The Bolivian lowlands, an area that encompasses the eastern two-thirds of the country, is gaining increasing attention from English-language historians. Focusing their histories on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century native people, Gary Van Valen and Erick Langer consider how the region remained on the periphery of the Bolivian state. Steven Cote's study explores the region's growing oil sector during the late nineteenth and middle twentieth centuries. Ben Nobbs-Thiessen's work covers the mid twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries—a time when state actors became increasingly concerned about the region—the so-called Bolivian “march to the east.” Studying the rise of “middle-class politicians, students, workers, farmers, and miners” (4) from the April 1952 Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) through today, the text outlines how these new political actors hoped to better incorporate the eastern lowlands with better infrastructure and, more important, new migrants and immigrants to the region, in the hope of developing an economically vibrant zone that would become Bolivia's breadbasket.
Nobbs-Thiessen's project is an engaging and deep study of how migration and immigration to a frontier region shaped and reshaped the environment. Specifically, he considers how agriculture and ranching transformed a once-peripheral region to one of the most important economic regions in Bolivia, often with little, if any, support from the state. This lack of state support meant that migrants from the highlands struggled in an unfamiliar hot climate with little protection from labor abuses, and that immigrants faced long rides over treacherous roads to La Paz to petition the government for loans and land.
Starting his text with a close study of Bolivian film, Nobbs-Thiessen looks at how Bolivians viewed the lowlands and hoped to transform the region. The text continues by offering insights into the challenges that Bolivian highlanders experienced in the region. Not content with simply excavating Bolivian sources, Nobbs-Thiessen also conducted primary research in Mexico, Canada, Paraguay, and the United States to develop a well-rounded study of the region. He also conducted numerous oral history interviews with those who immigrated to the region. Using these sources, the author is able to track how successive waves of immigrants to the region—specifically Mennonites and Okinawans—encountered it.
The text shines with Nobbs-Thiessen's nuanced approach to each group of immigrants to this eastern tropical region. For example, he explains the challenges (and outright resistance from Bolivians) that a group of Okinawans faced when trying to incorporate fishing into their colony's economic projects. Nobbs-Thiessen also explores the environmental challenges that migrants and immigrants to the region faced. Starting with how Bolivians struggled to transform the region with railroads and roads, the text also narrates how immigrants imagined transforming the region with Paraguayan cattle, Okinawan rice, and later Brazilian soy. Bulldozing large swaths of thick tropical forest, migrants and immigrants eventually transformed the region into the lush agricultural region that it is today.
The text excels in its rich narratives about how migrants and immigrants struggled—and sometimes failed—to make the region home. It also carefully explores how lowland Bolivians viewed these outsiders and struggled to incorporate them into their white (camba) identity. Nevertheless, this study does make the reader wonder how the indigenous people of the region resisted and coped with the arrival of so many outsiders and dramatic environmental changes.
This critique notwithstanding, the text is a valuable contribution to our understanding of environmental change in southern South America. More fundamentally, it fits nicely into the current literature about frontier regions in South America. The text significantly intersects with texts that study Brazilian economic penetration into frontier regions (eastern Paraguay, for example) with soy. Students of frontier regions will find much to discuss and enjoy in this text.
