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Javier Puente is a scholar of Andean places and peoples whose work explores the intersections of communal politics, environmental change, and, more recently, science and technology. His first book, The Rural State: Making Comunidades, Campesinos, and Conflict in Peru’s Central Sierra (University of Texas Press, 2022), was awarded the Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize by the New England Council on Latin American Studies (NECLAS). He is currently completing a second book, which examines the profound social and environmental transformations set in motion by the introduction and widespread use of dynamite in the Peruvian Andes, from nineteenth-century railway construction to the insurgency of Sendero Luminoso. Puente received his PhD from Georgetown University and is an associate professor and chair of Latin American and Latino/a studies at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
RCC Project: Builders, Miners, and Terrorists: Dynamite, Explosive Developments, and Ecological Injustice in the Andes
Selected Publications:
- El Estado rural: indígenas, comuneros y campesinos en la sierra central. Institute of Peruvian Studies, 2024.
- The Rural State: Making Comunidades, Campesinos, and Conflict in Peru's Central Sierra. University of Texas Press, 2022.
- with Adrián Lerner. “Modelando regiones naturales: Capitalismo, medio ambiente y la geografía del Perú pos-colonial.” Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana y Caribeña (HALAC) 12, no. 3 (2022): 20–27. https://doi.org/10.32991/2237-2717.2022v12i3.p20-27.
- “The Environmental and Ecological Impacts of Guerilla and Irregular Warfare.” Global Environment 14, no. 1 (2021): 7–14.