Fort Bella Esperanza: A Little-Known Story of Toba Peoples and Soldiers in the Bolivian Chaco, 1863–1867

This article analyses settler encroachment on Indigenous peoples’ lands in the Chaco region of Eastern Bolivia. It is an understudied story, rarely interpreted from a perspective inspired by settler colonial studies. My analysis explores policies promoted by the emerging Bolivian state to address its ‘Toba problem’ along the Pilcomayo River, where for three centuries hunter-gatherers ignored the colonial authority and continually defied the power of the new nation. The story is situated in the mid-to-late nineteenth century when administrators of the Republic distributed small tracts of land along the river with the intention of expanding ranching and consolidating the country’s international border. My analysis focuses on the contentious interactions between Toba and ranchers in a marginal area of Bolivia. Describing ‘settling’ from a non-Anglophone perspective, this approach expands the framework of settler colonial theory, offering innovative ways to read Indigenous dispossession and extermination in the Bolivian Chaco.

Collapse of the Pilcomayo River

Bermejo River Basin is located in the Chaco Plains in northern Argentina. The river has an extension of 1450 km and the basin area covers 16048 km2, comprising the north of Salta and the entire Formosa and Chaco provinces. Its principal tributary is San Francisco River which brings mountain waters. Two different sections can be detected in Bermejo River: the upper and the middle-low Bermejo. Vegetation is wooded with more plains to the east and with the presence of isolated yungas. The worst areas are historically inhabited by indigenous communities with extensive farming practice. Historical data show that the region has been the scene of frequent hydro-meteorological disasters (floods and droughts) and the impacts of these events have had a strong impact on the welfare of the population, productive activities and infrastructure. There is ample evidence that climate change impacts are already being observed today and that policies that seek the best ways to meet them are essential for the development and welfare of the community. The Chaco region is one of the regions that, as a result of the change in land use, presents “hotspot "or critical areas in recent times (from 1980). They are the result of the implementation of deforestation as a technology for the advancement of agriculture and intensive farming. In this region the climate is subtropical with a mean annual rainfall cycle showing a minimum in winter, which is more pronounced in the west, with dry conditions prevailing from May to September. The Andes chain lies along the west of Argentina and prevents the access of humidity from the Pacific Ocean. Therefore, the flow is governed by the South Atlantic High and as a consequence, winds prevail from the north and the east. The great interannual rainfall variability generates the requirement to understand the large circulation patterns associated with different hydric situations. Some remote sources affect the mentioned interannual variability. Subtropical South America is known to be one of the regions of the world with an important El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) signal in the precipitation field. This signal varies along each of the ENSO phases, and it differs between sub-regions. Although ENSO is the most important remote forcing without a doubt, the variability originated by other regional or remote sources cannot be disregarded. The scientific basis of the seasonal climate predictability lies in the fact that slow variations in the earth’s boundary conditions (i.e. sea surface temperature or soil wetness) can influence global atmospheric circulation and thus precipitation. As the skill of seasonal numerical prediction models is still limited, it is essential the statistical study of the probable relationships between some local or remote forcing and rainfall. In this paper an example of seasonal rainfall prediction is presented for Bermejo River basin. As the maximum rainfall season was summer, from January until March (JFM), this period was used to study interannual rainfall variability and predictors in the previous December could be defined, for each one of two sub-basin (Lower-Middle Bermejo and Upper Bermejo). Athough it is a small area, some differences were detected all over the basin. Therefore, two mean rainfall series were constructed as the average of monthly precipitation of nineteen stations in the upper Bermejo river basin (UB) during the period 1982-2007 and fourteen stations in the lower and middle Bermejo River Basin (LB) during the period 1968-2007, in order to be representative as from the precipitation over each one of the basin regions. Different period were considered in each sub-basin because of the availability of data. Simultaneous and one month lagged correlations were calculated to find the existing relation between summer (JFM) rainfall in LB and UB and sea surface temperature, 1000 Hpa, 500 Hpa and 200 Hpa geopotential height SST and 850 Hpa zonal and meridional wind. The results allowed to define some predictors in previous December, which were used to develop a statistical forecast model using the forward stepwise regression method, which retained only the variables, correlated with a 95% significance level. Forward stepwise regression is a model-building technique that finds subsets of predictor variables that most adequately predict responses on a dependent variable by linear regression, given the specified criteria for adequacy of model fit. The basic procedures involve identifying an initial model, then predictors are added one-by-one with the remaining candidate predictor that reduces the size of the errors, and this process continues until the errors cannot be significantly reduced. Linear regression models were developed for both, UB and LB. The correlation between observed and forecast rainfall time series derived from cross-validation was 0,6 and the linear regression model explained the 49% of the variance of EFM LB rainfall. However, the summer rainfall in UB depended mainly of Pacific and Indian Ocean sea surface temperatures. The final model explained the 46% of the variance of JFM rainfall in UB and the correlation between observed and forecast series was 0,49. Results indicate that the two mayor factors that influence summer precipitation in Lower Bermejo were the South Antarctic Oscillation and the weaken Atlantic High. In Upper Bermejo it depends mainly on Pacific and Indian Ocean sea surface temperatures. The efficiency of the method was proved by calculating some statistics like the hit rate, the probability of detection and the false alarm ratio. Results in LB are better than in UB. The probability of above normal rainfall events is in general, better than the probability to detect below normal rainfall ones. The probability to give a false alarm in a below normal rainfall event is greater than in the above normal cases. Additionally, the probability functions resulting from estimated and observed JFM rainfall resulted similar at the 95% confidence level and reveal that the method underestimates the most extreme cases. These results are promising and encourage further work in order to examine new techniques to better estimate rainfall, especially the extremes, and to investigate other predictors which could affect precipitation in summer.

