population dedicated to these activities is perceived under attack by both the Argentine and the Chilean national states. Michel and Núñez [32] observe that the response to many tensions in this type of production seeks alternatives in the international market as an exclusionary strategy. Michel [91] even argues how the answer to the problem of land tenure and lack of water was answered with the management of the ‘Denominación de Origen’ (DO) for the Creole goat, as an argument for sale and export. In other words, it continues to be argued that the exit to a foreign market is the solution to the paradoxes of the region.

The bias of taking the international market as an answer to any productive question appears throughout the Patagonian territory. The chronology of rural production in the Andean region repairs the market and not the local productive dynamics because those dynamics were built with elements and networks of family production. These networks are presented as constituents of the local identity in the area of the Andean region [4,37]. Family agricultural production is affected by invisibility, similarly to the women’s case. The previously cited transhumance practices are usually presented as a male activity, but in pictures, we can see women, kids and goats, presented as objects (and not subjects) of activity [29].

The farming of cherries is another example of a characteristic activity of the southern Andes. The production of jams, liqueurs and pickles are shown as characteristic of the region, and it is one of the most reviewed activities, offered in many touristic guides about Patagonia. Farms with a family organisation, represent in tourist guides the history and the present of their settlers, but if it ignores the operation of any establishment that does not focus on the objective of the sale.

3.3.2. The Cherries Case

The Bolsón valley and the Andean Shire of 42 Parallel are one of the most avowed Patagonian tourist destinations linked to rural activities, around which it is called ‘fine fruit’ (it involves mainly berries and cherries). It is also seen as a region for alternative ways of living against capitalism from the 1960s. Nevertheless, the local references locate the beginnings of the berries’ and cherries’ production in the 1960s. In those years, the trade was established as the main activity objective [36], although the beginnings of these plantations find antecedents in the decade of the 1940s. It is remarkable how visibility depends on the possibility of commercialisation in formal logics, even in a place with migrants discussing capitalism.

Danklmaier, Wienke and Riveros [37], p. 34 deepen the analysis of cherry production. They observed that it is one of the most emblematic of the area, and the quality of local production is superlative regarding the rest of the country. Furthermore, its commercialisation is given from a valuation of the product that has to do with the local identity. However, it is observed that although home productions move a significant volume in the informal market, there are currently no statistical records of this sector. The production for ‘self-consumption’ is also no knowledge, despite the extensive network of exchange between domestic products, which is the foundation of the identity and the sustainability of the production in the area [34,35,36,37,92].

The ‘self-consumption’ production, as the familiar farm, needs to be complexed in all Patagonia. It is a small scale of production, which involve a production site and exchange networks. It is not necessarily subsistence [93], but it is measured as subsistence by the State [74]. Several studies reiterate the relevance of horticultural production as to fruit production in the household order. However, rural household production, which is the basis of family farming, belongs to the constitutive order of productive identity, not to official or mercantile recognition. This situation is demonstrated by the repeated omission of data on this matter. There are no specific statistics that allow knowing the actual dimension of the harvested and processed production. Valtriani [35] recognises something similar in forestry. Trpin, Rodriguez and Brouchoud [48] have the same observations in pear and apple Patagonian productions.

3.3.3. The actual Livestock Censuses Case

The national agricultural and livestock censuses are the central tool of Argentine State to explore what is understood as the agricultural and livestock capacity of the country. Through this global survey, the environment is presented as a natural resource. However, this is only a process at the national level.

We can think that this census reflects a global look at the country, meanwhile the censuses since 1950 are designed in accordance with FAO guidelines. It promotes the use of international standards for concepts, definitions and methodologies from that program. In addition, since 1952 the censuses in Argentina began to be carried out in a decentralised manner, and each provincial or territorial government was directly responsible for the tasks in their respective jurisdictions, although normative centralisation was maintained.

The National Agricultural and Livestock Census should be measured according to regulations contained in the census manual. In that document, it is explained how to fill out the specific census forms [24,25,26]. The farm unit was defined by the census as the production organisation unit, with an area of no less than five hundred square meters, which produces agricultural, livestock or forestry goods that are destined for the market. This point is central to the issue at hand. The censuses only recognised what is traded in markets, especially the export market, a situation that was established in the earliest censuses. It is interesting to note that the current censuses remain without discussion.

