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Paper short abstract:

This paper centers on relationships of people and animals to show the entanglement of capitalist exploitation and settler colonialism in transforming Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation, based on a forthcoming book, will offer a synthesis of how the exploitation of animals —terrestrial and marine, domesticated and wild, living and dead— transformed Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego from Indigenous-controlled places into national territories of Argentina and Chile that were economically integrated into global markets. Drawing on evidence from archives and digital repositories, this presentation tracks the circulation of furs and fibers revealing how the power of fashion stretched far beyond Europe’s houses of haute couture and drove social and environmental changes in a part of the world often perceived to be an isolated, “frontier.” By exposing seams in national territories and capitalist regimes knit together by force, the intent is to offer perspectives and analysis vital for understanding contemporary conflicts over mass consumption, the conservation of biodiversity, and struggles for environmental justice in Patagonia and beyond.

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This article considers the territorial struggles along the Venezuela-Guyana border (at times called the Essequibo territory) during the 19th century, comparing the visions of land and sovereignty among multiple colonial and national regimes and Native tribes at the height of the gold rush.

Paper long abstract:

The borderlands of the Venezuela-Guyana border form a crucial conjuncture that sheds light on two key macro historical developments of the 19th century: the development of export economies in Latin America driven by foreign capital and the exclusionary projects of modernization and nation-building. In Venezuela, both of these projects were built on a legitimization of natural resource exploitation through a justification based on inherited colonial borders and Native recognition of sovereignty. This article uses the papers of the 1899 arbitration trial alongside local 19th century Venezuelan newspapers, photography, and maps to consider the multiple claims advanced for the Essequibo territory by Venezuela, Great Britain, and local Native people to show the impact this borderland had on the development of capitalist resource exploitation and notions of national territorial unification in Venezuela. The multi-sided colonial contest for this territory exploited the land and rivers of the Essequibo for gold and relied on the labor and recognition of indigenous people, even as they tried to obliterate Native claims to the land. Claiming the Essequibo was part of a broader project of stabilizing and modernizing the nation in its transition out of a major civil war. The gold of the Essequibo formed the great majority of Venezuela’s exports during the period and would grant Venezuela the economic and political power to enter into 19th century liberal statehood. Through these discourses of ownership and territorial sovereignty handed down through colonial borders, Venezuela built the Essequibo region as legitimately exploitable.

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This paper examines the relationship between large-scale banana cultivation, tourism, and environmental governance in twentieth-century Guatemala. Capitalist activities shaped environmental management and triggered debates about the role of region and landscape in national geographies.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the relationship between two capitalist industries in the construction of Guatemalan national geographies in the first half of the twentieth century: large-scale banana cultivation, and tourism. Both these industries managed and transformed environments in profound, though sometimes contradictory, ways. The United Fruit Company (UFCO) turned large swathes of Guatemala’s eastern lowlands into banana monocultures, while an emerging tourist industry sought to preserve archaeological sites in the midst of “picturesque jungle” territory. In the Guatemalan lowlands, UFCO was from 1910 onwards emblematic of both these industries, since the country’s most visited Maya archaeological site at the time, Quiriguá, was located on UFCO land and the Company was central to developing it as a tourist site.

However, the management of archaeological sites and tourist itineraries was increasingly also shaped by local rather than foreign historical actors. Archaeologists, the national museum, and the tourism club brought the political and environmental management of archaeological sites into sharper focus. In the era of Jorge Ubico’s UFCO-friendly dictatorship, few elites openly questioned foreign political and economic influence on the country. Nevertheless, specific concern about tourism and the significance of archaeological monuments for the nation led Guatemala City elites to debate the ability of the state to control these lowland regions both politically and environmentally. I contrast Guatemalan and North American archival material to argue that environmental factors and the tourist industry helped to drive a claim for territories previously dominated by United Fruit to become part of the Guatemalan national imaginary.

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This paper places the notion of environmental agency in historical perspective, focusing on the case of Juátarhu, Mexico, an indigenous region whose ecological control shifted from local producers to industrial loggers in the late nineteenth century.

Paper long abstract:

Reaching back to ancient Mesoamerica, yet zooming in to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (c. 1820-1920), this paper tells the story of Juátarhu, one of the oldest continuously inhabited regions of what is now central western Mexico. By tracing the history of Juátarhu's peoples (the Purépecha) and landscape, the paper places the notion of environmental agency in historical perspective. For all the talk of "human activity" as the driving force behind the Anthropocene, the truth is that over the past two centuries most humans have gradually lost any significant influence over the local environments they inhabit.

In contrast, as the case of Juátarhu illustrates, until the late nineteenth century, before the second revolution gained momentum, indigenous direct producers were able to build and manage their own landscapes. The Purépechas held decisive sway over land tenure and land use patterns, food production and forest management, labor regimes and market relations. But then, beginning in the late 1860s, the combined expansion of the liberal state and commercial and industrial capitalism began to upend Juátarhu’s longstanding socioeconomic and ecological makeup, including most notably the region’s abundant communal forests.

This paper explores the many ways in which the Purépecha met the challenge and even took advantage of the new circumstances, but also the ways in which industrial operations and state consolidation stripped many indigenous producers of their environmental agency, that is, their ability to have a say in the landscapes they once built and governed.

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The present paper analyzes how bioprospecting racially displaced peoples and used local embodied knowledge of tropical lands to enforce Brazilian imperial state-building and the making of new colonial relations within peripheral regions, like the Amazonian rainforest, in the 19th century.

Paper long abstract:

In the nineteenth century, Brazil emerged as a tropical sovereign monarchy that lasted for almost a century. Refusing to relinquish its colonial history and imperial governance, Brazilian authorities grounded their attempts to consolidate a nascent state on the premise of territorial unity. However, independence raised conflicting visions of labor, territory, and nationhood across the empire. For the northern provinces, like Grão-Pará in the Amazon basin, 1822 did not mark the birth of a nation. Rather, it signaled a troubled renegotiation between the old metropole, Lisbon, and the new one, Rio de Janeiro. Returning to colonial practices of border surveillance, agrarian production, and extractivist expeditions, the Brazilian empire reinforced the subordination of the Amazon through a racialized discourse on both its inhabitants and environment. By treating independence as an imperial transition and a colonial continuity to Afro-Indigenous peoples in the Amazon rainforest, I argue that Brazil transformed itself from a Portuguese colony to an independent empire with its own peripheral territories to be colonized. Now, colonization meaning the in insertion of a whole environment and its natural resources to be prospected, speculated, and commodified in a international capitalist market. Beyond the understanding of imperial continuity, the paper contextualizes how bioprospecting racially displaced peoples and used local embodied knowledge of tropical lands to enforced extractivist and agricultural productivity.

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Paper short abstract:

The alpaca wool industry has historically relied on sustaining a vision of pristine, untouched productive landscape that have helped sustain the social abandonment of highland communities while opening up the area to other forms of capitalist exploitation away from prying eyes.

Paper long abstract:

Alongside gold and mercury, alpaca wool emerged as a key Peruvian export since the colonial era. This commodity, long narrated and valued as “uniquely Peruvian,” saw a new level of growth after 1836 when a British industrialist deciphered how to industrialize the production of alpaca thread. Despite the industrialization of thread and the later development of capitalist agrobusiness, the bulk of alpaca wool production has remained de-industrialized, carried out by indigenous herders and weavers living in the Peruvian highlands. Because of its associations with Andean indigeneity, this industry has been simultaneously a celebrated and contested national industry. Taking a historical and ethnographic approach, I illustrate how shifting national attitudes towards Peru’s Andean indigenous populations have influenced how alpaca wool is valued. This valuation oscillates between erasing its indigenous connections while emphasizing alpacas living in an untouched, pristine natural environment, or celebrating indigeneity and its connections to a natural landscape that has remained pristine since pre-Hispanic times. Regardless of which perspective is in vogue at a certain moment in time, this industry relies on sustaining a vision of the Andean highlands and those who inhabit it (humans and nonhumans) as ahistorical and unimpacted by human action. This view of the highland landscape, central to the alpaca wool trade, has worked to either perpetuate the social relegation and abandonment of the highlands and those who inhabit them—making them ripe for other forms of capitalist exploitation like mining—or, more recently, obscuring the environmental climate change is having all beings inhabiting the highlands.

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Paper short abstract:

This research investigates mining corporations and hydroelectric dam impacts in late 20th century Central America. Understanding the origins and development of extractivist industries benefits scholars seeking to unravel current issues of “environmental migrants“ and pan-indigenous activism.

Paper long abstract:

After achieving independence from Spain, then separating from Mexico in the first quarter of the 19th century, Central America was slow to modernize and even slower to industrialize in what has been termed a “long middle period”. By the early 20th century, the nations of middle America began to adopt the modern technology of hydroelectric power with the purpose of producing electricity. While, initially, the construction of dams benefited local communities and were relatively small in size and output, by the late 20th century multiple national governments actively encouraged foreign investment and welcomed international mining corporations into rural zones that were often remote. These mining corporations required enormous electrical output previously non-existent in the areas determined to contain valuable mineral resources and, thus, large scale dam construction projects ensued, ostensibly in lands populated primarily by Mayan and Ladino subsistence farmers.

This research investigates the environmental impacts of those dam constructions, the aftermath of local population relocation, planned flooding of indigenous lands, and, ultimately, the rise of violence by national governments against their own people and subsequent pan-indigenous activism in response. While there are commonalities across the hemisphere, the local actors and environmental degradation that developed in the region have yet to receive sufficient scholarly attention. A fuller understanding of the impact from the construction of hydroelectric dams and creation of internationally-owned extractivist industries in Central America beginning in the 1980s will benefit interdisciplinary scholars, non-profit aid groups, and NGOs in unraveling 21st-century issues of “environmental migrants“ emigrating from the region.

