by Ximena Cecilia Martinez Trabucco

The materiality of land is ductile, not simply because tectonic forces shift the Earth’s plates or because the interaction of water and soil continuously reshapes the landscape, but because land acquires different valences and uses across time and among different actors. Under Dr. Carlota McAllister’s supervision, and as part of the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, my postdoctoral research investigates land as a site where diverse forces converge, shaping how it is perceived, occupied, used, experienced, signified, and felt. Tania Li (2014) aptly describes land as a “strange object”: it is not the same for a peasant as it is for a tax collector, and the attachments formed by inhabiting a place differ fundamentally from those shaped by observing it from a distance. Land, in this sense, is not a fixed entity but one constituted through multiple, shifting meanings. Using Stuart Hall’s conjunctural analysis, I examine the power dynamics surrounding land. Through this lens, I ask how the interplay of neoliberal market dynamics, international minority-rights frameworks, and emergent ethnoracial identities has reconfigured the Azapa and Lluta valleys in northern Chile and what these changes mean for people and the land.

The area of the research: the valleys of Azapa and Lluta

The locus of my research is the southern Andes, specifically the Azapa and Lluta valleys in northern Chile, near the borders of Peru and Bolivia. Studying valleys is fascinating. Their biodiversity, abundant water, and rich soil attract long-term human settlement. The interaction with the environment prompts the development of place-based knowledge and complex land-tenure systems that are immersed in equally complex cultural practices. However, their high value and strategic location usually spark conflict between interested parties, illuminating power relations. Connected to these reasons, my interests are both personal and academic. I grew up in the nearby city and watched the place, its people, and their relationships change gradually; in turn, those changes have shown ways in which people respond and what adaptive capacities emerge when market dynamics are unleashed, as has been the case in Chile during the last forty years. Examining the power dynamics in these valleys offers a window into how land becomes a particular type of global resource (Li, 2014) that attracts multiple actors and the consequences of that process for both the materiality of land and its cultural significance. It also illuminates how land rights are negotiated within a globalized economic system, particularly in Latin America, where ethnic identity and land claims are usually entangled and continually contested.

Brief history of the valleys

Although the Azapa and Lluta valleys are commonly described as marginal to the Andes, they have been important in local, regional, and continental development (Alvarado, 1970; Assadurian,1982; Hidalgo, 1993; Álvarez, 2014). Traditionally, these valleys were occupied by local Indigenous populations, and later, during colonial times, large estates were distributed among Spanish settlers, who benefited from the forced resettlement of Indigenous populations and of enslaved black people. In the early republic, Peru held sovereignty over this region. This status lasted until the end of the 19th century, when, following the War of the Pacific, Chile took control of the region and redistributed the most fertile land among a few families of more desirable immigrants. Italians, Lebanese, and a few Asian families became landowners. Black landowners who had acquired land previously to the war were expelled by the Chilean government, fleeing to Peru or settling in Arica, the nearest urban center. Only a few of them kept their land, and many others were relegated to the status of agricultural labourers.  

For decades, peasants practiced a subsistence agriculture, with olive trees as the main crop, alongside small-scale horticulture. During the 1950s and 1960s, Chile underwent an agricultural reform, and Andean peasants from higher altitudes, who received between one and two hectares per family, transformed frontier land into cultivable areas. As described by those who benefited from the agrarian reform, all the terrain after the first kilometres of the valleys was just stony ground; they transformed these areas into green horticultural fields; however, the subsistence character remained, and peasants could only supply local food demand. In 1993, after the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster), a pest that for decades had affected the region, was controlled, this pattern began to shift. The change was slow at first, but a decade later, the price of the land became so high that even half a hectare, the smallest legal unit that agrarian land can be subdivided in Chile, became nearly unattainable for residents.

Since the fruit fly was controlled, the agricultural production transformed from subsistence to mostly commercial. Although this change impacted both valleys, it has been the Azapa Valley the one that has experienced a radical change in a short time span. The green fields were olive trees, leafy vegetables, fruits, and a variety of herbs and spices used to grow practically disappeared, making room for greenhouses dedicated mainly to cultivating tomatoes that are sold in southern Chile and Argentina. Seen from aerial images, the surface of the Azapa valley is almost impossible to distinguish; one can only see hectares and hectares of brownish agricultural mesh that harbours tomatoes and, on rare occasions, other crops like sweet peppers and cucumbers. But the explosion of tomato production meant the implosion of rich ways of living and the transformation of land in its distribution, use, and meaning. Thirty years ago, the valleys were seen as places where a few well-off families and campesinos lived; nowadays, the valleys, and particularly the Azapa valley, are seen as tomato factories, and in their first kilometres, they have become a desired destination for upper-middle-class professionals, who, seeking to runaway from the city and its urban growing population, have illegally transformed agrarian land into luxury dwellings. Thus, the valleys, and in particular, the Azapa valley, are symbols of status and agricultural modernization.

But transforming the valleys into agro-industrial factories, and secondarily into luxury dwellings, unlike what one could think, did not mean that only new actors were involved in land ownership, nor can rising land prices be explained by market demand alone. Rather, many and myriad forces have intervened across scales.