The 2008 National Agricultural and Livestock Census introduced a change in the data collection. It explained that production was what goes to market and that self-consumption was not production. The previous censuses indicated that production was just what gone to the market, the 2008 census especially indicates that self-consumption is excluded. The producer units that never allocate surpluses for commercialisation were not counted [25], no matter the size or the social relevance.

This draws attention. In 2008, the debate about family agriculture was extremely relevant in Argentina. Additionally, many countries, such as Colombia, changed their censuses in order to count family agriculture and self-consume as part of the economic structure. The last Argentinean censuses took that debate and resolved not to modify the historical view, even in this context of recognition.

However, this is not the only denial. Even when all regions have productive species, some regions included more survey variables than others. This form of differentiated dating introduces elements that disciplining the recognition of family farming because the most commercialised species are taken as the focus of interest. Nevertheless, those are not precisely produced on family scale. The rhetoric of the value of family agriculture was blurred in the thick production cuts, reflected in Figure 4. We can see the number of variables measured in 2008 and 2019 censuses for each mentioned species in each region.

It is relevant to keep in mind that in National Agricultural and Livestock Censuses each region is studied in specific variables and number of characteristics. Figure 4 shows the number of variables for each production in each one of the five Argentinean regions.

The Argentinean regions involve specific provinces in censuses. PAT, the Patagonian region, includes Neuquén, Río Negro, Chubut, Santa Cruz and Tierra del Fuego. PAM, the central region, contains Buenos Aires, Córdoba, La Pampa, Entre Ríos, San Luis and Santa Fe. The NEA, Argentina North East, includes Corrientes, Chaco, Formosa and Misiones. The NOA, Argentina North West, contains Catamarca, La Rioja, Salta, Tucumán, Jujuy and Santiago del Estero. The CUY region refers to Cuyo, a region formed by Mendoza, San Luis and San Juan. Figure 4 shows that PAT (Patagonia) is the region that contains less productive species, besides not recognised as a specific one, except apple and pears.

In Patagonia, it is clear that the regional particularity is marked by pears and apples, which are distinguished from other regions. In the livestock area that concerns us, we see that the relevance in detail is comparable to any other part of the country. If we take into account that the relevance of pear and apple production has generated inequalities within the region [94], we can think that in Patagonia, having a higher number of variables allows more adequate policies. By centrally relieving export production, it follows that the policies related to this trade are of greater interest than those related to staying and intern produce. In this way, only because of this differentiated relevance, the primary data needed to build policies is delineating the reason for the continuity of invisibility.

From here it is observed that the regions with more productive species are, historically, the areas of greater connectivity and political recognition. Patagonia is out of this situation, and we can see that the central productions are seed fruits and minor ruminants. Concerning rural women’s work and family agriculture, more than census variables, it is interesting what is not surveyed. There are no variables or elements in the censuses that account for native production (plants, animals, cultural practices) outside from the strictly commercialised commodity. For example, when the census asks about breeds in sheep, only those exotic species that belong mostly to large farms such as the Merino and Corriedale breeds are present, but the Criolla or Linca breed of great importance in small producers and rural women are not present [95].

Regarding the goats, no specification of the breed is requested, showing the low productive value as opposed to the sheep or other productions where an exhaustive detail of each variety is requested, in line with the limited state assessment of the Northern Patagonian transhumance linked to this production. This type of activity corresponds to that of the small farmers and family agriculture that for more than half a century has been presented as not belonging to the economy, marking a continuity with 1947 Daus’s view. Currently, there are no varieties of Andean potatoes, Andean maize or creoles varieties in Patagonia, which are present in almost the entire national area. This exclusion ends up leaving out the main part of the family structure production, repeating the unmeasured and unrated over the years.

3.3.4. The Invisibility of Rural Female Work

Female work, directly denied until middle-century, with a recognition that has just begun to be statistically noticed in the 1990s, structured the identification of the production of those who were considered the actors of the economy. These were the export capitalists. The censuses were configured according to their interests and practices. Thus, the approach that what does not go on the market is not production is presented as the main bridge linking the denial of female work to the impossibility of recognising family farming.

