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Paper short abstract

Campesino settlers in La Chiquitanía, Bolivia both rejoice and despair as machines, agrochemicals, fires, pests, and commodities proliferate in this agricultural frontier. Lamenting how preferable and possible futures collapse, they experiment to redraw horizons for rural life within agroindustry.

Paper long abstract

The Agricultural Frontier of Bolivia has for decades evoked imaginaries of territorial and demographic integration and economic development for politicians promoting Mestizo and Amerindian settlement to plough forest and savannah lands. While deforestation, land enclosure, and vertical integration saturated the frontier around central Santa Cruz, fostering peasant displacement, Northern La Chiquitanía was largely discarded by state planners due to a perceived lack of fertile soils and valuable hardwoods. Aided by populist land redistribution to relocate migrant and indigenous communities pressed by agroindustry, this ‘depressed zone’ has since the 2000s become a nexus for campesino settlements. These have become both a regional vector for smallholder-led agricultural expansion and scapegoats for wildfire crises and land tenure conflicts.

Based on fieldwork with Chiquitano and Quechua-speaking settlers in this newly integrated area within the Agricultural Frontier, I depict how settlers shift between rejoicing and despairing as machines, agrochemicals, and consumer commodities, and fires, pests, and deforestation proliferate, and they find themselves increasingly entangled yet at odds with agro-industrial elites. As non-intentional effects of industrialisation and urbanisation spill across communities, fields, and forests, campesinos lament how distinctions between preferable and simply possible futures collapse. In responding with agro-industrial experimentation, they redraw horizons for what counts as valuable for family, community, and the nation-state. These socio-ecological transformations not only foment new subaltern experiences of citizenship recognition through commodity market participation within campesino communities in La Chiquitanía but also foreclose other futures, uprooting plants and people and shackling communities to agro-industrial enterprise and uneven commodity circulation.