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Life in Traffic
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16 June 2026
In the year 2000, the presidents of Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia agreed to construct the Interoceanic Highway as part of the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America. Instead of bringing the promised economic benefits to the shared triple-frontier Amazonian region, the highway facilitated trade in extracted natural resources as well as a traffic in women. Centering "traffic" as both an analytic and a method, Ruth E. Goldstein argues that projects like this 3,500-mile highway have deeply gendered effects, reorganizing political economies of sex, nature, kinship, and care. Life in Traffic underscores how markets for women, plants, and gold are not just intersecting phenomena but historically co-constituted economies. Amazonian extractive industries, too, have global ramifications for a warming planet: as rainforests disappear, so do the oxygen-creating, carbon-sequestering, and life-sustaining abilities of Mother Earth.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: On the Road and Vestiges of "Virgin" Wilderness
Chapter 1: The Roots of Plunder
Chapter 2: Women, Rubber, and Highway Robbery
Chapter 3: Histories of Conquest, Consent, and the Gender of Progress
Chapter 4: Collisions, Conflict, and Convivencia
Chapter 5: Traffic Lines Between the Andes to the Amazon
Chapter 6: When Mines Are Like Women and Other Riddled Relations
Conclusion: Riddles, Roads, and Life in Traffic
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index