Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Date of Degree
6-2025
Document Type
Doctoral Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
History
Advisor
Mary Roldan
Committee Members
Herman Bennett
Laird Bergad
Marc Edelman
Nancy Appelbaum
Subject Categories
Indigenous Studies | Latin American History | Social and Cultural Anthropology
Keywords
Amazonia, Colombia, Indigenous History, Environmental History, Land Conflicts, Rubber, Ethnogenesis, Indigenous Movements
Abstract
This dissertation examines the reconstruction of the Indigenous societies that survived the Amazon rubber boom (1850-1930), with a specific focus on the Murui-Muina nation in the Colombian municipality of Leguízamo. It is grounded in ten months of ethnographic research in Leguízamo’s Murui-Muina communities and archival research in missionary and official government collections in Colombia, Italy, Spain, and France. I analyzed the written documentation and the Murui-Muina oral tradition through a distinctively interdisciplinary research approach that combines oral history, ethnography, and an ethnographically anchored reading of the archival sources. After their ancestral lands’ conquest, dozens of Murui-Muina clans escaped from rubber stations and found refuge in Leguízamo. By the end of the twentieth century, their new homes were protected as Indigenous resguardos, which cover one-fourth of the municipality’s area. Reclaiming Ancestral Lands shows that the reconstruction of the Indigenous societies that survived the rubber boom could only happen based on a territory the native communities could call their own again. I argue that the protection of the Murui-Muina land in resguardos resulted from the Indigenous population’s struggles to reclaim their ancestral lands from government-led colonization plans and successive extractive cycles. Originally devised by the Spanish Crown to tighten its control over the native population and reduce their land to delimited areas, the Murui-Muina people turned resguardos from instruments of colonial control into meaningful tools to defend their land. My dissertation challenges views that have understood protected territories for ethnic communities only as state concessions or a further step toward land dispossession. Instead, I contend that Indigenous resguardos in Colombian Amazonia were the legal confirmation of a broader social, political, cultural, and economic reconstruction of the region’s Indigenous societies and ancestral lands after the rubber boom.
Recommended Citation
Aponte, Oscar, "Reclaiming Ancestral Lands: The Indigenous Peoples of Colombian Amazonia after the Rubber Boom" (2025). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/6226
Included in
Indigenous Studies Commons, Latin American History Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons
