Landscape of Migration

Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present

Ben Nobbs-Thiessen

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781469656106
  9781469656090
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469656113
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Biological Sciences

In the wake of a 1952 revolution, leaders of Bolivia’s National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) embarked on a program of internal colonization known as the “March to the East.” In an impoverished country dependent on highland mining, the MNR sought to convert the nation’s vast “undeveloped” Amazonian frontier into farmland, hoping to achieve food security, territorial integrity, and demographic balance. To do so, they encouraged hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Bolivians to relocate from the “overcrowded” Andes to the tropical lowlands, but also welcomed surprising transnational migrant streams, including horse-and-buggy Mennonites from Mexico and displaced Okinawans from across the Pacific.

Ben Nobbs-Thiessen details the multifaceted results of these migrations on the environment of the South American interior. As he reveals, one of the “migrants” with the greatest impact was the soybean, which Bolivia embraced as a profitable cash crop while eschewing earlier goals of food security, creating a new model for extractive export agriculture. Half a century of colonization would transform the small regional capital of Santa Cruz de la Sierra into Bolivia’s largest city, and the diverging stories of Andean, Mennonite, and Okinawan migrants complicate our understandings of tradition, modernity, foreignness, and belonging in the heart of a rising agro-industrial empire.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Graphs, Illustrations, and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations in the Text
• Introduction: The Meanings of Mobility in Bolivia’s March to the East
• Chapter One: Moving Pictures: Narrative, Aesthetic, and Bolivia’s Frontier Imaginary
• Chapter Two: Military Bases and Rubber Tires: Okinawans and Mennonites at the Margins of Nation, Revolution, and Empire, 1952–1968
• Chapter Three: Abandonment Issues: Speaking to the State from the Andes and Amazonia, 1952–1968
• Chapter Four: To Minister or Administer: Faith and Frontier Development in Revolutionary and Authoritarian Bolivia, 1952–1982
• Chapter Five: A Sort of Backwoods Guerrilla Warfare: Mexican Mennonites and the South American Soy Boom, 1967–Present
• Conclusion: Past and Present in the Bolivian Lowlands
• Epilogue: From Abandonment to Autonomy
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index