Trust Science and Inspire Hope: Our Duty of Care

Reviewed by: A Military History of Texas by Loyd Uglow Christopher M. Rein A Military History of Texas. By Loyd Uglow. War and the Southwest Series. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2022. Pp. xiv, 433. $34.95, ISBN 978-1-57441-865-1.) While the state flag of Nevada bears the phrase “Battle Born,” Loyd Uglow’s A Military History of Texas demonstrates that the appellation applies equally to the Lone Star State. Long a contested borderland between various Indigenous peoples and European colonizers, the modern state of Texas is very much a creation of the series of nineteenth-century wars and irregular conflicts that defined its modern borders, privileged certain groups of immigrants, and determined its current form of government. The author clearly demonstrates that Texas’s history is military history, and that military conflict has been instrumental in the formation of modern Texas. Uglow organizes his work chronologically, moving from pre-Columbian warfare to Texas’s involvement in current conflicts, and he relies almost exclusively on secondary sources, as is necessary for a work of this breadth. With a few exceptions, these sources are well chosen and represent the most current literature in the field. The nineteenth century dominates the work, reflecting both the author’s interests and the role the various wars of that period had in carving the Republic of Texas out of Mexico, attaching it to the United States, [End Page 165] and depopulating the state of the Indigenous peoples who had lived there for centuries. Uglow provides a straightforward accounting of events, with some bias shown toward the declared wars and set-piece battles that dominate traditional military history, though there is some attention in later chapters to irregular warfare and the home front. A too-brief conclusion of just eleven pages (with one page devoted to the 2009 Fort Hood shootings) covers the entire period since World War II, and it delivers an at times celebratory accounting of the manpower and resources that Texas contributed to the growth of militarism in the United States and the nation’s various military adventures of the past eighty years. By providing a strict narration of mostly well known events, Uglow misses a number of opportunities to provide more in-depth analysis, especially analysis reflecting the “war and society” turn in military history. Other than brief mentions of “racially motivated” violence during Reconstruction and the violence that erupted between white residents of Houston and Black soldiers stationed there during World War I (which the author labels a “mutiny”), there is little attention paid to the impact of military conflict on the state’s troubled history of race relations (pp. 243, 307). Similarly, despite the long history of violence along the state’s southern border, with armed incursions emanating from both Mexico and the United States, and notable episodes of brutality committed by the state-authorized Texas Rangers, the author offers a spare analysis of how this legacy impacts current views of border security both within the state and across the nation, or of the lingering hostility and mistrust among the state’s Anglo and Hispanic residents. There is little discussion of how Texas’s violent past, including the frequent incursions by both Comanche and Mexican raiders, continues to influence both racial views and positions on issues such as gun rights in the modern state. However, Uglow does point out that the Texas Revolution began with an attempted confiscation of firearms by Mexican officials. Citing works such as Susannah J. Ural’s Hood’s Texas Brigade: The Soldiers and Families of the Confederacy’s Most Celebrated Unit (Baton Rouge, 2017), which fully explores the connections between military forces and the societies that raise and sustain them, might have helped the author move past the detailed accounting of well-chronicled events to offer some explanation of how military history shaped modern Texas society, and how that culture continues to influence larger events and movements in the nation as a whole. Thus, the book fully achieves its limited aim of recounting Texas’s military past but misses an opportunity to highlight its broader significance and, thereby, to make a larger contribution to the existing literature. Christopher M. Rein Air...

