Revisiting Stagnation: An Urban Environmental History of Iquitos between the Rubber Boom and the Oil Boom, 1920–70

This paper focuses on the hybrid landscapes created by the interactions between the built environment of Iquitos, the largest city of the Peruvian Amazon rainforest, and the ecosystems of the Amazon during the twentieth century. By focusing particularly on the half century that mediated between the end of the rubber boom in the 1920s and the oil boom of the 1970s, it challenges the classic tropes of stagnation and decline that are often used to characterize this period of the city’s history. As the importance of some of the key rural extractive industries diminished, the city became all the more crucial from a regional perspective. Significant works in the realms of urban sanitation, water management, paving and electrification were carried during this period, and pueblos jóvenes (shantytowns) entered the life of the city. Through these infrastructural, spatial, and social changes, Iquitos acquired some of the recognizable traits that have come to define Latin American cities.

 This urban modernization encompassed continuous and intense connections with the rainforest’s powerful ecology. Often assumed as indispensable for the development of Amazonia, it entailed conflicts over the use of the rainforest’s resources, as well as the transformation, commodification, and engineering of nature to meet urban needs. At the same time, the environment conditioned and limited the characteristics of urban infrastructure. The results of these transformations were landscapes that complicate easy distinctions between urban and rural, and between the city and the jungle. An environmental history of Iquitos, therefore, offers a vintage point to explore the degree to which an era of so-called stagnation was in fact one characterized by dynamism and change.