Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present

Abstract

Bolivia's eastern lowlands form a landscape of the future. They tempt landless families with hopes of prosperity and tantalize governments both revolutionary and reactionary with dreams of export-driven development. Ben Nobbs-Thiessen takes seriously these dreams and the spaces on which they converge in Landscape of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia's Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present. An ambitious, transnational history of migration and environment in the lowlands, this book juggles three different migratory streams: colonists from the Andean highlands, Okinawan farmers, and Mennonites who settled in Bolivia via Mexico and Canada. The confluence of these groups on land already inhabited by Indigenous communities after the Bolivian Revolution of 1952 reshaped Bolivian political and economic power in the twentieth century.After a century of wars in which Bolivia lost valuable territory and resources to its neighbors, the revolutionary nationalists of 1952 were anxious to populate and control the least connected and largest section of Bolivia. The idea of developing the lowlands through roads and settlement provided an answer to many Cold War anxieties, including for US government officials. Bolivian officials concerned about growing numbers of unemployed and politicized workers in the highlands encouraged colonization schemes in the lowlands. Meanwhile, US diplomats, concerned about the frustrated economic expectations of Okinawan youth as well as Mennonite “model farmers in search of a model crop,” saw new possibilities for prosperity in the Bolivian frontier (p. 190). Each of these communities justified their belonging in this frontier and made claims for themselves by performing what Nobbs-Thiessen calls agrarian citizenship.Landscape of Migration's first three chapters cover the nationalist revolutionary period from 1952 to 1964, establishing the histories of each migratory stream and the ways that state and settler performed agrarian citizenship. Making extensive use of both public and private archives across multiple continents, Nobbs-Thiessen shows Andeans, Mennonites, and Okinawans articulating settler legitimacy as the transformation of unruly frontier into national wealth. Landscape of Migration bridges both internal and external migration in its analysis, understanding that while Andeans and Okinawans performed their belonging in different ways, both were settlers in an unfamiliar landscape whose histories share meaningful resonances. The last two chapters of the book address the period of military dictatorship and neoliberal democracy after 1964, focusing on development projects by missionaries, nongovernmental organizations, and Mennonite soy farmers. An epilogue brings us to the present, in which Bolivia's lowlands form just one portion of the transnational empire of soybeans that now dominates the Amazon and its inhabitants.The first chapter is a standout. Here Nobbs-Thiessen explores postrevolutionary image making of and in the lowlands through film, written narrative, and photography, focusing on the work of filmmaker Jorge Ruiz. Nobbs-Thiessen describes a national romance with the lowlands, which Andeans felt in both political and nationalist terms. His analysis gives room for both nationalist anxieties and bonanza dreams, whether through oil, gold, or soybeans. The chapter considers the context of these narratives' production as well as their circulation and the material places that they traverse. This chapter would make a fine addition to undergraduate classes on film or environmental history.Bolivia's march to the east is an old story, but Nobbs-Thiessen is part of a new generation of scholars rethinking the legacies of the 1952 revolution. Landscape of Migration contributes admirably to this rethinking, weaving migration, development, and environment into a dynamic, compelling narrative and reminding Andeanists of the lowlands' importance to nation building long before Santa Cruz's economic power came to compete with that of La Paz. Nobbs-Thiessen also insists on writing Bolivia's history as inherently transnational while remaining deeply rooted in regional and local context, an endeavor that he rightly notes is rare in Bolivianist scholarship. Concerned with questions of belonging and the ways that migrant communities make claims in unfamiliar spaces, Nobbs-Thiessen explores the racial underpinnings of citizenship in the part of Bolivia that considers itself the whitest and least Indigenous. Here the book could have spent more time with the lowland region's many non-Andean Indigenous inhabitants, especially as Andean settlers and lowland Indigenous communities increasingly contest the same spaces in Bolivia's pluricultural present. Nobbs-Thiessen's analysis of the settler underpinnings of agrarian citizenship does not sidestep these questions, even as Landscape of Migration leaves their full consideration for another book.Landscape of Migration is both an environmental history of a landscape's production and a history of migration and belonging across multiple archives. Such a project establishes a high bar for future scholars in the field and raises tantalizing questions. Nobbs-Thiessen begins his fifth chapter following Mennonite settlers and Che Guevera's guerrillas on simultaneous visits to neighboring patches of lowland frontier. Both are dreaming of future success; both are stymied by the same wet weather. Has there ever been a better landscape on which to imagine the perils and ambitions of the Latin American twentieth century?