The chapter examines how diverse forms of rural insurgency (i.e. banditry, caudillismo, millenarianism, revolutionary uprisings) were depicted in literature from the tapering off of the civil wars to the Mexican Revolution. Rural insurgency was a paramount preoccupation for letrados of the period, not only because of the material challenges that it posed to the imposition of agrarian capitalism and the sovereignty of the nation-state, but also because rural insurgency tapped into the cultural capital of rural societies (e.g. kinship, networks of patronage), forms of leadership (e.g. caudillismo), heterodox versions of Catholicism to articulate dreams of social justice (e.g. millenarianism). Hence, rural insurgency was considered, by its mere existence, an existential challenge to the very notion of a modern capitalist nation-state. However, the chapter examines how, at the same time that literature served as a sort of “prose of counterinsurgency” (Ranajit Guha), it was also a site of reflection on the dilemmas attending the constitution of a modern polity and culture.

The first Amazon rubber boom (1870–1912) represents a defining event in the history of the Amazon and a pivotal moment in the development of modern industry. This chapter traces, from a transnational perspective, some of the most significant Brazilian and Spanish American literary responses to the cultural, political, territorial, and environmental transformations brought on by rubber extraction in turn-of-the-century Amazonia. It also examines how the literature of the period reinterpreted major rubber-related international incidents, such as the Acre territorial dispute (1899–1903), the Putumayo scandal (1907–1914), and the rubber regime known as “La Funera” (1910–1921). The chapter situates the works of Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909), Alberto Rangel (1871–1945), José Eustasio Rivera (1888–1928), and César Uribe Piedrahita (1897–1951) within regional narrative traditions and in connection with later literary and cultural production related to the Amazon rubber boom.