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...
