Textual Forests

Abstract

In Latin America, transnational and multicultural spaces like the Amazon rainforest have been portrayed by politicians, entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and writers as inner frontiers, as spaces of otherness. They constitute what Mary Louis Pratt has defined as “contact zones”: places of colonial encounters in which people who were geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish among themselves relations based on coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.¹ Rainforests have been seen in the dominant imaginaries on the one hand as the wilderness, and on the other hand as economic and symbolic repositories that offer wealth and hope to the nation. According to the central powers and the economic and political elites, these inner frontiers should be conquered and “civilized,” totally ignoring the lives and rights of their Amerindian populations in order to extract from them their “unlimited” riches that should redeem Latin America from its poverty.