ABSTRACT
Indigenous displacements and other forms of social migration have a history of boundless proportions in the Andean territory. The displacement of considerable population groups was a common practice imposed long before the Inca state for the purposes of food planning, political unity, and military stability. During colonial times, migration was not an unusual event either. The Spanish state mobilized thousands of indigenous workers to the mines and the haciendas for labor. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the situation did not change, although the causes of massive migration are mainly economic and political, given the abandonment in which the dominant groups have traditionally left the impoverished population. In the present day, the advancement of global warming and the predatory practices of logging and mining in the Amazon basin have accelerated the flux of massive portions of indigenous populations into the cities and mining camps. This chapter examines the effects that migration has in the reconfiguration of a social imaginary and of the expressions that migrant indigenous groups hold about society and nature.
