Introduction: Indigenous Urbanization

in Lowland South America

By
Miguel N. Alexiades and Daniela M. Peluso
University of Kent

Introduction

The popular conception of Amazonia as a predominantly rural place

inhabited by forest peoples is outdated: the vast majority of Amazonians, includ-
ing an increasing number of indigenous peoples, currently either live in, spend
significant amounts of time in, or have developed close links to urban centers.
This revelation, of course, should come as no surprise. Since the beginning of
the 20th century and particularly since the 1950s, the proportion of the world’s
population living in or around urban areas has steadily increased from 13 percent
in 1900 to over 54 percent in 2014 and is projected to continue doing so, reaching
an estimated 66 percent by 2050. This urbanizing trend is particularly dramatic in
“less developed” regions in which the proportion of urban population in 2050 is
henceforth expected to be nearly four times that of 1950 (United Nations 2014).
While global drivers for urbanization are generally attributed to the interplay of
numerous push–pull factors linked to population growth, modernization, and in-
dustrialization (Hardoy and Satterthwaite 1989; Tacoli 2006), there are important
differences between the urbanization histories and trends of those higher-income
countries that underwent large-scale urbanization following the industrial revo-
lution in the late 19th century, and those amidst rapidly urbanizing lower-income
regions today. In the case of much of lowland tropical South America, Africa,
and parts of Asia, for example, the urban transition is not unfolding directly in
response to industrialization, nor is it associated with a large-scale, unidirectional
or permanent migration to cities. Rather, rural–urban linkages in these regions are
driven by a complex interplay of economic, social, political, and technological pro-
cesses, evincing ongoing shifts in the relationship among rural communities, the
state, and the market (Barrett et al. 2001; Ellis 1998; Rigg and Nattapoolwat 2001).

The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 1–12. ISSN 1935-4932, online ISSN
1935-4940. 
C 2015 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/jlca.12133

Introduction: Indigenous Urbanization 1

 The postwar indigenous “demographic turnaround” (McSweeney and Arps
2005), the revolution in transport and communications, and a growing dependency
on modern state services for health and education have all played an important role
in this urbanizing trend. The liberalization of trade and the end of state subsidies
to the agricultural and forest sectors after the 1980s contributed to significant
re-organization of the household economy in rural Amazonia, characterized by
de-agrarianisation and increased involvement in the extractive and service sectors,
often within a largely informal, submerged economy. This in turn has contributed
to enhanced levels of mobility and migration, to a re-engagement with cities and
markets and to intensified rural–urban links and exchanges, often through the use
of complex informal social networks (Peluso and Alexiades 2005; Pinedo-Vasquez
et al. 2001; Tritsch et al. 2014). Other factors such as civil war and social conflict
have contributed to an urbanizing trend in some instances, as will perhaps climate
change in the coming decades (Echeverri 2009; Hoffman and Grigera 2013; Segura
Escobar 2000). Indigenous urbanization,1 as a subset of a wider urbanizing process
in Amazonia, raises a particular set of problems and prospects, particularly in light
of the fact that (1) it is a rather poorly understood phenomenon, (2) it appears
to have a number of distinct aspects and properties, and (3) its existence—given
its invisibility and the complex and ambivalent role it plays on the politics of
indigeneity, identity, and representation—has serious political and policy-related
implications. This volume adds to a small but growing body of literature and seeks
to make a contribution to this important and rapidly emerging field.2

Amazonian Urbanization in Historical Perspective

It is important to place this upswing of indigenous urbanization in a historical con-

text, especially because, as archaeological and historical evidence clearly show, dif-
ferent regions in Amazonia have experienced numerous cycles of (de)urbanization
over time.3 The origins of urban settlement in Amazonia and the Orinoco can
be traced back to the “Formative” period (4000–2000 B.P.) amidst the spread of
agriculture, population growth, sedenterization, and the emergence of ranked so-
cieties. By the time Europeans reached the Americas, Amazonia had developed into
a regionally complex and “differentiated political-economic structure” (Hornborg
2005:593), which included numerous chiefdoms and ranked polities embedded
in an interethnic regional network of trade and exchange. This in turn entailed
large-scale transformations of the landscape and extensive urban development,
albeit of diverse types, and often following very different models of urban-
ism and settlement from those associated with European cities (Erickson 2006;
Heckenberger 2013).

