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This chapter introduces the subject of Peruvian responses to climate change and ensuing glacier catastrophes from 1941 to the present. In Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range, which towers above the Callejón de Huaylas valley in the Ancash Department, 25,000 people have died from glacier-related disasters (glacial lake outburst floods and avalanches). The chapter places this study within current historiography on climate history, the history of science and technology, environmental history, Peruvian history, Latin American history, disaster studies, and glacier-society relations both globally and in the Andean region. The chapter then demonstrates why glacier retreat in Peru's Cordillera Blanca mountain range is an ideal case study for understanding long-term human adaptation to climate change, as well as analyzing how science evolves in societal context following climate change and natural disasters. Responses to climate change, which brought scientists and engineers to the Cordillera Blanca, unleashed a process called disaster economics: the use of catastrophes or disaster mitigation programs to promote and empower a range of economic development interests in both the public and private sectors. Climate change triggered historical processes and scientific developments far beyond the immediate disasters caused by melting glaciers.

This chapter analyzes the onset of Cordillera Blanca glacier disasters in 1941 through an examination of a glacial lake outburst flood that killed 5,000 people and destroyed one-third of the Ancash capital city of Huaraz in the Callejón de Huaylas. In the aftermath, Peruvians scrambled not only to survive and rebuild but also to determine the cause of the flood. While hazard mitigation began right after the catastrophe, it progressed haphazardly during the 1940s. Just as the 1941 flood made urban residents in Huaraz intimately aware of the previously unrecognized melting glaciers over their city, the glacial lake disaster made Peruvians in Lima and elsewhere significantly more aware of the Andean mountains—both their peril and their possibilities. Local urban and rural residents, engineers, scientists, and government officials who began studying glacial lake hazards after 1941 all brought their own perspectives about glaciers, construing them simultaneously as hazards and resources.

This chapter examines disaster responses and environmental perceptions of climate change and glacier retreat through an analysis of the 1941 Huaraz and 1945 Chavín de Huantar glacial lake outburst floods, which killed 5,000 and 500 people, respectively. For the people most affected, the urban Huaraz population, the disaster not only leveled physical structures but also toppled symbols of social standing, wealth, status, and even the culturally constructed racial categories that supposedly distinguished Indians, mestizos, and creoles (whites). Essentially, the floods erased supposed boundaries between highland and lowland, countryside and city, and nature and civilization. Conceptualizing Cordillera Blanca glacial lake disasters as the combination of societal and environmental forces illuminates the culture of climate change and reveals why residents later rejected hazard zoning. It also explains why Huaraz urban inhabitants turned to state science and technology to protect them from glacier retreat.

In 1950, the Los Cedros glacial lake outburst flood destroyed the nearly constructed Cañón del Pato hydroelectric facility. President Manuel Odría responded by creating the Control Commission of Cordillera Blanca Lakes to prevent additional floods caused by climate change and glacier retreat in the Andes. The Lakes Commission achieved marked success in glacier science and glacial lake engineering during the 1950s and 60s, including a glacial lake inventory, lake classification system, and engineering projects to drain and dam glacial lakes. Government support for the Lakes Commission was often motivated by and facilitated coast-focused economic development initiatives through the Peruvian Santa Corporation rather than humanitarian concerns for vulnerable populations. These hazard mitigation programs ultimately made the state responsible for disaster prevention, and in the process facilitated nation building and gave the government more control over Andean space and resources, in part with local support because residents wanted to prevent floods.

The Control Commission of Cordillera Blanca Lakes, which was established in 1951 to prevent glacial lake outburst floods caused by climate change and glacier retreat in the Andes, had far-reaching effects on the economic development of Ancash and the Callejón de Huaylas. Engineers who examined glacial lakes brought development interests that had long inspired Peruvian policymakers and developers. They hoped to exploit Andean natural resources to promote national economic development and modernization. Glacial lake flood prevention programs provided a springboard for the expansion of hydroelectricity, road building, tourism, and wage labor. This process whereby disaster spurred economic development is referred to as "disaster economics," which the Lakes Commission carried out after 1951. Economic development directly and indirectly followed the science, technology, engineering, and policies implemented after catastrophes to prevent additional disasters, thereby revealing the social construction of science and engineering.

Chapter 7 focuses on the adaption of the mountain conception imported to the colonies. Indeed, the conception does not simply follow a copy paste model from the metropolises to the colonies. Colonization also proceeded by adopting modes for managing places and developing resources. Here again, references to the mountain were common and usually conceived in terms of Western models. Colonization, whether conceived solely as occupation or also as the exploitation of resources, was thus based on the deployment of forms of geographical knowledge that had originated in the West. That deployment preceded or went hand in hand with the deployment of men, capital, and techniques for development. The colonial powers approached the worlds they had discovered and made their own by means of categories that standardized descriptions and conditioned practices. The “tropical mountains,” along with other objects, emerged in the wake of that colonial expansion and territorial appropriation. They were the product of a set of images, facts, resources, and projects that articulated the European model in terms of similarities but also well-understood differences. The nation-states that emerged from decolonization usually retained that highly standardized model to configure the mountains.

