From horseback to motorbikes: inside the motorcycle boom in Indigenous South America

Abstract

The landscape of the South American Lowlands has been drastically changed over the past 150 years by the arrival of mechanical machinery, and particularly the territories inhabited by indigenous peoples who have been forced to adapt to new ways of living, with their traditional life transformed or disrupted. Steamships, railways and trucks used for transportation arrived over the last century, followed by guns, used for both hunting and warfare. Then the arrival of bulldozers and chainsaws, used by the logging industry, has changed the rainforest forever. Meanwhile, electric generators hum constantly in the background. Motorbikes are one of the latest machines to hit the lowlands. Over the last two decades, there has been a huge motorbike boom in Indigenous South America, with more and more indigenous people buying bikes from the money they make trading rubber, timber, palm hearts and Brazil nuts, and I have seen firsthand how motorbikes have drastically changed these people´s lives.