2 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

 European military conquest and the catastrophic effects of the “virgin soil
epidemic” (Crosby 1976) led to massive depopulation and dispersal, the demise of
complex polities and their urban centers, and disarticulation of many of Amazo-
nia’s pre-Columbian trade networks. What subsequently came to be recognized as
typically Amazonian—the relatively small, dispersed, mobile, egalitarian and po-
litically autonomous, hunting-gathering-based societies—are thus in many cases
a historical product of colonization (Denevan 2001). The same colonial forces that
disrupted existing social, ethnic, and political forms and trade networks generated
new ones, often involving new manufactured commodities, particularly metal tools
(Ferguson 1998). Multiple waves of agro-extractive and mercantile booms shaped
much of the region’s subsequent history and colonization (Bunker 1985). These
characteristically “permanent” yet “hollow” Amazonian frontiers (Little 2001)
have historically generated complex and dynamic processes of ethnic, spatial, and
territorial fragmentation, amalgamation, and re-organization (Zent 2009).
Between the 16th and 18th centuries, these processes of colonization and of eth-
nic and economic re-articulation were structured around an extractive-mercantile
economy that was largely regulated by, and formed around, mission settlements.
These, at times quite large, urban centers became crucibles for new, or at any
rate transformed, ethnic, socio-political, and economic formations and networks.
Urban expansion and contraction often reflected a complex interplay between op-
posing forces: the centripetal effect generated by dependency on external goods or
services or the relative protection afforded by missions, for example, often alter-
nated or intermingled with the centrifugal effects of epidemic outbursts or social
conflicts generated within these emergent urban spaces, for example.
The secularization of these mission towns and the “boom and bust” extractive
cycles that sustained frontier development in the Amazon after the 19th century
contributed to a characteristic “disarticulated urbanism” (Godfrey and Browder
1996), with multiple urban centers dispersed within a shifting frontier economy.
Many Amazonian cities have undergone periodic cycles of expansion and contrac-
tion, reflecting population movements into and from the countryside, following
fluxes in the global demand for particular forest products (Pinedo-Vásquez and
Padoch 2009). After the second half of the 20th century, the dynamic relation-
ships between urban and rural spaces became increasingly shaped by the influence
of nation-building and state-driven modernization. The spatial reorganization
generated by modernity created in turn new boundaries and hierarchies—ethnic,
spatial, and territorial (Rubenstein 2001). The subsequent emergence of neolib-
eral capitalism in the 1990s, with the associated processes of democratization,
contraction of the welfare state, and economic liberalization outlined earlier have
contributed to a new phase of regional integration (Santos-Granero and Barclay
2000) and to the particular demographic, social, and territorial urban–rural dy-
namics that are the focus of this volume.

Introduction: Indigenous Urbanization 3

 Figure 1 The Shipibo neighborhood of Cantagallo in the city of Lima, Peru, in January 2013. Photo by
Sanny Ancon.

Despite Amazonia’s variable, heterogeneous, and complex social, economic,

and territorial history, mobility has characteristically served Amazonians as an
effective instrument of spatial and social mediation; of approximation or distancing
from markets and social others, allowing individuals and collectives to manage risk,
uncertainty, and change (Alexiades 2009a; Alexiades and Peluso 2009; Chibnik
1994; Roller 2014). Through the complex flow and interaction between urban and
rural places, Amazonian peoples have been subjects in the historical coproduction
of both, a process that, as historical ecologists remind us, is deeply inscribed in
Amazonian “nature” (Balée 2013; Lehmann et al. 2003; Raffles 2002), and which
continues to this day (Brondizio et al. 2013; Browder 2002).