This is because the primary production that allows subsistence, which since the exchange consolidates family ties and friendships and promotes barter in disaster processes, is not seen as production nor is it considered in public policies. It remains in the unknown practices characterised as ‘informal’ and ‘domestic’. Words that justify not paying attention to them. But they are the very basis of family farming, they are the first references in the interviews cited in Patagonic studies, and yet they are systematically dismissed. The gender problem, in this way, is linked to that of territorial integration by introducing the need to rethink the ‘gender’ category in this matter.

For years, different ‘minorities’ have reviewed the Euro-American burden of the gender category [52] that does not allow us to understand pre-colonial cultures, to which we would also add those forged on the margins of capitalism. It is interesting because the Patagonian case should not be regarded as part of the otherness of the Western order, but as a frontier of it. The incompleteness that creeps from the notion of a desert does not generate a ‘being outside’, but a ‘being subordinate’. Femenías [96] reviews this distinction in the Latin American scenario referring to the need to think about gender from dynamic intersections, deepening into these dynamisms. Moving away from an essentialist binarism, which in our opinion is one of the leading gender theorists of Latin America, shows the need to think about the transits and moves that the philosopher travels in the breadth of Latin America. The idea of ‘feminisation of the land’ elaborated for the Patagonian case, is an appropriation of the view of Femenías. The feminine, in the case at hand, is not only the body of women. The metaphor of the feminine slides towards other bodies, practices and things, in a line that brings us closer to the problems articulated by ecofeminism [15,57,58]. Not seeing or measuring is, according to Plumwood [58], a decision to recognise only the instrumental links. The criticism does not aim to ignore them but to think what tools we need to see what does not enter into that instrumentality, but that constitutes us.

In the case at hand, family farming, like women, is fundamental for social development in general. However, it drags a history of denials that results in its permanently subaltern location that, when investigated, is recognized with remarkable resilience. Because almost as a challenge to statistics, it continues to exist as one of the most massive rural productions in the world.

3.4. Family Agriculture in Patagonian Land. The Permanence of the Denial of Women Work

The recognition of family agriculture goes through the low recognition of rural female work. In Latin America, this scale started to be analysed in the 1990s decade [44]. Conti [33] indicates that family agriculture adopts changing characters in the Patagonian scenario. This scale considers family farmer to any person who lives in rural areas and works in agriculture together with her/his family. In Argentina, family agriculture is a scale of great recognition in rural studies [45]. In South America it is presented as one of the primary food providers, a guarantee of food sovereignty, and as the basis that supports the lifestyle and cultural practices [40,41,42,43,69]. In fact, studies at the scale of family agriculture are considered as overcoming previous analyses perspectives. At the end of the 1980s, the question about local producers appears in many regional rural investigations. This was clear in the North-West area, linked to peasant conflicts [97].

3.4.1. The Problem of the Market as the Only Option

Even after decades of specific promotion of family farming, the most basic of it is still considered today outside of the production cycle. The paradoxical overvaluation of the market as a source of answers feeds the contradictions of the local economy because productions with more than seventy years of history in the region are unknown. The production is made visible only if it goes on the market, despite its history and social meaning [98].

The self-consumption and family farming are not seen as part of the productive logic, although it has been the focus of the development policies for more than twenty years. It is worth mentioning, as an illustration, the Mohair plan that proposed the genetic improvement of goats in Patagonia [99] about which it was indicated that one of its weaknesses was that it traded in local networks. Thus, not only self-consumption but internal marketing is seen as a problem. The idea of an armed territory from an external demand crosses Patagonia. Local organisations and populations, in general, are considered strengthened from a commercial intervention that excludes reviewing ties of solidarity, customs or ways of understanding the problem of land tenure and lack of water, which is often not supplied by trade. The rural population of Patagonia in many cases is Mapuche, that is, a member of native peoples, so the relationship with the environment, animals and commerce does not necessarily follow the modalities of economic reasoning. Besides, the sale is not separated from the local affections. Conti [33] shows the case of a wool cooperative that stopped selling pastures to a buyer who paid very well because he left production to rot. This, even without getting new buyers.

From here we seek to clarify that the problem is not to consider the relevance of the commercial variable for export, but the fact of having seen it as the only one impacted on the devaluation of self-consumption, local networks, emotional ties and cultural senses of production and trade, in the same line that Plumwood proposes for instrumentalization.

