LASA/EANLAS: Rethinking Trans-Pacific Ties: Asia and Latin America

The Chinese Dragon in the Bolivian Amazon: Indigenous girls body-mapping transnational capital

• In Event: Socio-environmental impact of the growing Chinese investment in Latin America

Abstract

World hegemony—increasingly disputed by China—has been widely analyzed in a macro-structural context, rather than in the lives and bodies of those who experience their effects in an intimate way. Although the rapid expansion of Chinese finance in Latin America has attracted the attention of academics and policy-makers, few have approached the territories themselves in which Chinese capital has settled. This work charts the experiences of indigenous girls from the Santa Ana community in the Bolivian Amazon traversed by the construction of a highway built by a Chinese company. Drawing from participatory mapping, I analyze three “body-territory” maps made by indigenous girls about the transformations experienced by this intervention of their territory. This community-based approach allows me to explore the intersections of gender, age, and race that are the subject of interest of intimate geopolitics in its analysis of the situated and specific, and its connections with the global dynamics of power. This case informs the daily-life violence of indigenous women, girls, and communities impacted by Chinese capital, the renegotiation and restructuring of community life around the company and its workers, and the fears and damage experienced in the body-territory in these processes. I argue that these maps offer insights to the understanding of the complexity of the Chinese presence in Latin America from an indigenous perspective, and stress the need to destabilize top-down approaches that omit the spatial, corporeal, and affective processes of the transnational capital now led by China.

Author

• Nohely Guzman, University of California, Los Angeles