The indigenous peoples of north-eastern Bolivia experienced major challenges with the arrival of independence and the economic pressures created by the Amazonian rubber boom. Gary Van Valen argues that the residents of former Jesuit missions in the region employed diverse strategies to mitigate the erosion of valued cultural elements. Van Valen focuses on the Arawakan-speaking people known as the Mojos originally settled in the mission towns of Trinidad, San Ignacio, Loreto, and San Javier in the seventeenth century; more superficially, he addresses the history of other ex-mission groups and even peoples that remained independent of Spanish control. Chronologically, the book picks up where David Block's Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enterprise, and Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660–1880 leaves off. Van Valen begins with the creation of Bolivia's Department of Beni in 1842 and ends just before the outbreak of the Chaco War with Paraguay in the 1930s. The book challenges historiography that paints liberalism and especially the rubber boom as uniform disasters for indigenous people. Van Valen's regional study shows that the former-mission residents of Beni navigated the difficulties of the period with some success.
Bolivian liberalism sought to replace the Mojos' tradition of communal property with private property (among other changes), but like elsewhere in Bolivia, liberalism struggled in practice. Continuities with the colonial period marked Beni during the first couple of decades following independence: officials continued to demand unpaid labour and imposed a discriminatory Indian tribute mirroring highland practice. The rubber boom in the second half of the nineteenth century accelerated the pace of change. Van Valen challenges traditional assumptions about the boom: coercion, abuse, death, and the destruction of Beni's former-mission culture. Van Valen acknowledges that this describes the experiences of independent indigenous groups, but the Mojos had nearly two centuries of contact with the Spanish and their republican heirs. This experience produced a more informed engagement with the forces unleashed in Amazonia by the international demand for rubber. Some nineteenth-century trends were negative, like population decline in many former-mission towns and decreased artisanal activity, but Van Valen argues that nothing in Mojo history during the early years of the boom supports the more apocalyptic historiography.
But indigenous groups did feel increased pressure as the boom quickened. The heart of Van Valen's study is a Mojos' resistance movement with millenarian overtones in 1886 and 1887. Bolivian authorities quickly repressed the participants, but in a surprising epilogue, dissident Mojos established a new town preserving high levels of autonomy and independence for decades. As outsider demands for labour and land increased over the course of the rubber boom, many Mojos migrated towards the more isolated fringes of the region's savannas. By the 1880s a number of these migrants coalesced in the new town of San Lorenzo under the leadership of an indigenous prophet named Andrés Guayocho. Van Valen does an excellent job of reconstructing the episode using a limited number of sources: two accounts by government officials seeking to justify their actions and a third by a Jesuit priest criticising the government's response. The Mojos of San Lorenzo decisively defeated the first military expedition sent against them. A second expedition burned San Lorenzo to the ground, murdered leaders like Guayocho and turned the Mojos into hunted fugitives. A brutal purge of Mojos still living in the departmental capital of Trinidad followed and created even more refugees. But this harsh campaign was not the definitive end of San Lorenzo. The Mojo renaissance that followed is the book's most intriguing chapter.
José Santos Noco Guaji, a literate follower of Guayocho, re-established San Lorenzo in the early 1890s and guarded the town's autonomy for over three decades. Using the Mojo leader's own correspondence and the reports of priests and government officials, Van Valen reconstructs Santos Noco's long tenure in which he successfully played the Catholic Church and the Bolivian government off against each other to preserve his town's political and cultural autonomy. This experience contrasts with Mojo tribulations in ex-mission towns like Trinidad and San Ignacio during the decades between 1890 and 1930. There, continued migration from elsewhere in Bolivia and outsider economic dominance led to a dwindling number of Mojo options. Despite the challenges, Van Valen emphasises the Mojos' creative responses, explaining the continued existence of a unique Mojo identity and culture in lowland Bolivia to this day.
In his introduction, Van Valen mentions older scholarship on Latin America that emphasised the ‘resistance’ of the popular classes. He then notes more recent works employing the concept of ‘agency’. He oversells the distinction between the two. Van Valen also pushes the Mojos' understanding and manipulation of liberalism a bit too far. Florencia Mallon's Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru made the idea of indigenous people manipulating liberalism and nationalism a popular one. Van Valen argues that the Mojos created their own interpretations of Bolivian liberalism, but it is not clear how far these ideological experiments extended beyond a select group of leaders. Literate figures like Santos Noco played with the terminology of liberalism in correspondence with priests, government officials and newspapers, but even he resisted core liberal impulses. The great bulk of Mojos simply sought to be left alone to practise their cultural traditions and avoid the inevitable exactions of outsiders.
The Mojos' diverse reactions to liberalism and the rubber boom are important reminders of the need to consider regional variations in Amazonian history. Van Valen's presentation of Andrés Guayocho's movement, its violent repression in 1887, and the Mojos' surprising recovery from military disaster under the astute leadership of José Santos Noco Guaji is a praiseworthy contribution to Latin American historiography.