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) is a global policy issue with significant social, economic and personal consequences. The burden of VAWGs is distributed unequally, with rates of gender violence significantly higher in low- to middle-income countries of the Global South. Yet the bulk of global research on gender violence is based on the experiences of urban communities in high-income English-speaking countries mainly from the Global North. This body of research typically takes the experience of women from Anglophone countries as the norm from which to theorise and frame theories and research of gender-based violence. This chapter problematises theories that the privilege women in the Global North as the empirical referents of 'everyday violence' (Carrington et al., 2016). At the same time, however, it is important to resist homogenising the violence experienced by women across diverse societies in the Global South as oppressed subaltern Southern. This binary discourse exaggerates the differences and obfuscates the similarities of VAWG across Northern and Southern borders and reproduces images of women in the Global South as unfortunate victims of 'other' cultures (Durham, 2015; Narayan, 1997). This chapter contrasts three examples, the policing of family violence in Indigenous communities in Australia; Image-based Abuse in Singapore; and the policing of gender violence in the Pacific as a way of concretising the argument.

The new public health surveillance requires at the global, national and local levels the use of new authoritative analytical approaches and tools for better recognition of the epidemiologic characteristics of the priority health events and risk factors affecting the population health. The identification of the events in time and space is of fundamental importance so that the geo-spatial description of the situation of diseases and health events facilitates the identification of social, environmental and health care related risks. This assessment examines the application and use of geo-spatial tools for identifying relevant spatial and epidemiological conglomerates of malaria in Chiapas, Mexico. The study design was ecological and the level of aggregation of the collected information of the epidemiological and spatial variables was municipalities. The data were collected in all municipalities of the state of Chiapas, Mexico during the years 2000-2002. The main outcome variable was cases and types of malaria diagnosed by blood smears in weekly reports. Independent variables were age, sex, ethnicity, literacy of the cases of malaria and environmental factors such as altitude, road type and network in the municipalities and cities of Chiapas. The production of thematic maps and the application of geo-spatial analytical tools such Moran and local indicator of spatial autocorrelation metrics for malaria clustering allowed the visualization and recognition that the important population risk factors associated with high malaria incidence in Chiapas were low literacy rate, areas with high percentage of indigenous population that reflects the social inequalities gaps in health and the great burden of disease that is affecting this important vulnerable group in Chiapas. The presence of road networks allowed greater spatial diffusion of Malaria. An important epidemiological and spatial cluster of malaria was identified in the areas and populations in the proximity of the southern border. The use of geospatial metrics in local areas will assist in the epidemiological stratification of malaria for better targeting more effective and equitable prevention and control interventions.

After a decade of chasing stories around the globe, intrepid travel writer Stephanie Elizondo Griest followed the magnetic pull home--only to discover that her native South Texas had been radically transformed in her absence. Ravaged by drug wars and barricaded by an eighteen-foot steel wall, her ancestral land had become the nation’s foremost crossing ground for undocumented workers, many of whom perished along the way. Before Elizondo Griest moved to the New York/Canada borderlands, the frequency of these tragedies seemed like a terrible coincidence. Once she began to meet Mohawks from the Akwesasne Nation, however, she recognized striking parallels to life on the southern border. Having lost their land through devious treaties, their mother tongues at English-only schools, and their traditional occupations through capitalist ventures, Tejanos and Mohawks alike struggle under the legacy of colonialism. Toxic industries surround their neighborhoods while the U.S. Border Patrol militarizes them. Combating these forces are legions of artists and activists devoted to preserving their indigenous cultures. Complex belief systems, meanwhile, conjure miracles. In All the Agents and Saints, Elizondo Griest weaves seven years of stories into a meditation on the existential impact of international borderlines by illuminating the spaces in between.