3.4.2. Idealization of Family Farming

It should be noted that the memories carried out in South America and Patagonia drag a gender perspective, since the affective senses of production, when they are relieved, are found more in the reflections of women rather than men. Because in them, there is the reproductive burden that gives social meaning to the set of activities that are carried out, including trade [41,42,43,69,92].

The Patagonian gender studies are still set out to highlight the fluctuating productive-reproductive character of family farming [40,100,101], because the reproductive part of an economic order is not an issue. Paz [102], adds another issue to the discussion; he opposes the category of the peasantry to family farming, indicating that family agriculture, as an organisation, is seen in many academic works as avoiding the history of the struggle for land, which has characterised peasant organisations. In many cases, they are linked to organisational practice with clearly feminine matrices. The author denounces a view that idealised the practices of the central area of the country, denying regional particularities and blocking the development of appropriate interventions. The most critical references, in one way or another, record the problem of subalternity in territorial integration, which results in the devaluation of the scale of agriculture sustained mostly by women.

From this writing, it follows first, the denial of the struggle for land tenure as constitutive of rural practices, but also that the experience of the centre is transferred to marginal spaces. In this transfer, the tools to deny the feminine actions are strengthened while policies are set in place to dismiss the initiatives coming from the domestic order. We add that it also replies to the invisibility of female work, appealing to a romantic perspective still present in studies about family farming. Carrapizo, Speranza and Ganduglia [46] are an example of analysis that assumes that the success of family farming in an individual process without significant conflicts. In their work of some impact on regional policies, they move away from problematizing structural policies, placing female work in the anecdote and success in international trade.

3.4.3. Contributions from the Gender Perspective

The history of recognition and work invisibility challenges us to reflect that feminist economics has sought to review in structures often marked by patriarchy. The story told contains both recognitions and devaluation, which challenges us to follow the path of the feminist economy, which managed to review the structures that the patriarchate has denied [1,2,10,53,54,55]. This discusses harmony as part of family farming, highlighting essentialist views that idealise this structure, as well as the need to study the complexity of the family-scale in rural production. Here we could return to the reflection of Femenías about the need to review the changes in the male-female orders that are established in societies. The constructions of femininities transit diverse materialities in the spaces of subalternity. Gender tensions also dialogue with alliances and empowerments of women who often rely on the social construction of difference. In Patagonia, the reference is often loneliness, the companionship of the man who co-inhabits a region of very low demography and with connectivity in extremely precarious conditions, with cold climates, a couple seen in many cases with such relevance that justifies the denial of domestic violence. Progressively, artisan organisations begin to consider themselves as an alternative to this situation [92]. The steps that follow are not linear, nor do they respond to gender theories. They are possible, at the crossroads of economic, political and family strategies that demand a greater vision regarding the process they carry out.

The visibility claims of rural women’s groups allow us to explore the challenges they face. Among them, disputes over land uses are one of the largest and are not considered mostly concerning the senses of family farming. Raguileo [50] has reviewed some tensions regarding oil holdings and capital investments. But they are not the only tensions. Cobelo [34] indicates that tourism is structural to land use in the Patagonian Andean valleys and that it adversely impacts rural activities. This tension is more interesting because these are initiatives that should not collide with the objectives, but which clash with the structural denial of local work, resolved at the level of family farming.

Tourism structured land organisation in the area [34,87,94,103]. The urban logics are projected throughout tourism in rural areas. Hence, as the tourist brochures say, the farms of the region are attractive because they reflect history. Nevertheless, as we can see, history has veiled both women’s work and family agriculture. Thus, the lack of systematic data on family productions brings us back to the question of the link that hides female work and production on a family scale. The census forms and the questions posed to the population are made with categories based on a model of masculine society that especially hides female rural work by omitting tasks. These tasks do not end up being recognised as part of daily work in the strengthening of a stereotype of the urban working woman, even with the few dates surveyed.

The South American female work that supports family farming is recognised in many studies [41,42,43,69,77,104], but without statistical recognition [27,40,89,90,98]. Now, another census allows us to suspect that the permanence of inequality in recognition of rural women’s work not only has social roots, but it is also linked to environmental interpretations. The work of rural women does not end inside their homes, it extends to their environment. Moreover, in the way we recognise the environment, we find clues to understand the support that still maintain the invisibility, because denying women’s work implies ignoring the elements with which they interact in their tasks [105,106].

