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Paper Short Abstract:

I will present my ongoing research on Campesino settlers land tenure engagements in Chiquitanía, as anthropogenic environmental transformations reconfigure livelihoods, knowledges, and the ‘motley’ territorial networks in this agrarian extractive frontier.

Paper Abstract:

The agricultural transformation of the dry-forests of Chiquitanía in the Bolivian lowlands has multi-scalar consequences for ecologies, livelihoods, and rural communities. In the last decade, land fires, commonplace in refashioning and reinvigorating ecologies, have been appropriated, scaled, and run wild, spurring eco-political crises. Campesinos are ‘hybrid’ settlers in this landscape, in frictional relations with extractive processes and local indigenous territorial struggles. Portrayed by agroindustrial elites as Andean colonizers uncaringly spurring fires, these internal settlers stem from impoverished communities across high- and lowlands. They represent a de-territorialized, pluri-national, and market-oriented indigeneity challenging essentialist frameworks for understanding (de)colonization, only uncomfortably aligned with MaS government policies (Fabricant 2012).

Rather than being just destructive ‘aliens’, ‘hybrid’ smallholder settlers across Latin America cultivate ecological ethics through land tenures (Campos 2008). In Bolivia, state exemptions to settler deforestation pave the way for Campesinos to hold land, affording subsistence and economic participative citizenship, but cycles of debt and ecological degradation. and obtuse land titling push them toward maximizing short-term profit. I present my ongoing research on Campesino settlers land tenure engagements in Chiquitanía, as anthropogenic environmental transformations reconfigure livelihoods, knowledges, and the horizons for ‘motley’ territorial networks. I portray how biophysical processes such as anthropogenic (wild)fires gather disparate territorial worlds, shaping territorial spill-overs, contestations, and collaborations. Investigating Campesino territorial entanglements with extractive landscape transformation, I explore how territorialities, situated in livelihoods, ecological knowledges and practices as matters of care (Bellacasa 2017), intersect with regionalist, extractivist, and indigenous politics in the (re)fashioning of (de)colonial territorial projects in Chiquitanía.