Social construction of the territory: native peoples, State and large extractive capital

Abstract

The right to recognition of indigenous territories is a long-standing demand of the original populations. However, political and economic processes mostly associated with periods of high dynamism of extraction of natural resources (the most significant was the period of the rubber boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) acted against the current possession of these ancestral territories. The reconstruction of territorial and cultural identity has been and is part of a long process of building their social agency by these populations. The case of the creation of the Megantoni district (2016), in the Cusco region of Peru, shows a long process of occupation and social construction in a part of the ancestral matsigenka territory, Lower Urubamba. Its main characteristic is to have an absolute majority of the original population (about eight thousand inhabitants). It is a territory characterized by its high biodiversity and for having important sedimentary gas deposits in the subsoil, which makes this a confluence space for diverse actors and interests. Achieving recognition of the area as a district can also be a form of resistance to the presence of extractive capital. For the matsigenka population that has accessed the district government, it implies a new challenge in this long walk of building their territory with their own identity.