Congratulations to PhD alumnus Ben Nobbs-Thiessen on the publication of his first monograph – Landscapes of Migration: Mobility and Environmental Change on Bolivia’s Tropical Frontier, 1952 to the Present – with UNC Press. Nobbs-Thiessen is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Washington State University. Dr. Jeffrey Lesser advised Nobbs-Thiessen’s 2016 dissertation, “The Cultivated State, Migrants and the Transformation of the Bolivian Lowlands, 1952-2000.” Read a blurb about the book below and see more on the UNC Press website.

In the wake of a 1952 revolution, leaders of Bolivia’s National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) embarked on a program of internal colonization known as the “March to the East.” In an impoverished country dependent on highland mining, the MNR sought to convert the nation’s vast “undeveloped” Amazonian frontier into farmland, hoping to achieve food security, territorial integrity, and demographic balance. To do so, they encouraged hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Bolivians to relocate from the “overcrowded” Andes to the tropical lowlands, but also welcomed surprising transnational migrant streams, including horse-and-buggy Mennonites from Mexico and displaced Okinawans from across the Pacific.