Defining and Theorizing Indigenous Urbanization in Amazonia Today

The articles in this volume suggest that beyond the obvious reference to rural–
urban migration and to the increased presence of Amazonian indigenous peoples in
cities, indigenous urbanization is best understood as part of a broader social process
premised on the individual and collective refashioning of cultural, political, and
territorial selves. The strategic, dynamic, and mobile positioning and mediation
between—and ultimately appropriation of—different social forms, agents, and

4 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

spaces make this process, in our view, distinctly Amazonian and consistent with
Amazonian cosmologies and worldviews (Overing and Passes 2000; Viveiros de
Castro 1992).
Indigenous urbanizations are simultaneously symbolic, political, and physi-
cal processes with distinct spatial dimensions. The term encompasses an entire
range of multilocational and multidirectional flows, including cyclical and return
migrations, as well as multiple forms of occupation and residence, ranging from
dispersed settlements to indigenous enclaves or neighborhoods, some ephemeral,
some more permanent. The constitution of these new life ways is further consti-
tuted within a broad spectrum of possibilities in terms of who moves, why, under
what conditions, in what circumstances, with whom, at what point in their lives,
how often, for how long, and to what kind of dwelling.
These multiple configurations create a huge assortment of possibilities, real-
ities, and constraints. We are interested in understanding how the relationships
that are established through the urbanizing process both shape and are shaped by
notions of personhood, relatedness, and wellbeing, and, ultimately, how notions
of self and place are transformed within the field of charged social relations that
characterize the urban–rural interface. We also seek to understand the kinds
of problems that such contemporary engagements create in people’s lives, their
health, well-being and livelihoods, and the different individual and collective
responses. In other words, we seek to elucidate how processes of urbanization are
associated with different outcomes and strategies within and among ethnic groups.
Because indigenous urbanization is most often about interconnecting, and thus
transforming, places and peoples, it entails not only the ruralisation of the urban
but also the urbanization of the rural, creating all sorts of hybrid, peri-urban and
sub-urban, spaces in between (Brondizio et al. 2013; Cleary 1993; Wrinkler-Prins
2002). The transformations are, of course, not only spatial and physical but also
ideational, ideological, and aesthetic; because of this, urbanization often begins
in people’s minds and is mobilized through their desires (Peluso and Alexiades
2005; Rubenstein 2012). As a social process, indigenous urbanization in Ama-
zonia subverts the core dichotomies of modernity: urban–rural, nature–culture,
modernity–tradition. In that sense indigenous urbanization provides an excellent
context and medium through which to engage with contemporary theorizations
of personhood, indigeneity, place-making, territoriality, and nature.

Purpose and Outline of This Volume

The motivation for putting together a journal volume dedicated to indigenous

urbanization in Amazonia, which includes four case-study papers and an after-
ward, responds to several of the concerns outlined above. As important, prevalent

Introduction: Indigenous Urbanization 5

 and topical as it is, the issue of indigenous urbanization in Amazonia still remains
relatively underexamined ethnographically. Focusing on indigenous urbanization
counterbalances deep-rooted tendencies to exoticize, emplace, and essentialize the
indigenous. There are also considerable epistemological, ontological, and method-
ological challenges entailed by the study of such complex, multiscale, diverse, and
unbounded networks (Fisher, this volume, Nasuti et al. 2013). Indeed, attempting
to understand and describe “urbanization” in terms of the particularities of the
people involved, the circumstances entailed, the kinds of relations sustained, the
flows and transformations affected, and the resulting consequences, is a daunting
task, especially if it is to be attempted at any scale of generalization. Some of these
challenges, moreover, have very real practical, political, legal, and institutional
implications, especially for indigenous peoples themselves.
It is indeed in this vein that McSweeney and Jokisch’s paper (this volume)
analyses the complex relationship that exists between indigenous urbanization,
as a distinct form of “de-territorialization,” and the concomitant advances made
by indigenous peoples to secure rights to homelands on the basis of traditional
occupation, as ongoing forms of “re-territorialization.” They do so as an explicit
counterpoint to what they see as a dangerous tendency among policy makers
and their advisers to see the two processes as fundamentally at odds with each
other. This narrative, evident for example in UN documents, draws on reified
assumptions of indigenous people as fundamentally tied to place, and sees their
urban relocation as one that weakens their attachment to their homelands and
that is thus at odds with the legitimacy or political will to sustain their land-
based claims. Drawing on published ethnographic evidence, the authors affirm
the opposite. They suggest that indigenous urbanization and territorialization
work in harmony, not in opposition, and so need to be understood in relation to
each other. This is because, the authors argue, in addition to whatever “push–pull”
factors contribute to individuals moving toward the city, contact with the city
catalyzes a profound political transformation, providing indigenous peoples with
unique opportunities and means to effectively articulate their claims.
In the chapter that follows, Fisher explores a seemingly different paradox in
the relationship between indigenous peoples and cities, in this case among the
Ramkôkamekra-Canela in northeastern Brazil. Why and how, despite decades
of familiarity, opportunity and established social networks bridging urban and
rural areas, despite the near-universal desire for salaried work and the services
and goods offered by the city, and despite the almost complete absence of paid
work in the reservation, asks Fisher, have the Canela consistently avoided wage
labor outside of the reservation or moving to the cities? Likewise, despite their
long-standing, close, and frequent contact with cities and towns, the Canela have
not differentiated into “urban” and “rural” groupings, intermarried with out-
siders, established nuclear homesteads, or become dependents of local powerful

