The gold-mining waste frontier collides with conservation efforts in the south of the Peruvian Amazon, placing Indigenous communities in a challenging landscape. This essay shares insights from the field on how the process of frontier expansion is lived and experienced by Peruvian youth, written from my position as a professor of Sociology based in the city of Lima. It narrates daily life situations and encounters among young people, approaching the frontier through the eyes of students at an elite university in the capital of Peru, and at the high school of the Puerto Luz native community. The piece first takes you to the field in the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve, then contextualizes the landscape in a global and national policy panorama to show how global agendas and local expectations resonate with each other. Finally, it engages dialogues among youth and the role of education in frontier processes.
Delgado-Pugley, Deborah,
"Inside an Amazonian Communal Reserve: Education and Youth in a Frontier of Gold-mining Waste"
(2022).
Commodity Frontiers.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/9htp-be80
Commodity Frontiers is the Journal of the Commodity Frontiers Initiative (CFI). Edited by a group of scholars and researchers from various disciplines and organizations in the CFI Network, the Journal explores the history and present of capitalism, contestation, and ecological …
