A Land without Men for Men without Land: How the Nuclear Family Reshaped 20th-Century Amazonia

Drawing especially from Carolyn Merchant’s work on narratives of environmental decline, this paper combines insights from gender studies and environmental history to interrogate the myriad ways in which the discursive characterization of tropical nature as empty, feminine, and in need of male virility conditioned the planning, implementation and ecological consequences of road colonization in the Peruvian Amazon. Beginning in the late 1950s, the Peruvian national gaze set upon the humid tropical forests of the eastern Andean flank with a rekindled zeal. Stress from demographic explosion and the concomitant drive for agrarian reform, led reformists to devise combined road-construction and colonization schemes that would divert migrants away from burgeoning urban slums and a highland context where arable land was in short supply. In this effort, legions of boosters, engineers, cartographers and politicians scrambled to redefine a region; while Peru’s Amazonian territories were once portrayed as modernity’s forgotten backwater, they were now touted for their attractive economic potential. But contrary to prior economic incursions into the region, this new wave of colonization rested on a highly gendered rhetoric of conquest and domestication. In his 1959 book, Perú’s Own Conquest, President Fernando Belaúnde Terry proclaimed the Amazon a “land without men for men without land,” framing men as the only viable agents of forest domestication and positing land as man’s rightful counterpart. Based on this characterization, a normative family unit became the subject of jungle colonization promoted in state-directed colonization schemes. Yet evidence from land court records demonstrates that this gendering of tropical nature was assimilated and contested by the agents of spontaneous colonization, as well.  When newly arrived migrants had to justify their land claims they seized upon the readily available tropes of feminine nature and masculine conquest, but often in the service of their own oppositional agendas.