6 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

elites. The ability of the Canela to “include the urban area within their orbit
without being urbanized” suggests Fisher, is related to the way in which mobility
coupled and counterposed to a ceremonial system based on an internally differen-
tiated system of rank and hierarchy. High-ranking Canela leverage their internal
prestige and their relationship with powerful outsiders to loan money and chan-
nel funds and resources from powerful others to support ceremonial activities.
The frequent movement and alternation of residences and periods of dispersion
between town, hamlet, garden settlement, and other spaces allow Canela of dif-
ferent rank to navigate through a complex social field marked by differences in
wealth, class, rank, and ethnicity—ultimately enabling “the reproduction of the
age classes and the matri-uxorilocal organization and unified plan of the main
village.”
In the third paper, Peluso provides further evidence to support the idea that
indigenous urbanization is often highly contingent and situational and is best
evinced not as a simple or permanent migration to the city, but rather as part
of an ongoing circulation of people that connects different communities, towns,
and multiple-sited dwellings, as individuals “craft urban and rural aspects of self”
refashioning themselves as multidimensional subjects. She illustrates this process
through a collection of detailed ethnographic vignettes organized around three
primary contexts or motivations underlying Ese Eja sojourns into the city; accessing
secondary education, providing an escape from conflict in the community or as a
rite of passage of sorts, allowing adolescents to craft a sense of self by experimenting
with modernity in juxtaposition to their own indigeneity.
In the fourth and last case study, Janet Chernela examines the social trajectories
of a large group of Tukanoan women from different age cohorts following their
forced migration as young girls between 1968 and 1980 from their communities
in the Upper Rio Negro region to the city of Manaus. Here they lived and worked
in isolation and seclusion as unsalaried domestic servants for households in the
city’s air force compound until the banning of the practice by the Russell Tribunal.
While the circumstances and manner in which these women migrated is clearly
very different to those described by the other authors in the volume, Chernela’s
account and analysis of how the women actively and collectively reconstituted their
lives within the metropolis after they were released resonate with the descriptions
of agency and social appropriation of urban spaces and of modernity described
earlier.

Rethinking Indigenous Urbanization in Amazonia

The articles in this volume urge us to consider indigenous urbanization in Ama-

zonia in the context of numerous forms of mobility, as the interplay of individual

Introduction: Indigenous Urbanization 7

 and collective agencies, as part of an ongoing refashioning of indigenous social and
political identities, and amidst the coproduction of new forms of territoriality and
nature. This view contrasts sharply with pre-established notions of urbanization
as entailing and generating exactly the opposite: emplacement; social, cultural, ter-
ritorial, and political dilution; and disenfranchisement. The disjuncture between
these emergent and orthodox views of indigenous urbanization has, as we have
already reiterated, direct implications that extend well beyond the merits of intel-
lectual theorization. This is particularly the case given that indigenous claims to
rights, resources, and territories are commonly substantiated through claims to
ancestry, emplacement, and tradition, and often directly linked to environmental
conservation and to territories that are adjacent to or within natural protected
areas (Fisher 1994).
These two contrasting views of indigenous urbanization have very different
political implications and potential outcomes. This is particularly the case amidst
a new, aggressive, and expanding neoliberal agro-extractive frontier organized
around energy (oil and gas, hydroelectric, biofuels), mining, transport, and agro-
industrial sectors. The extent to which indigenous peoples can retain control over
vast territories—many of them within or around natural protected areas—is in
large part dependent on the kinds of relationships they form with both cities
and forests and, most importantly, how these are understood, represented, and
communicated. If urbanized indigenous peoples, as some representations contend,
are not “really” indigenous, then their claims to highly contested lands, resources,
and rights become unsubstantiated. The politics of authenticity, in other words,
are increasingly being drawn into Amazonia’s global arena of the 21st-century
socio-environmental conflicts, and the issue of indigenous urbanization is likely
to become a core element within these dynamics.
One way to unravel the political and representational “dilemma” created by
the apparent contradiction between indigeneity and urbanization is through closer
examination of the historical context in which such a contradiction emerged, which
we assign in turn to the social, economic, and political changes of the 20th century.
There are two interweaving strands to our argument here. The first relates to
the proposition that the point at which Amazonian indigeneity became a socially
and politically productive asset, as opposed to a liability, and the extent to which
urbanization became constitutive, as opposed to dilutive, to the formation of
indigenous identity and indigenous political mobilization, is concurrent with the
neoliberal transformation of the past 30 years (Chaves and Zambrano 2006; Perz
et al. 2008). This trend, nicely illustrated in Chernela’s (this volume) diachronic
portrait of the changing relationship between Tukanoan women’s indigeneity
and “white” society in Manaus, can be traced to a number of overlapping post-
1990 processes; democratization, the liberalization of the economy and trade, the

