ABSTRACT
Latin America’s resource frontiers have long been the site of land (re)valuations driven by different forms of speculative finance that support extractive industries and international interests over those of local peoples. Drawing from an analysis of agrarian extractivism and Indigenous labor in the Paraguay-Brazil borderlands, the chapter shows that contemporary land grabbing builds from sedimented histories of routinized, racial dispossession—the continuities of colonial capitalism. Histories of land appropriation and Indigenous labor exploitation marked by routinized violent dispossession in the Brazil-Paraguay borderlands are central to enduring racial geographies in the region. By attending to the longue durée of frontier violence that (re)shapes land control, this chapter shifts the spatial and temporal scale of analysis beyond a strict focus on the financialization of land and transnational deals to everyday forms of racialized dispossession. The chapter argues that land grabs are not isolated moments that merely change existing land relations, but that they are colonial continuities reproduced through new agrarian and juridical technologies. Rethinking resource rushes with attention to ruptures and continuities shows that land grabbing is an embodied, emplaced practice that articulates with the slow violence of colonial continuities.
