In Colombia, the case of the Caja Agraria, Colombia's agricultural development bank, represents a crucial site in debates over the contested relationship between Indigeneity and economic modernization in the aftermath of the Great Depression. Colonial frameworks about ethnicity persisted even as the state sought to redefine citizenship in terms of market participation, ultimately shaping political mobilization in rural spaces. At the height of the Cold War, rural modernization was debated on air, as a transnational rural radio network reformulated Indigenous relationships to development experts’ schemes in the 1970s. This case illustrates how Indigenous broadcasters became increasingly skeptical of outside development programs—even as their own radio stations grew from those projects—and instead promoted localized practices, emphasizing alternative approaches learned from within rather than from without. Spanning multiple periods, the case of the Yaqui Aqueduct in Sonora, Mexico—inaugurated in 2024 as a symbolic gesture of restitution despite being unfinished and connected to a nearly empty dam—illuminates the problems of development in Indigenous territories. The history of Yaqui River water extraction, from the 1930s through the present, reveals how development projects continue to shape Indigenous spaces in a post-extraction era.

Responding to a series of recent studies on technocratic expertise in the Latin American countryside, these papers argue for the need to center how development practices interacted with Indigenous lives, lifeways, and livelihoods. At the same time, the papers trace how state and foreign development agendas raise crucial questions about the political, social, economic, and environmental meanings of Indigeneity in local and global contexts. As a whole, this panel offers new narratives and perspectives for understanding the uneven relationship between development and Indigenous identity throughout the hemisphere.