8 J ournal of L atin A merican and C aribbean A nthropology

proliferation of civil society, and a shift toward heterogenisation—spatial, political,
cultural, and economic (Alexiades 2009b).
The degree to which the postmodern revitalization of the “indigenous” has
drawn on socially powerful, essentialized and thus easily deconstructed, modern
ontologies and dichotomies is, of course, now generating its own ironic set of
problems and challenges for indigenous peoples (Conklin and Graham 1995). As
McSweeney and Jokisch (this volume) note, “that such archetypally rural peoples
are increasingly living urban and often transnational lives challenges orthodox
notions of indigeneity, mobility, identity, and raises important questions about
the meaning of urban circulations for native Amazonians’ long-term territorial
struggles.”
The ontological debates surrounding authenticity amidst these new forms of
(de)territorialization are often internalized within indigenous collectives, both in
intra- and interethnic contexts and disputes and struggles over rights, resources,
and representation (Albert n.d.; Espinosa 2012; Gow 2003; La Neta 2014; O’Driscoll
2015). The ambivalence toward urbanization may also in part explain the relative
inattention this phenomenon has received among policy makers, indigenous orga-
nizations, and local service providers. At the same time, however, an increasingly
numerous urban indigenous constituency is generating new political and territo-
rial transformations, illustrated by the rising prominence of indigenous leaders
or indigenous issues in electoral politics, or formally recognizing cabildos (Indian
councils) within urban areas (Chavez and Zembrano 2006).
These new emergent forms of multisited and multilocal indigeneity, sociality,
and spatiality demand new kinds of engagement: scholarly, institutional, and po-
litical. They urge us to reconsider our own scholarly “sitedeness,” purpose, and
positionality amidst the open-ended questions, difficult challenges, and high stakes
created by indigenous Amazonians’ ongoing entanglements with the rest of the
world. This volume hopes to contribute to this process.

Notes

1 The category of “indigenous” in Amazonia, as elsewhere, is of course quite fluid, blurred, and

often contested. The articles included in this volume refer to people who self-identify as such. Many
of the principles and issues discussed here, however, also apply to other collectivities, including Afro-
indigenous groups or indigenous peasants such as caboclo or ribereño communities (Harris 1998; Nasuti
et al. 2013).
2 See, for example, Andrello 2004, Bogado Egüez 2010, Calavia Sáez 2004, Eloy and Lasmar 2012,

Espinosa 2009, Garcı́a Castro 2000, Imilán 2010, Linstroth 2014, Mainbourg et al. 2002, Peluso 2004,
Peña Márquez 2010, Simmons et al. 2002, Urrea Giraldo 1994, Virtanen 2009, Virtanen 2010, Whitten
et al. 1976, and Wroblewski 2014; also, for urbanization among Amazonian caboclo and ribereño see
Harris and Nugent 2004, Nugent 1993, and Wagley 1953.
3 For a more detailed summary of the history of mobility and migration in Amazonia and for a

more extensive list of sources for this section see Alexiades 2009a:5–15.

Introduction: Indigenous Urbanization 9

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