Since the early-twentieth-century settlement of the region of Aisén, in southern Chile, residents of the area have had easier access to Argentina than to Chile's metropolitan central region. The ease of cross-border contact during the region's early history led to a transnational flow of ideas, currencies, and cultural practices. As locals adopted ranching methods, clothing items, and cultural practices from across the border, Aisén took on a distinctively Argentine look and sound. Today Aiseninos (residents of Aisén) claim Argentine popular music from the early twentieth century as their own, casting it as local traditional music. This dissertation proposes the idea of the "post-frontier" as a means of explaining this apparent contradiction. The post-frontier explains a situation in which people use cultural practices from a neighboring nation-state not as a means of forging connections with that nation-state or its citizens, but rather as a way of commemorating a local "frontier" past in which such connections existed. The concept of the post-frontier brings a temporal element to the study of transnational connections and allows for a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which people use and define practices that cross national boundaries based on ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation interrogates the ways Aiseninos use an idealized regional past and traditionalist discourse to cast this Argentine-influenced music as a locally rooted practice. In turn, it examines the ways in which people use this music to construct regional identifications and narratives of heritage, while considering how these narratives contest a homogenizing Chilean cultural nationalism. Each chapter pursues a distinct aspect or manifestation of this process of tradition formation, covering Aiseninos' engagement with the past, collective memory, aesthetic preferences, and nationalist sentiments. The concept of the post-frontier informs this analysis throughout and works toward a critique of current work on transnational connections.
