Labor, Resistance, and Politics: Indigenous Agency in the Bolivian Rubber Boom

LORENA CÓRDOBA; ANNA GUITERAS MOMBIOLA

The Lowland South American World

Routledge

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2025; p. 52 - 68

The rubber boom reshaped the Bolivian Amazon on multiple levels: geographically (by drawing borders that have been immovable ever since), socially (with the rise and positioning of various local actors and national and European immigration), economically (by installing the machinery of rubber extractivism), and politically (with jurisdictional changes, the implementation of citizenship rights, and new legislation). This paper offers an ethnohistorical analysis of the various forms in which the indigenous populations of the Llanos de Mojos and northern Amazonia regions interacted with the colonizing front (rubber tappers, officials, businessmen, travelers, explorers, missionaries), as well as the heterogeneous range of adaptations, practices, and strategies that they implemented to insert themselves in the national society or interact with it. Keywords: Bolivian Amazon – Indigenous peoples – Rubber boom – Labor – Citizenship DOI: 10.4324/9781003005124-4