Indigenous Agency in the Amazon: The Mojos in Liberal and Rubber-Boom Bolivia, 1842–1932

Abstract

“On a hot day in May 1887, a group of Bolivian soldiers halted their march across a flat savanna laced by lakes and tributaries of the Amazon. They were taking ten indigenous prisoners back to their headquarters in Trinidad, the local capital, but stopped to administer several hundred lashes to each. The soldiers took special delight in whipping an eighty-year-old man before finishing him off with gunshots. They saw the old man, Andrés Guayocho, not as the pathetic figure who begged them for a drink of water before dying, but as the leader of a major indigenous rebellion. . . . The local government ruthlessly crushed Guayocho’s millenarian movement not so much because of its religious unorthodoxy, but because it deprived the white elite of the Mojo labor necessary for the extraction and export of rubber for the world market.”Now that he has our attention, Gary Van Valen uses it well. The Mojos lived in savannas along the Mamoré River as it flows toward Brazil. From 1682 onward, they congregated onto Jesuit missions in what later became the Department of Beni. Van Valen traces their trajectory through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly during the rubber boom (1875–1910) and its aftermath. He focuses on their agency in retaining their ethnic identity even as they accommodated the emerging Bolivian state. “Any attempt to renegotiate power relations is agency,” he writes, “from engagement in overt resistance such as a rebellion or millenarian movement, to the use of discourse, or language encoding a vision or plan for social relations. . . . By adapting to political and economic change, they remained Mojos.”In general, we know relatively little about western Amazonia during the century after 1787, when Jesuit missionaries were expelled from Spanish colonies. Van Valen provides a useful account of those “lost years.” By the 1860s, for example, several thousand Beni Indians worked for white patrones along the lower Madeira River and its tributaries—a generation before Indians in Peru, Ecuador, or Colombia underwent similar fates. Bolivian traders, borne by native paddlers, often made the round trip to Manaus loaded with agricultural products and returned with European manufactures. Until the 1880s, Van Valen writes, native people exercised considerable choice in escaping the tightening noose of taxation and repression in their homelands. After 1885, however, as the rubber boom quickened, their alternatives became much worse.And herein lies the problem with Van Valen’s view of agency. “There can be no doubt,” he writes, “that the former mission Indians of Beni suffered exploitation by the [whites] during the rubber boom—but it is equally true that the Indians were not helpless victims. They were constantly exercising their agency, looking out for their own best interests and choosing the best strategies for survival that their changing circumstances offered.” Of course, many people exercise some degree of choice within broader political, economic, and social conditions that lie completely beyond their control. But calling this kind of limited choice “agency” threatens to render the term analytically meaningless. It also ignores the millions who made a wrong choice—or no real choice at all—and disappeared from our analysis.Nonetheless, Van Valen has written a valuable book that should be widely read. It adds to our growing understanding of how groups like the Mojos endured forced labor, loss of land, oppressive taxation, and violent suppression during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The rubber boom was a needle’s eye through which they had to pass as they formulated their modern ethnic identity. Van Valen has given us another essential chapter in that story.