Recently, both history of science and agricultural history have increasingly adopted a transnational perspective that focuses on the circulation of people, materials and ideas. Ben Nobbs-Thiessen's Landscape of Migration is a welcome addition to this evolving scholarship. Tracing the history of three colonist groups – Bolivian highlanders (kollas), Okinawans and Mennonites – to the eastern lowlands, the book addresses how nationalism, developmentalism and religion interacted with the heterogeneous agency of individuals and communities, and how such interactions changed across time, transforming the environment which in turn transformed the colonists’ agrarian life.
The first two chapters introduce the historical contexts underlying the formation of migrant communities in the Bolivian lowlands. After the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) seized power in 1952, it kicked off a ‘March to the East’ project to encourage highlanders from Andean mining cities to colonize the lowland rainforests. Chapter 1 pays attention to propaganda films and pamphlets depicting lowlands with a ‘frontier imaginary’ in which male highlanders asserted their masculinity and female highlanders ‘civilized’ the society, thereby turning colonists into agents of nation building. These media were then circulated across developing countries and used to attract international funding for the colonization. Chapter 2 focuses on foreign colonists – the Okinawans and the Mennonites – attracted by the MNR's project. Annexed by Japan in the nineteenth century, Okinawa had a long history of transpacific migration following Japan's imperial expansion. Under the military occupation of the United States, Okinawa witnessed another wave of migration in the 1950s. While interested in potential economic benefits, the MNR did not favor mass migration due to public opposition to these ‘racial others’, and the Okinawan settlement thus never grew beyond a few thousand people. Mennonite colonists had a different trajectory. An Anabaptist group known for its emphasis on simple living and pacifism, Mennonite colonies in the twentieth century were thriving across the Americas. Although early attempts of Paraguayan Mennonites to colonize the Bolivian lowlands were unsuccessful, a new wave of Mennonites would arrive in the 1960s from Mexico and Canada lured by the frontier imaginary. Notably, by then the MNR government had been overthrown in a coup and its leadership fragmented, while the government began to realize the mismatch between its vision and reality in lowland colonies.
Chapter 3 and 4 turn to the idea of ‘agrarian citizenship’ to analyse how colonists interacted with the state and international organizations to sustain the colonial project. One contested notion in these exchanges was ‘abandonment’: since the late 1950s, the state often blamed colonists for abandoning their settlements, while colonists accused the state of failing to provide the support – infrastructure, credits and technology – necessary for their prosperity. Meanwhile, observers from the United Nations and other developmental agencies generally sided with the state, considering the colonists overly dependent on government intervention. As Nobbs-Thiessen aptly summarizes, for the state, land ownership in its eastern frontier ‘was processional, a goal that colonists aspired to through the performance of good agricultural citizenship, rather than a legal basis from which they could operate’ (p. 129). As Bolivia descended into military dictatorship in the second half of 1960s, faith-based organizations like the United Church Committee (CIU), including Mennonite, Methodist and Catholic development workers, gained a more prominent role in the colonization of the lowlands. Chapter 4 highlights how the CIU's San Julián project tried to reduce abandonment rates by planning several ‘nuclei’ where homes and social services were situated at the center of the colonies while fields were on the outside, therefore increasing solidarity within the community. American anthropologists were also attracted to the experiences of these settlements and brought this knowledge of development to other parts of the world. Non-state actors nevertheless retained an uneasy relationship with the authoritarian government, occasionally struggling to balance their apolitical developmentalism and support for colonists’ protests against state negligence.
The state reliance on faith-based organizations eventually laid the groundwork for the success of Mennonite colonists, detailed in Chapter 5. Compared to earlier Mennonite colonists from Paraguay, Canadian and Mexican Canadian Mennonites who arrived from the 1960s had more capital and stronger ties with the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC). Granted the privilege to import duty-free agricultural machinery, the Mennonites created a vibrant and diverse economy based on corn, sorghum and animal husbandry. Many then facilitated the soybean boom in the 1980s with improved varieties from Brazil. However, the Mennonites were also the first to suffer from the negative effects of soy monoculture: as severe drought and erosion hit the lowlands in the late 1980s, many Mennonites who invested heavily in soybeans relied on the MCC to save them from bankruptcy. Despite these setbacks, soybean would ultimately help transform the lowlands into an agricultural powerhouse, thus fulfilling the vision of colonization while leaving deep environmental and economic impacts on the region.
While agricultural science and technology play only a secondary role in Nobbs-Thiessen's account of the March to the East, his examination of the complex interplay between colonists, the state and international organizations delineates how the knowledge of development often accumulates through trans-local, trans-border movements. Rather than treating developmentalist concepts like the ‘Green Revolution’ as monolithic programs, Landscape of Migration illustrates the fruitfulness of the circulation approach to environmental and agricultural history that historians of science can certainly benefit from. Moreover, by showing the ambivalent consequences of colonists’ desire to exploit the state-sanctioned mobility, the book suggests new ways to scrutinize visions of internal colonization. What remains to be written is the responses of Indigenous communities to the uneven influences of mobility. As Nobbs-Thiessen notes in the epilogue, the 1980s marked certainly not only the beginning of the soybean boom but also the expansion of Indigenous rights movements. To capture this evolving story, historians will also need to move beyond the disciplinary boundary and participate in debates in critical anthropology and geography. As migration becomes a salient theme in the analysis of human–environment relationships, an expanded view on how knowledge of – and access to – the land is contested in multiple power structures is more needed than ever.
