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Hispanic American Historical Review 84.1 (2004) 172-173



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La construcción de la Amazonía andina (siglos XIX-XX). Edited by Pilar García Jordán. Colección Biblioteca Abya-Yala. Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, 1995. Maps. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliographies. 356 pp. Paper.

This volume promotes Amazonian history as a legitimate and recognized academic discipline. Works in anthropology, ethnohistory, and environmental studies have shaped the field of Amazonian studies, leaving historians with ample room to contextualize earlier works while calling for more interdisciplinary research. Four of the five articles in this volume were presented in 1994 at a conference in Sweden, and most of the authors are affiliated with Spanish universities. The project coordinator, Pilar García Jordán, focused this volume on the period between 1820 and 1960, a period that exhibits both strong continuities and important changes as the transition from colony to republics incorporated the peoples and lands of the eastern Andean slopes and the Amazonian basin into Peru and Ecuador.

García Jordán contributed the first article in this collection, "Las misiones católicas en la Amazonía peruana." Here the legacies from the colonial period are strong in language, culture, and approach. Franciscan missionaries served to expand the internal frontier and to mark external borders as they reduced indigenous peoples into mission towns to spread "civilization" to the barbarian. She notes the role of technology (especially steamships) and the rubber boom in placing missionaries in competition and conflict with secular and commercial interests. The author relies primarily on published documents and secondary sources, although she did consult and cite Italian and Peruvian church archives. Although she does not present much new information, she does offer tantalizing clues about missionaries involved in forest extractive enterprises and the cultural and demographic importance of indigenous boarding schools in the post-1910 period. Unfortunately, indigenous peoples and cultures are almost invisible in this mostly institutional story, suggesting that historians should cross-fertilize their work with that of anthropologists.

Jean Claude Roux also relies heavily on published documents and secondary sources in his account of the environmental impact of the rubber boom in the Peruvian Amazon. He provides a useful overview of the overexploitation of rubber trees and subsequent resource destruction and migration that so disrupted isolated regions and peoples. Roux lets the Peruvian government off the hook for the Putumayo crimes, suggesting that lack of state control over the Casa Arana and the region fueled the violence there. Clearly, government support—gunboats, troops, and trade goods—aided national and international rubber companies in their conquest of frontier zones and free peoples living there.

The next two articles are significant contributions to the field. Núria Sala i Vila takes us into the fabric of Ayacuchan society and landscape, á la Steve Stern. Archival research grounds the comparative analysis with impressive results; graduate [End Page 172] students will find much here for future articles or theses. The geographic focus is on northern Ayacucho department, a montaña area long exploited as a region of the ecological complementarity. As the biggest coca producer in late colonial Peru, peasants and elites angled (often together) to defend their profitable lands from coastal governmental interests and foreign colonists. This was a farming, not an extractive, frontier, so dynamics obeyed an Andean logic. Ayacucho's uniqueness is revealed through fascinating vignettes: in 1905 coca was exported directly to the U.S. market, and local hacendados were refining 1.5 kilos of cocaine a day; Cossacks, brought to colonize the eastern slopes in 1929 and plagued by malaria and local resistance to their presence, went on to become circus performers in the Andean highlands. Real life and the importance of history ooze from this chapter.

Equally pathbreaking, Frederica Barclay's study looks at rural land use, property rights, settlement patterns, and labor systems from the bust of rubber to the 1960s. Rural estates served as the new base for land concentration, labor demands, and trade and debt relations inherited from the rubber boom. Extractive industries (tagua nut, balata, barbasco, and...

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