Albuquerque is New Mexico’s most populous city. At just over half a million people, Albuquerque is home to a quarter of the state’s entire population. It is geographically framed by the Sandia Mountains to the east and the volcanic rock formations of the Petroglyphs to the west. Flowing between these dramatic landscapes is the Rio Grande, the region’s life force, which nourishes the surrounding Bosque—the largest stretch of cottonwood trees in the world. This lush ecosystem provides shade, sustenance, and recreation for people and wildlife alike. Centrally located within the state, Albuquerque sits nearly equidistant from the northern border with Colorado and the southern border with Chihuahua, Mexico. While the city’s name reflects Spanish and US colonial rule, the land has been—and remains—Indigenous territory for millennia. Today, the primary languages spoken are English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Diné, and Tiwa. Historically, Albuquerque is most associated with the frontier lore of the “Wild West,” the romanticized idea of the open range where Anglo Protestant culture would further “progress” in the region. For Latino studies scholars, New Mexico—and by extension Albuquerque—is an important region to study and to correct dominant narratives that erase the Indigenous and Mexican people who have lived here for centuries, and the more recent refugee, immigrant and non-Indigenous people of color communities who call this place home. Today, the city is 49% Hispanic/Latino, 37% white alone, 3% African American, 5% American Indian, 3% Asian alone, and 18% two or more races. The median income in 2022 was $61,503.00, and the number of persons in poverty was 16%. Albuquerque is the fourth-largest city in the Southwest, and residents enjoy the perks of living in a larger city, while also not foregoing the benefits of a smaller town, like commuting, with only twenty minutes being the average time people spend in traffic. Major economic industries in Albuquerque include the University of New Mexico (UNM), Albuquerque Public Schools, Sandia National Laboratories, Kirtland Air Force Base, and more recently film and entertainment companies like Netflix Albuquerque Studios. Cannabis has also been a burgeoning industry, spurring economic growth and development in the city since its recreational legalization in 2021. The following selection of readings presents scholarship in Latinx studies and related fields, offering insights into Albuquerque’s rich history and evolving present.

Resumen La guerra del Pacífico (1879-1884) que enfrentó a Perú y Bolivia contra de Chile, representa un conflicto armado marcado por las políticas realistas de imponer el interés nacional, frente a otros Estados, alterando el equilibrio político regional, bajo la justificación de las reivindicaciones territoriales. Esta política no sólo afectó a los beligerantes, sino que a otros países que pudieron sumarse en la confrontación buscando cambiar su status quo. Ecuador representa esta consideración, en cuanto a que su participación pudo consolidar su frontera sur con Perú, pendiente desde de la emancipación. ¿Fue la debilidad política interna la que no permitió concretar una posible intervención? En las siguientes páginas se estudiará este proceso histórico, desde la óptica del realismo clásico presente en las relaciones internacionales, donde el escenario interno de un país, es determinante en la proyección de su política exterior.

