Indigenous peoples in “twin” towns in the Amazon between invisibility and urban territorialization

A retrospective outlook

Abstract

Based on a retrospective review, and dialoguing widely with anthropology, this article deals with the process, first of invisibility, and later of ethnic, socio-cultural, and political revival of the indigenous peoples who have lived, and still do, in urban spaces regarded as towns or “twin” settlements at the border and trans-border areas in the Amazon. It examines particularly the case of indigenous people in the towns of Leticia and Tabatinga on the triple border of Brazil, Colombia, and Peru. Beginning with the dissolution of imperial facilities, it then describes the reconstruction of these settlements from the twentieth century to the present. It stresses the processes of ethnic recovery, the indigenous struggle for recognition of their territorial rights in urban and border spaces, as well as their social and political organization as expressed in the formation of urban indigenous cabildos.