3.4.4. Impact of These Processes on Public Policies and Academic Recognition

Finally, it should be noted that this lack is especially structuring of the non-recognition of rural women’s work because the works that reveal family agriculture in Patagonia, such as Muzi [47], take as a basis for their conclusions the censuses that, paradoxically, omit this scale deliberately. In these institutional works, phrases like the following can be read, as part of the introduction, ‘In this work, information constructed with emphasis on cartographic aspects is made available to the reader based on the data provided by the National Population Census, Homes and Housing 2001 and the National Agricultural Census of 2002′ [47], p. 10.

In the reflections that are the basis of public policies, there are no statements related to what is observed in national censuses, they are just shadows, while there are not surveys tools designed to see what is intended. As a result of this denial, the graphs that seek to represent family farming are progressively cutting what is registered as family farming in relation to a small, precarious, decapitalised and informal work, eclipsing the potential that the bibliography that they take like antecedent, demands to make visible. From this description, the echoes of the characterisation of women’s work in 1869 return, as a sign of vulnerability rather than capacity. The gender vision on agriculture, present in numerous manuals with concrete tools to account for these processes [45,46,100,101,104], ends absent in the final presentation of the world of rural agriculture in Patagonia. As we mentioned, Núñez [9] has linked this process to the feminisation of the land, since the different development plans that are deployed as of these years, even to the present day, are supported by metaphors that associate the type of woman territory that justifies the type of exploitation. Each activity and recognised geography refer to a different woman so that the development process has an impact on the social order. In rural Patagonia, the woman’s representation of the land refers to that of the prostitute, the Indian or the slave, with a penetrable body, argument not only of the denial of feminine work but also of the destructive and contaminating environmental intervention. Against this vision, local populations survive supported by their family and emotional ties. From there, they establish cooperatives and communities, which take the objective of commercialization and articulate it to their particularities [40]. This survival is configured from care brands that refer to female work. The denial of this work impacts the denial of the whole set of associated practices.

The plots investigated, impact on the possibility of linking the visibility of rural female work in Patagonia, as opposed to the possibility of establishing new development policies from the demand for promoting family farming. Basically, the first reference is the need to recognise exchange dynamics alternative to international trade. This does not mean denying or demonising the gaze of higher institutional weight in the region, but putting it in dialogue with the practices that made institutionalisation possible as long as they configured the subsistence pattern.

The potential of this plot, linked to family farming and mostly female work, is what stands out when recognising the Patagonic productive plot in gender. Nevertheless, not only stands out for its dimension but the social sense of production. The Patagonian region has been investigated thinking that the human is reduced to extensive livestock, the same recognised by censuses, plans and that refers to female labour.

One of the areas of study where this is clearer are soil studies [107,108], Del Valle, argues ‘Land degradation is both a form of ecosystem self-regulation and a cause of ecosystem fragmentation. The ecological equilibrium of Patagonia is highly susceptible to man’s impact and the present methods of natural rangeland management, based on an extreme overuse in space and time. Overgrazing and woodcutting result in a gradual degradation of vegetation, which causes a reduction of the total cover and of the number of plants, the disappearance of valuable fodder species, the invasion of undesirable species, and finally the decrease of available forage. The effects of overuse of this resource are also evident in soil erosion. The consequences of the anthropic impact are also aggravated by drought phases’ [107], p. 118.

The anthropic impact is seen as masculine even in 2019 texts, which ignore other non-extractive uses. This is observed even in studies on sustainable developments that do not mention women [109]. Sustainability is run from the limits established for the activity. Sustainability is, in fact, linked to the international price of wool as an excluding factor. Against this, the analysis carried out calls attention to the multi-activity to think about the region, rethink land uses and even to establish suggestions for technical intervention.

The point we reached, in the light of the challenges of gender theory in dialogue with the results presented, is that we must modify even the knowledge matrix. There are no references to sustainable land uses, against the incipient mentions of pastoral women who find in the care and use of native plants the basis for claiming the visibility of their history and their practices [110].

