La Frontera

Thomas Miller Klubock is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Contested Communities: Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904–1951, and a coeditor of The Chile Reader: History, Culture, Politics, both also published by Duke University Press.

"La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile's Frontier Territory tells the compelling backstory to Chile's forestry boom. Indigenous people, settlers and foresters were pushed out through enclosure and fraud, as temperate rainforest was burned to make way first for agriculture, then sterile plantations of Monterey pine." - Patience Schell (Times Higher Education)  "A much-needed analysis of a region the history of which has been understudied."  - Claudio Robles-Ortiz (Journal of Agrarian Change) “La Frontera brings a great deal to the table; individual chapters provide enough fodder for a week’s seminar meeting. Undergraduates might feel overwhelmed, but as that list of themes indicates, they will find in the book many crucial features of the long twentieth century in Latin America as a whole.With Klubock’s telling, we have new ways to understand how Chile experienced those processes.” - Thomas D. Rogers (Hispanic American Historical Review) “La Frontera makes its social subjects come alive. It convincingly shows that the debate over the forest has a long history and that we cannot understand forest policy without taking social history into account. This is political ecology at its best.” - Eduardo Silva (European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies) "Klubock’s source base for this nuanced and detailed monograph includes diverse archival materials, many of which had not previously been used by historians, as well as oral histories of forestry workers, labour activists and indigenous communities. ... This is an excellent study, addressing an extremely complex history, to which a review of this length cannot do justice. La Frontera  pioneers a new approach to social and environmental history and will be a reference in point for years to come." - Patience A. Schell (Journal of Latin American Studies) "This exceptional book is a rare combination of the best traditions of social history and environmental history in a powerful analysis of Chile’s forestry sector from the late nineteenth century to the present.... Readers interested in the contemporary environmentalist challenge of Mapuche movements today will find La Frontera indispensable. Historians interested in Latin America’s experience of 'enclosing of the commons' will find no better book."  - Heidi Tinsman (The Historian) "Insightful and necessary." - Emily Wakild (Canadian Journal of History)

• Acknowledgments viiMaps xIntroduction 11. Landed Property and State Sovereignty on the Frontier 292. Natural Disorder: Ecological Crisis, the State, and the Origins of Modern Forestry 583. Forest Commons and Peasant Protest on the Frontier, 1920s and 1930s 904. Changing Landscapes: Tree Plantations, Forestry, and State-Directed Development after 1930 1185. Peasants, Forests, and the Politics of Social Reform on the Frontier, 1930s-1950s 1456. Agrarian Reform and State-Directed Forestry Development, 1950s and 1960s 1767. Agrarian Reform Arrives in the Forests 2088. Dictatorship and Free-Market Forestry 2399. Democracy, Environmentalism, and the Mapuche Challenge to Forestry Development 268Conclusion 298Notes 309Bibliography 361Index 373