Reviewed by: Standing Firmly by the Flag: Nebraska Territory and the Civil War, 1861–1867 by James E. Potter Ronald C. Naugle and John J. Montag James E. Potter, Standing Firmly by the Flag: Nebraska Territory and the Civil War, 1861–1867. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012. 375pp. $29.95. The adage that war is long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror is borne out by the experience of the First Nebraska regiment of volunteers from 1861 to 1866 as related by James E. Potter in Standing Firmly by the Flag: Nebraska Territory and the Civil War, 1861–1867. In researching the story of the regiment and the 1,300 or so men who served in it, Potter realized the importance of the larger and more complex story of Nebraska Territory itself in the half dozen years before statehood in 1867 and that realization led to the structure of the book. Drawing primarily on the official records, newspaper accounts, letters, diaries, memoirs, and public papers he interweaves political and military events chronologically in an introduction, six chapters (each titled for individual years of the war), and an epilogue that chronicles the war and the events that followed. He seeks to overcome the limitations of earlier works–the uneven coverage of the military in general histories of the territory and the lack of broader context in specialized studies of military or economic activities such as freighting. In doing so Potters argues against “the notion that statehood in 1867 is really the genesis event from which Nebraska history has unfolded” (xvi–xvii). Kansas and Nebraska territories were created as part of the same congressional act in 1854, but the two territories were vastly different. Kansas remained close to its present size but Nebraska by comparison was initially geographically huge, being five times its present size. It incorporated everything between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains from Kansas to [End Page 101] the Canadian border and incorporated by what would become those parts of North and South Dakota lying west of the Missouri River, large sections of what would become Idaho, Montana and Wyoming and the northeastern portion of Colorado. Most of those areas had been carved away by 1861. The Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which had disallowed slavery in those areas west of Missouri and north of Missouri’s southern border in the Louisiana Purchase and replaced it with “popular sovereignty” allowing the people to decide the fate of slavery at the time the territory became a state. It meant technically slavery could exist in both Kansas and Nebraska territories until statehood. The two territories had different experiences with slavery. Kansas was besieged by political turmoil over the issue of slavery and the division between pro-slavery Missourians and Free Soilers fighting for control of the territory briefly led to the creation of two capitals, one anti-slavery at Lawrence and the other pro-slavery at Lecompton. The story was very different in Nebraska, at least in the territorial days. Few expected Nebraska to embrace slavery but some new residents brought slaves with them into Nebraska. The federal census in 1860 listed only fifteen slaves in Nebraska. Instead Nebraska’s divisive issue was the location of the territorial capital which dominated the political scene all the way into statehood. Indians made up most of Nebraska’s population in 1860, with white settlement concentrated near the Missouri River and a scattering of “soldiers, miners, and trail side entrepreneurs” to the west. Three quarters of the territories 28,841 non-Indian population were native-born, about 80% coming from the free states. Most of the immigrants came from German provinces, England or Ireland. With so much diversity it comes as no surprise that whatever might be inferred initially from the title, Standing Firmly by the Flag, the reader soon learns that Nebraskans in the Civil War era differed widely in their political views, ranging from secessionists or “secesh” as they were commonly called, to Unionists and from pro- to anti-emancipation. In just one example Potter relates the story of Robert D. Thompson, twenty-three-year-old son of First Nebraska company commander J...

This article sets out to examine the tensions that exist in post-Gaddafi Libya with respect to the establishment of central government and one of the sub-state actors, namely tribes. The study finds that, as a result of its colonial past, Libya as a state was created by negotiations between British, French and Italian colonial powers without regard to the indigenous populations such as the North African tribes with their natural tribal heartlands. This has led to an incoherence between identity and territory and in turn has created problems of irredentism and national security issues. After a detailed examination of Libya’s extensive East, West and Southern borders, the article finds that as a state, Libya is unable to control its borders and so cannot qualify as a fully functioning nation-state according to Western definitions of the phenomenon. The article then discusses the complex issue of the differences between state-building and nationhood and finds that according to the definitions of the 14th century Maghreb sociologist Ibn Khaldun, while the state and the nation are two different concepts, one cannot exist without the other. This stands in contrast to the modern, global emphasis on linear as opposed to cyclical development and reflects the values of donor states and not the complex needs of emerging and fragile democratic states. The article therefore recommends the need for understanding, trust and compromise from all parties involved. For example, while tribes contribute the much-needed values of nationhood, they must in turn respect the values of democracy such as the rule of law. Conversely, external players should respect the concept of national identity with its emphasis on the value of social cohesion.