4. Discussion

As we recognize in the first part of the results, in the origins of the Patagonian order, we find that, as economic capital has a greater recognition to the population, the most reasonable tenure is presented as large estate and work as masculine. As a consequence, women have more fixed and hidden obligations, because much of the effort they need for the same subsistence is opposed to the productive and commercial rationality.

The second section of results allows us to indicate that the censuses that are configuring the idea of female work allow to see female work as urban, perhaps as part of the inequality between rural and urban orders that are also cited as a reference for the development of census indicators. The partial recognition of the woman’s work of the 1895 census and the direct denial of the 1914 census show the basis of invisibility. Rural female work is categorised as non-work.

The results of the third and fourth section allow us to argue that the indicators and variables of the censuses, as part of the State discourse, linked to the precepts of international, reassert logics of appropriation and extractive capitalist construction, updating racial biases, sexist and xenophobes of space.

Thus, what is ‘seen’ is the dynamism of the market. Among people, the one ‘seen’ is the capitalised man, who is the owner of land and productive resources. From here, success is the trade (ideally international) which is presented as the answer to the rural development and sustainable development. Self-consumption is not present, nor are networks of cooperation and solidarity. There is not the territory of the feminine, despite many decades of reclamation and declamation to its valuation.

The third section of the results reinforces this. Production that does not target trade is omitted even in local studies. This is reinforced in the way that overall production is measured. The invisibility of what does not go on the market has a marked depth. This comes together in the fourth section, where family farming is shown in a paradox. Despite having a high symbolic recognition, it faces a recognition structure that denies the bases of its structure as part of the productive system.

Above all, we recognise the practices of women and men, linked to the construction of everyday life, as the basis of the meaning of local rural production. This production and these people print with their practices, specific senses to their environments which discuss the exit to the market as a solution and which demand new ways of considering what exists. From the speeches of the family farmers, the land is still a woman, but it is presented as a peasant, a fighter and demanding to be seen for what she decides, and not for what they say it is. She is herself plus her environment and her social relationships, she is not an individual, she is a network of relationships.

This needs a look anchored in territorial and ethnic particularity. Strong women are not occidental models; it does not matter if they belong to European migration; they are outsiders in their own culture. This has been endorsed by some lines of feminism.

We reflect on how the land organisation justified the rural production that eclipsed female work. So, the discussion about women rural work needs to discuss land organisation, rural production, history and censuses. This work sought to expose the most problematic issues about that in later integrated territories.

5. Conclusions

The results presented seek to show the historical weight of the invisibility of rural female work. They also endeavour to expose the plot of variables where invisibility is built, where the lack of recognition of women’s work is associated with the shortage of recognition of characteristics of the territory. From this point, the potential impact on regional development plans implies the set of new approaches. Census indicators are an actual problem that could be solved by the design of new ones. Nevertheless, the problem of recognition is much more profound. Relationships have been established from plots that have denied this work from a vision of the territory that only recognises export activities. In this way, there is a plot between territory and settlement that is questioned. The cited soil studies show how the biased recognition of activities mediates the physical characterisation of the space itself.

Somehow, we go back to the beginning of the conclusions. What does it mean to recognise? What is recognised when survey tools deny existence? The first point is that in order to not recognise something so relevant, we have to slide the recognitions and set up an association of unequal recognition forms of many elements. In this case, it is linked to orders that support the subalternity of both the population and the territory.

Among the results that allow us to think about alternatives is the fact that rural women in Patagonia begin to be more visible from their organization and not so much from their individuality. Perhaps this organising and reclaiming strategy of the women of the steppe allows us to think of alternatives for the general recognition of rural women’s work and family farming.

All this leads us to think that recognition denies. To recognise what work looks like meant to deny women. The consequences of this ‘decision not to see’ were not only reflected in the social order but also the territorial one. In discrimination, space is ordered, which brings us to a very delicate point if we think about recognition. Seeing outside that order is messy. Thus, integrating family farming in the terms that are intended, as if it were merely something that was missing, ignores the enormous constitutive contribution present that operates from not seeing those dimensions. The problem that links female rural work with family farming is that we do not need to add something, but look from a different perspective. This is certainly one of the challenges of feminism, we mean to think that new orders are possible. To relocate, which recognised marginal territories such as the Patagonian, allow us to think about future comparisons of a broader framework.