The conjuncture

Following Stuart Hall’s definition of a conjuncture, I characterize the recent transformation of the valleys to one of the world’s most expensive agricultural soils as a conjuncture.  For Hall, a conjuncture is a specific, historically produced moment where political, economic, social, and ideological contradictions come together, providing a society with a distinct, often unstable shape. It is a complex, temporary fusion of forces that enables a profound power shift, making it both a moment of danger and opportunity” (Clarke, 2010). I interrogate the various factors -historical and recent events- that have come into play, for instance, motivating newly form Afrodescendants organizations and Indigenous organized political groups to claim these valleys as their ancestral territories in light of the Chilean ratification of the ILO 169 Convention. I also interrogate the policies and market dynamics that have motivated an illegal urbanization equally led by the upper and lower classes. I also examine the mechanisms that enabled a few sharecroppers, mostly Bolivian immigrants, to become prosperous farmers despite the legal, cultural, and social constraints they have historically faced. They, among other actors, have engaged in a process of land and water accumulation that is invisible to authorities and to the inexpert eye, which renders land and people in perfect conditions for classical capitalist exploitation.

As Hall et al. (1978) explain, a conjuncture is not random, but a dynamic, interconnected “totality” of social relations of force. A conjuncture may seem chaotic, but it is rooted in long-term structural forces. When considering this important premise, the mentioned elements of the conjuncture need to be placed in a longer period. The market primacy that coexists with the expansion of Indigenous and Tribal people’s rights after the ratification of the 169 ILO Convention, and the current far-right government in power, one can only understand the transformation of space with all the layers of meaning that arise if the elements of the conjuncture are traced. Since the 1990s, Chile has entered into a new phase of accelerated liberalism (Rose, 1999). Unlike the preceding dictatorial period, during which environmental policies and market-oriented land legislation were imposed through executive decrees, the subsequent wave of reforms that favoured private interests was conducted through parliamentary processes. This time, under democratically elected center-left governments, the neoliberal agenda further refined the legal framework that divided water and land into distinct commodities while facilitating the entry of transnational capital into Chile for mining, agroindustry, and forest industries.  But that a left-wing government furthered privatization was not the only puzzle. While Chile opened to international markets, it passed legislation that recognized nine ethnic populations as part of the Indigenous populations that had inhabited Chile since precolonial times. These populations were linked to specific geographical areas, some of which, especially in northern Chile, were the target of extractivist transnational capital. Within this conjuncture in which two ideological stances collided, market-oriented politics and ethno minority rights, the legal and political framework that made it possible for them to converge is what scholars such as Hales (1994) and Postero (2007) have named neoliberal multiculturalism. In this framework, the state recognizes and even celebrates cultural diversity as long as it does not interfere with the interests of the market. Moreover, cultural diversity itself becomes an asset. In Chile, neoliberal multiculturalism took the form of a series of policies and social programs that sought to support the socio-economic improvement of individuals certified by the state as Indigenous while facilitating their dialogue with transnational capital.

The enactment of the law that recognized the existence of Indigenous populations and the consequential economic support that Indigenous individuals received is one of the reasons that may explain the proliferation of demands for recognition of other minority groups. As part of these groups in the early 2000s, Afrodescendants organized and demanded their recognition as also part of the groups that lived in the current Chilean territory before the formation of the liberal state. In 2008, Chile ratified the ILO 169 Convention on Indigenous and Tribal Rights, expanding the recognition of the rights of minority groups by introducing the concept of territory. In this context, the valleys, Azapa and Lluta, were reclaimed by Afrodescendant political groups as their traditional and ancestral territory. A vindication that took on more relevance after Afrodescendants were recognized in Chile under the 169 ILO Convention in 2018. Since then, Aymara Indigenous organizations have also reclaimed ancestrality over the valleys, engaging in a conflict with Afrodescendants. However, all of this happens only within the limits of a legal framework that, above all, primarily recognizes private property. Thus, the collective nature of Indigenous and Tribal Rights is so far nominal, while Indigenous certified subjects who have land are better equipped to engage in market dynamics with state subsidies that, as usual, aid the development of capitalist endeavours.

But the aforementioned are not the only elements of the conjuncture. So far, I have come to understand other forces involved and their interconnectedness, which render the valleys as disputed spaces. On the one hand, some advocate for the ecological conservation of the valleys, while on the other hand, some see and use the valleys as mere, but highly profitable, commodities. In the middle of those extremes, we find ambiguous legislation, the separation of water and land into two expensive commodities, an entrenched entrepreneurial doctrine, exploitative productive relations anchored in historical racial hierarchies, and efforts to engage the valleys in the circulation of global capital. For instance, extractive economies in the Andean region, driven in places as far away as Canada, Australia, and the United States, have generated patterns of displacement and dispossession, putting pressure on cities that resulted in the expansion of the urban frontier into the agrarian land of the valleys. Also, the role that insects play as ecological-economic influencers in what Olivadesse and Dindo (2025) explain to be both destroyers and supporters of food systems, responsible for famines and agricultural productivity. These two phenomena articulate with processes of agricultural commodification and intensification, through which the valleys are incorporated into agro-export circuits.

