My dissertation addresses the depiction in Latin American literature and culture of the Llanos (tropical savannahs from Colombia and Venezuela) and the Amazon basin as contact zones where indigenous populations, rubber tappers and settlers collide in postcolonial Latin America. It analyzes the dynamic shaping of these frontiers by market demands, interethnic conflicts, and mestizaje using a comparative and interdisciplinary approach. I destabilize the boundaries between disciplines, revealing different types of discourses which validate or challenge the encroachment of indigenous people. I examine a wide range of materials including literary works, memoirs, ethnographies, travel accounts and archival documents.

Chapter one establishes a dialogue between literary representations and oral traditions of the Llanos by analyzing the depiction of the violent encounters between cattle ranchers or llaneros and Sikuani Indians in the famous Colombian novel La vorágine (1924). Chapter two dismantles the discourses of some Colombian elite members to show how they combine the idea of progress with colonial images (cannibalism, savagery) and with the metaphor of the" virgin forests," to justify the conquest of Amerindian territories. To examine the representation of the Amazon frontier during the rubber boom period in José Eustasio Rivera's La vorágine and in Euclides da Cunha's collection of essays Um Paraíso Perdido, I discuss the dialogue of the two authors with the geopolitics of the Amazon region, as well as with the idea of science and modernity. In chapter four, I focus on the representations of contemporary Amazonian indigenous people in the novels A Expedição Montaigne (1982) by Antônio Callado and El hablador (1987) by Mario Vargas Llosa. Vargas Llosa presents the Matsigenka, an Arawak group in the Peruvian Amazon, as a poor, fragmented and rudimentary culture, condemned to cultural extinction for the sake of Peru's neo liberal development. In contrast, Callado ironically criticizes the stereotypes about the Indians in Brazilian society and culture. He presents the possibility of Indian's resistance through their use of mythological thinking as a powerful tool that helps them in their struggle for cultural revival.