On the Edge of the Wild: Representations of Peru’s Montaña Region and its Indigenous Peoples, an Enduring Frontier between the Andean and Amazonian Worlds

Abstract

On the Edge of the Wild demonstrates how Indigenous peoples, Spanish conquistadors, missionaries, scientific explorers, and early national elites have formulated conceptions of the montaña region—located at the eastern slopes of the Andean highlands in northern Peru—and how these ideas have changed or adapted over time. This is a regional history of the montaña—with a special focus on the Huallaga and Mayo river valleys in the vicinity of the colonial cities of Moyobamba and Lamas in northern Peru—that traces back past ecological, cultural, and geopolitical considerations that have positioned the montaña region as a central place within the territorial imagination of Peru, and more generally of the Andean World. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the environmental attributes of the montaña region have allowed its diverse residents to see the value in maintaining a physical and cultural barrier from colonial powers and urban early national elites. Indigenous and Spanish chroniclers portrayed the Inca Empire’s difficulties with this region, turning it into a perennial frontier between imperial civilization and a wilderness inhabited by 'savages'. Over the course of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, the montaña changed from a romanticized gateway to a golden El Dorado; to a north-south corridor for missionaries hunting for souls to convert and civilize; to a frontier zone and project for improvement; and finally, to a potential emporium as well as barrier to commercial possibilities that would link the new nation of Peru with Brazil and the industrializing economies of North America and Europe, before the rubber boom of the late nineteenth century exploded these prior visions. This project contributes to the fields of environmental, regional, colonial Latin American, and Indigenous peoples’ history. Countering the tendency by scholars to treat the Andes versus Amazonia as separate or in tension, On the Edge of the Wild seeks to bridge the gaps between these two ‘worlds’ by identifying some of the lost cultural and economic linkages drawn from the montaña’s and its inhabitants’ history. In a context where Natives from the montaña region—specifically the Kechwas of Lamas and vicinity—are still in the process to obtain their territories’ title, this project sheds light on their ancestral and historical connections with this montaña and with the colonial-era Indigenous group known as the Motilones.