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This paper discusses the rise of two oil city-regions in the Amazonian rainforest: Nova Olinda do Norte (Brazil), and Lago Agrio (Ecuador). Symbols of national development expectations, I evaluate how perceptions of nature and native ecologies by technicians shaped national imaginaries and policies.

Paper long abstract:

After World War II, a plan to establish an international research institute for the Amazonian rainforest was launched at UNESCO. The early dismissal of the project, largely based on sovereignty concerns, paved the way for national operations inspired by a centralized, dirigiste developmental approach towards the forest.

This moment coincided with the discovery of large deposits of oil by the Brazilian state in the shores of the Madeira river in 1955. Urban infrastructure was built in a remote village in the middle of the jungle to support oil extraction for what was at the time deemed as the most important project of the recently created national Brazilian oil company Petrobrás. Ten years later, the project was discontinued as it lacked commercial viability.

Roughly at the same time Nova Olinda's hopes had been lost, the Texaco-Gulf consortium found large oil reserves in the Oriente region of Ecuador. To capture the rents of the nascent industry, Ecuador created its own national company, and alongside oil multinationals fostered the occupation and colonization of the rainforest, from where it obtains its most valuable export commodity.

My paper explores the encounters between policies of territorialization - based on detailed surveying, spatial operationalization, and territorial planning - and local ecologies. By comparing how two Amazonian nations have framed and dealt with the biome and some of its indigenous peoples during crucial moments of national development, I aim at better understanding how dynamics of cheap nature and cheap labor have been (re)produced in Amazonian commodity frontiers.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the ecological impacts of Louis Agassiz's polygenic ideas in the colonization of the Amazon River Basin, which opened to international navigation soon after his visit and approximation to Emperor D. Pedro II during an expedition sponsored by Harvard and banker Nathaniel Thayer.

Paper long abstract:

The Thayer Expedition was an ambitious year-and-a-half-long scientific mission organized by Harvard that collected more than eighty thousand objects from Brazil to the recently founded Museum of Comparative Zoology (Cambridge, MA). Led by the naturalist and scientific racist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873,) the voyage combined vital agendas for the scientist's legacy and the U.S. economic ties with Brazil.

Through analyzing the Amazon River's Ichthyological distribution, Agassiz aimed to prove Charles Darwin's recent revolutionary thesis on the origin of species wrong, forging evidence in favor of polygenism, a racist theory especially functional in the Southern United States. Soon after the expedition, which took place amid the Civil War, Agassiz's new friend, Brazilian Emperor D. Pedro II, sanctioned a law authorizing the opening of the Amazon River Basin to international steamships, changing the course of the rainforest's history. Is it possible to measure the impact of Agassiz's ideas on the commodification of the Amazon River basin? How did his ideas on race and the origins of life affect the way the forest and its peoples were attacked by ecocide projects?

This paper will draw connections between Agassiz's writing of nature and the colonization of the Amazon River basin, reading his scientific production in its ontological implications to think about the political economy of nature that would unfold in the region. The assemblage (Tsing, 2019) of political actors, scientific methods, and cosmogonies mobilized by his power-knowledge will be discussed in both human and non-human impacts left by his voyage.

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Paper short abstract:

This paper uses community records to examine agrarian landscapes and Andean geographies in mid-twentieth century Peru. These records reveal how capitalism perpetuated a colonial system of land tenure in which Indigenous communities lived on the fringes of haciendas and, in turn, society in general.

Paper long abstract:

In colonial Peru, Spanish authorities established a system of haciendas in which large land holders of Spanish descent managed agricultural production in fertile valleys, while Indigenous communities often lived on the fringes of these estates and provided labor for the landowners. This system of land tenure persisted until the early 1970s when Peru’s military government carried out a radical land reform program.

Using documents from community record books, this paper will examine agrarian landscapes and geographies in four regions of the Peruvian Andes—Junín, Arequipa, Puno, and Ancash—during the two and a half decades leading up to the agrarian reform. The available documents often deal with conflicts over land between communities and haciendas, as well as community petitions for official recognition and protection from the Ministry of Agriculture. Some records include roughly-drawn maps of haciendas and the surrounding communities. These documents help reveal the way colonialism pushed Indigenous communities to the poorest lands and reduced their social mobility by giving hacienda families a virtual monopoly over agricultural technology and educational opportunities.

In conflicts over land, both hacienda owners and community leaders often invoked their rights by stating that they had lived on the land “from time immemorial.” Even though community claims were clearly more legitimate, government officials often sided with hacienda owners. This paper will explore the ways capitalism, including officials' interest in production, helped perpetuate the colonial system of land tenure and social hierarchy, and it will highlight the voices of community members in their fight against these colonial legacies.