The convergence of these forces generates a field of struggle in which competing projects of capital accumulation, territorial recognition, and subaltern claims to land are differentially authorized, contested, and negotiated. The valleys emerge as a site of contestation, where the meaning and uses of land are continuously rearticulated through uneven relations of power. From this perspective, the changes experienced in the valleys, and more conspicuously in the Azapa valley, are not merely a shift resulting from economic dynamics. It is a reorganization of space and its understanding, signification, and management, producing new forms of inclusion, exclusion, and conflict.

Research questions

Thus, some of the questions that guide my research relate to the elements of the conjuncture. I ask: 1) How is land being assembled in the context of neoliberalism, international agreements on ethno minority Rights, and the emergence of novel ethno-racial identities? 2)  How do historical and contemporary uses of land in the Azapa and Lluta valleys reflect the entangled relationships between ethnicity, identity, and the constitution of land as a resource in the context of globalization? 3) How do Afro-descendant claims to the Azapa and Lluta valleys shape national debates about land as a resource and its relationship to cultural rights and neoliberal policies? 4) How do neoliberal pressures to turn land into an economic resource affect the ability to exert cultural rights, shape inter-ethnic relations, and influence socio-political movements? 5) What can we learn from Afro-descendants’ emergence as a political group and as land claimants? And, 6) how does the intersection of multiculturalism and international legal frameworks affect the future of land for minority groups and civil society in general?

Methods and fieldwork challenges

To answer these (and other emergent) questions, I use a mixed-methods approach. I am currently conducting fieldwork. So far, I have reviewed documents from the agrarian reform of the 1960’s and 1970’s, conducted policy analysis, visited the valleys, taken on-site pictures, observed the valleys through satellite images, conducted interviews, participated in a session of participatory cartography, and even learned about insects. The research has not gone as smoothly as I expected. Trust is the main obstacle. Competition for land and water is part of the issue, but the sketchy relationship between the valleys’ inhabitants and the state has put me in a difficult position. It has caused most of my interviewees to think of me as a government agent trying to find, for instance, if they are illegally using groundwater or if I am interested in learning how they get the money to pay for one of the world’s most expensive agricultural lands. These dynamics complicate access to information and require persistent relationship-building. A task in which I continually work.

This research is an expansion of my doctoral research, which I conducted at the Department of Social Justice Education at OISE, University of Toronto, with the great support and mentorship of Dr. Tania M. Li. My research and dissertation titled “ analyzed the relationship between land and the formation of political identities, with a particular focus on Aymara identity. The research examined key sociopolitical and economic moments that have shaped how land is understood, inhabited, and signified, highlighting the deep connection between land and people. It also demonstrated how, in northern Chile, the intersections of class, race, citizenship, and indigeneity converge around the materiality of land. I now propose to extend my analysis of the evolving relationship between the state and ethnic groups with a focus on Chilean Afro-descendants who face the challenge of navigating a hypermodern Chilean society while constructing an ethnic identity to access newly available economic and cultural opportunities.

Author biography:
Dr. Ximena Martinez Trabucco joined EUC as a postdoctoral fellow in June of 2026, under the supervision of Dr. Carlota McAllister. She is a scholar of land, Indigeneity, and environmental justice in the south-central Andean region (the Chilean, Peruvian, and Bolivian border). She holds a PhD in Social Justice Education from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), University of Toronto, where she also completed a Master of Arts in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education. Her academic formation integrates history, geography, and anthropology, grounding her interdisciplinary approach to territorial conflicts and multicultural governance. Her SSHRC Postdoctoral Research examines how ancestral territorial claims in the valleys of Azapa and Lluta in northern Chile are negotiated within contemporary regimes of recognition and public policy in the context of neoliberal multiculturalism. Her broader scholarly interests include Indigenous and Afro-descendant territorial struggles, environmental justice in the Global South, and the political economy of land in peri-urban and rural contexts. She has extensive experience in formal and community-based education across Latin America and Canada, working with teacher candidates, marginalized communities, and educators in underserved territories.

References

Alvarado, L. (1970). La vida rural en el altiplano chileno. ICIRA.

Álvarez, L. (2014). Etnopercepción andina: valles dulces y valles salados en la vertiente occidental de los Andes. Diálogo Andino, 44, 5-14. 

Assadourian, C. (1982). El sistema de la economía colonial: mercado interno, regiones y espacio económico. Instituto de Estudios Peruanos.

Clarke, J. (2010). Of crises and conjunctures: The problem of the present. Journal of Communication Inquiry, 34(4), 337-354.

Hale, C. R. (1994). Resistance and contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan state,  1894-1987. Stanford University Press.

Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts, J. (1978). Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law’n’Order. London: Macmillan.

Li, T. (2014). What is land? Assembling a resource for global investment. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 39(4), 589-602.

Olivadese M, Dindo ML (2025) Plagues, famines, and fear: How insects influenced the course of human history. Bulletin of Insectology 78: 83-96.

Postero, N. (2007). Now we are citizens: Indigenous politics in postmulticultural Bolivia. Stanford University Press.

Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge University Press.