The paper examines the connections between the social and the interethnic conflict in the Southern Border of Cordoba (Argentine Confederation) between 1836 and 1851. It does so based on an analysis of the relations between the Ranquel indigenous groups and the unitarios who sought refuge in the tolderias of the Mamil Mapu, in the central pampa. It claims that these relations would have limited the exercise of territorial sovereignty by the Government of Cordoba as the forces that moved from the interior involved the depopulation of the southern border causing the resettlement of its inhabitants in safer areas within the same Cordoba jurisdiction. The study is based on the documentation of the Government Fund of the Historical Archive of the Province of Cordoba (AHPC) and the Secretariat of Rosas of the General Archive of the Nation (AGN). It also takes into consideration the Memoirs of Colonel Manuel Baigorria and the former captive Santiago Avendano, as well as the Provincial Censuses of 1822 and 1840. Keywords: Southern Border of Cordoba, Ranquel indigenous groups, unitario refugees, articulation.

Editor's Column: “Danny in the back seat wants a cup a water”: Musings on America, Steinbeck, and the Child

Reviewed by: Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917 Roger Kangas, Dr. Russia’s Orient: Imperial Borderlands and Peoples, 1700–1917. Edited by Daniel R. Brower and Edward Lazzarini. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. 339 pp. $39.95 Cloth. Histories of Russia’s expansion into Asia—the Far East, Central Asia and the Caucasus—are replete with accounts of battles, migrations, and exploitation. Almost always, though, they are told from the Russian perspective or, at least, based on Russian sources.This Russo-centrism is even more pronounced when examining the state-building process. After all, in the context of establishing institutions of power, it is how the periphery relates to the center that is important—as judged by the center. Through the contributions of various scholars, editors Daniel Brower and Edward Lazzarini tackle the issue of power relationships in Russia’s Orient. A common theme running through the book is that there existed a symbiotic relationship between colonizers and colonized that significantly influenced the policies which were carried out, as opposed to simply a top-down approach to colonial rule. Stressing that the volume does not abide by a single methodological or conceptual paradigm, the authors note that “our project is grounded in general agreement among the authors...on the benefit of viewing that history through new, unfamiliar perspectives.” It is with detailed research and scholarship that the contributors of the volume adhere to this principle. [End Page 192] Part One, entitled “Empire and Orient,” focuses on Russian strategies in dealing with the non-Russian populations of the southern and eastern border regions. The seven contributions range in analyses from how the Caucasian peoples were depicted in Russian literature (Susan Layton) to the role of Islam in Russia’s colonial program (Daniel Brower). Likewise, the selections by Dov Yaroskevski and Austin Jersild explore the definition of grazhdanstvennost (citizenship) in the regional context and point out the more important Russian-controlled interpretations. Michael Khodarkovsky reminds us that a similar question of perspective arises when viewing the conquest itself—namely, its nature differs depending upon who is evaluating the situation. Since the peoples of Siberia and the east could claim lineage to the great Chinggis Khan, it is with merit that Khodarkovsky notes, “[w]hereas Moscow regarded all the newly encountered peoples as its subjects, the non-Christians often considered Russia no more than a military ally. What the natives of Siberia often considered to be trade, Moscow regarded as levy that it was due.” Thus, an immediate problem of interpretation and understanding of roles have plagued colonial relations in the Russian empire. The seven selections in Part Two entitled, “Frontier Encounters,” continue the theme of colonial relations and examine how the regional populations—especially the elite—worked with and within the Russian colonial system. For example, Thomas Barrett observes that the Terek Cossacks were just as influenced by the peoples of the north Caucasus as was the other way around. The author notes that, “[t]he Cossacks needed frontier trade as much as the gortsy did and were threatened by every attempt to curtail or cut off trans-Terek exchange [by Russia proper].” The result was that both sides—the indigenous peoples and the “colonizers” who lived in the region—occasionally found themselves on the same side with repect to policy decisions from St. Petersburg. Adeeb Khalid notes interestingly enough that in Central Asia, “...Russia and the Russians were integral to the reformist project of the jadids and to their creation of a sense of self.” This assertion is particularly evident, as Khalid points out, in the portrayal of Russians in Central Asian literature of the early twentieth century. All of this is not to gloss over the problems that existed—the violence, forced evictions, and supremacy of Russian laws over local ones—but rather to highlight a situation that was much more complex than it was perceived. Readers looking for a comprehensive analysis of Russian [End Page 193] colonial policy in the Asian regions may be disappointed by this volume, as it never really gives a comparative assessment of the policies implemented by the tsarist government in St. Petersburg. However, the fact that each chapter is a “case...