Mechanic Fossils: Alterity, Contested Memories and the Construction of Fluvial Heritage in the Rubber Boom Steamships (Bolivian Amazonia)

DIEGO VILLAR

Poznan

Congreso; 'Memory, Archeology, Identity: The Construction of Identity on the Antiquities' (Tanja Itgenshorst & Sebastian Brather, orgs.), 23rd International Congress of the Historical Sciences, Poznań, Polonia; 2022

International Committee of Historical Sciences

The cities of Northern Bolivia are full of abandoned steamships or steamboat vestiges from the so called 'Rubber Era' (1870-1920), and some of these have been “patrimonialised” as national monuments or even commodified as touristic handcrafts. At the height of the rubber boom, Amazonia became a Promethean scenario: rubber produced fortunes in the middle of the jungle and the rubber extracting firms launched a naval race that radically transformed local navigation. Therefore, technophile discourse presented the rubber steamer as a Copernican revolution: it freed transport from the constraints of the geography, it allowed social progress and economic development, it reinforced national sovereignty, and it helped to overcome interethnic conflict. However, an historical anthropology reveals what actually happened with the vessels itself without diluting them as vectors of political economy, it allows to reconstruct the imaginaries of the steamboat itself and its people (rubber tappers, captains, pilots, mechanics, passengers, indigenous peoples), and in turn a whole fluvial experience that encapsulated novel perceptions of the alterity of the local populations, the river and the Amazonian jungle. The reconstruction of this relational landscape shows that these 'mechanic fossils' relate to contested memories by indigenous and creole peoples that constitute several layers of collective identities.