Abandonment Issues

The chapter examines the intertwined movement of indigenous letters and bodies in the March to the East. In an array of letters Andeans demanded they take part in colonization in the 1950s and then denounced its shortcomings in the following decade. The chapter follows their petitions as they traveled from highland hamlets and humid settlement zones to the halls of government. Letters produced in the Andes in the 1950s and 1960s painted a provocative portrait of desperate situations in home communities with the promise and allure of the tropical environment of the lowlands. Writers attempted to shame the state by emphasizing their struggles as migrant laborers or braceros in neighboring Argentina and demanded land as part of the state’s commitments to its own revolutionary legacy. Along the lowland frontier, the reality of colonization failed to match the harmonious human experiment depicted in state propaganda. Government officials blamed a high rate of settler abandonment in new colonization zones on the “backwards” cultural practices of Indigenous migrants. Settlers flung this accusation back on the state, claiming that the MNR had abandoned them. Each group would cast failure as the justification for new rounds of intervention or radicalism in the following decades.

From Abandonment to Autonomy

The Epilogue extends the history of the March to the East to the present. It returns to the personal history of current Bolivian President Evo Morales and links his personal trajectory in the March to the East to his administration’s current plans to extend the agricultural frontier. The epilogue also examines the ways that transnational and regional dynamics continue to unfold in this national state-building project. Just as ideas of abandonment provided a key framing narrative for the body of this work, conflicting notions of autonomy help us understand Santa Cruz at the beginning of the twenty-first century. During the well-publicized autonomy movement of 2008, residents of Santa Cruz challenged state authority emanating from the Andes and lashed out at the visible presence of highland indigenous migrants. This occurred even as lowland indigenous peoples voiced a very different set of demands for autonomy. Long silenced in the March to the East, the Guaraní, Chiquitano, Sirionó, Ayoreo, and other indigenous communities recast the narrative of settlement as one of displacement and organized to demand the return of their traditional lands.

Moving Pictures

The chapter draws from an impressive corpus of visual and written materials that sought to define the March to the East in human and environmental terms. This includes the work of filmmaker Jorge Ruiz, who traveled throughout the Bolivian lowlands documenting colonization for the state and its U.S. sponsors. Ruiz played with the visual distinction between the arid highlands of Bolivia and the tropical lowlands. His camera followed the lives of fictional characters whose migrations through unfamiliar landscapes would overcome profound regional differences and unify a fractured national body. Shown in cinemas across the country, Ruiz’s films helped the state consolidate an enduring frontier imaginary that the future of the country lay in the east. Residents of Santa Cruz responded to such films in conflicting ways. Lowland elites eagerly embraced new highways and railways that would link them to the rest of the nation. Yet they harbored a deep fear of the Andean indigenous bodies that would accompany these new forms of mobility. Ruiz and his images also circulated far beyond Bolivia. His success at transplanting his aesthetic repertoire highlights the flow, pervasiveness, and flexibility of midcentury development ideology and the role of film as a powerful vehicle for representing change.

The Meanings of Mobility in Bolivia’s March to the East

The introduction introduces the diverse migrants that settled in lowland Bolivia after the country’s 1952 National Revolution. These include low-German speaking Mennonite farmers from Mexico and Paraguay, Okinawan and Japanese settlers, and Indigenous Andeans from the nation’s own highlands. In contrast to earlier scholarship the introduction places the “March to the East,” a program of internal colonization and infrastructure development as a major, long-lasting, and relatively unexplored legacy of Bolivia’s 1952 Revolution with parallels in other South American nations.

Military Bases and Rubber Tires

This chapter explores the transnational undercurrents of Bolivia’s national revolution. It weaves together the geopolitical and environmental forces that led the Okinawans and Mennonites to Santa Cruz. In postwar Okinawa, the U.S. military displaced farmers as it constructed bases on expropriated lands across the Ryukyuan archipelago. From political protests and blockades to performances of model agrarian citizenship, Okinawans contested removal and several thousand were eventually relocated to Bolivia. There Okinawans employed the same strategy of model agrarian citizenship they had used to contest U.S. removal on the Ryukyuan islands to successfully counter xenophobia in Santa Cruz. The second half of this chapter begins with the small-scale migration of Paraguayan Mennonites to Bolivia in the mid-1950s before turning to Mexico where a prolonged midcentury drought was devastating farming communities in Chihuahua. In the face of drought many Mexican Mennonites initially traveled north to work as laborers on Canadian farms. Returning to Mexico, these braceros brought modern goods and evangelical missionaries back to their traditional colonies. The result was a bitter conflict that centered on the use of rubber tires, rather than steel wheels, on Mennonite tractors and pushed forward an exodus of conservative Mennonites to Bolivia in 1968.

A Sort of Backwoods Guerrilla Warfare

This chapter explores the intertwined migration and expansion of two temperate zone transplants—Mennonites and soybeans—in semitropical Santa Cruz. The transnational history of Bolivian Mennonites offers several interrelated ironies that drive home the paradox of national development in lowland Bolivia. A revolutionary nation-state that sought to use colonization to transform traditional Indigenous subjects into citizens welcomed foreign Mennonites and explicitly freed them from the central components of modern citizenship. Seeking to develop modern, market-oriented agribusiness on its eastern frontier, the MNR invited a traditionalist agricultural community that shunned a wide range of technological innovations. Yet, surprisingly, horse-and-buggy Mexican Mennonites emerged over the following fifty years as exactly the sort of model, mechanized farmers the Bolivian state hoped to create of its own citizenry. In particular, the chapter situates Mennonites amid the dramatic expansion of late twentieth century soybean production that has converted the forested heart of the continent into the world’s preeminent soy region. By then, the logic of the March to the East had definitively shifted from national self-sufficiency to the export of profitable cash crops. Mennonites stood at the center of this neo-extractivism even as they continued to produce dairy within an earlier logic of food security.

To Minister or Administer

Across the Global South, missionary and religious organizations served as state proxies in “secular” modernization projects. In Bolivia, Protestants flocked to new colonization zones at the invitation of the MNR. This chapter explores the Methodist Mission Board and the Mennonite Central Committee (a North American relief agency). Each made Bolivia a center of its global operations and joined with several Maryknoll nuns in an improvised United Church Committee (CIU) in the wake of a devastating 1968 flood. The CIU would go on to administer the San Julián Project, the largest colonization program in Bolivian history during a period of authoritarian rule ushered in by General Hugo Banzer’s 1971 coup. Faith-based development practitioners worked on the ground with colonists, gained the confidence of Banzer, and channeled international funding. During that time, San Julián attracted a range of academics and planners who were drawn to its unique orientation program and spatial design. The chapter follows the trajectories of these mobile actors who leveraged their work in Bolivia into new roles with international agencies and NGOs across the Global South. These “go-betweens” crossed boundaries separating the revolutionary and the authoritarian, the secular and the sacred, and the frontier and the academy.

Past and Present in the Bolivian Lowlands

This conclusion draws on contemporary examples from Santa Cruz to explore the visibility and invisibility of internal and transnational migration. The very scale of the March to the East continually obscures its origins as new agro-industrial operation and its role in accelerating development. In highlighting these realities, the conclusion points to decades-long continuities in lowland policy that are shared by diverse political regimes.