In the process of the making of building nation-state, numerous mountain ridges have been mobilized as "natural" borders between states. On the opposite, recent initiatives try to shift from this notion of mountains as barrier to mountains as bridges among communities. The transboundary character of the mountains is considered as an asset. These regional initiatives are part of the general rise in influence of transnational regions, which the imaginaries of globalization seem to encourage, even as the exclusive prerogatives of nation-states evolve and transborder practices intensify.

Recent studies in the ceja region of the Upper Amazon show that early social complexity was present in the lower flanks of the Andean Cordillera with intricate manifestations of Formative period technologies and practices, such as pottery, polished stone artifacts or long-distance trade networks. This chapter presents the data of the material culture and the ideology of an early complex society called the Mayo-Chinchipe-Marañón, situated on the frontier region between Ecuador and Peru. Archaeological evidence, dating around 5500/3500 BP, from Santa Ana–La Florida (Palanda, Ecuador) shows the existence of a precocious ceremonial center that rallied the neighbouring areas. The complicated stone spiral architecture and the importance of the funerary paraphernalia found on the site suggest a strong ideological structure that led and managed the population on a regional scale. Similar findings have been studied in the Jaén / Bagua region of the lower Chinchipe basin in Peru.

The Tupiguaraní expanded over a sizable area of South America, reaching an almost subcontinental scale. At the geographic center of this Tupiguaraní expansion were the Bolivian southern Beni-Chiquitano savannas and drier Chaco regions. This chapter offers an overview of the Guaraníes in southeastern Bolivia. It also explores the ways in which Guaraní tribes and Inca imperial representatives coalesced in the Inca fortification of Cuzcotuyo. This site was a neuralgic Inca frontier outpost of the Eastern Cordillera de Chiriguanos. After being ransacked by intruding Guaraní tribes, Cuzcotuyo was later reconstructed as the southeastern Inca borders became more militarized. The archaeological and ethnohistoric evidence portrays complex forms of frontier interaction between representatives of the Inca empire and the eastern Guaraní tribes. Despite sustained conflictive relations with Guaraní populations, selected Guaraní tribes became valued Inca imperial frontier allies.

The Cordillera de Tilarán and the Cordillera de Guanacaste create a landscape with dramatic relief, strong climatic contrasts, and extraordinary biodiversity. On the fertile volcanic soils of these Cordilleras, biodiversity in the flora and fauna, community composition, forest structure, and ecosystem function depend in large part on variation in dry season cloud moisture inputs. The authors provide a biogeographic framework emphasizing the topographically dictated climatic constraints that underlie the biological richness of northern Costa Rica’s montane forests. The critical importance of topography and elevation is demonstrated by the life zones they create, which are not strictly defined but include distinctive habitats and species. The chapter includes a description of the richness and diversity of plant and animal species, and of the various ways in which species interact, both competitively and symbiotically. More broadly, the authors give a high level overview of the function and dynamics of the region’s ecosystems, including a discussion of nutrient cycling, trophic structure, and energy flow. The chapter ends with a history of land use and conservation in the region.

The tropical evergreen cloud forests on the slopes of the Cordillera de Talamanca in Costa Rica’s southern highlands is of vital importance both as a source of drinking and irrigation water to the main cities in the Valle Central and as a bastion of many endemic species. In this chapter, the authors first summarize the current knowledge of the Cordillera de Talamanca’s physical characteristics, including climate, geology, and geomorphology. This is followed by an overview of biodiversity both at the species level and the community and ecosystem level of plants, animals, and fungi, with an emphasis on the three vegetation zones between the lower boundary of the premontane forests at 500 m to the upper limit of the upper montane oak forests at 3,100 m. The chapter provides a high-level outline of the functioning and dynamics of the ecosystems described, including forest structure and water and nutrient cycling. Finally, the authors provide a summary of the history of land use and conservation in the region.

This chapter examines gendered indigenous resistance to the Chico IV dam and hydropower development project in the Cordillera Mountains in the northern Philippines. The project, if built, would have inundated dozens of Bontok and Kalinga ili (villages), requiring the relocation of approximately fifteen thousand families, or one hundred thousand people, from their ancestral lands. Bontok and Kalinga villagers organized to oppose the Chico IV project in many ways, however this chapter will focus on a particular narrative centering on the disrobing tactics of village women. These villagers had torn down dam workers' and soldiers' campsites, thrown their construction lumber into the Chico River, and created human barricades to prevent them from accessing their equipment. With tremendous support from allies throughout the Cordillera region, in Manila, and internationally, the villagers exerted so much pressure that the Chico IV project was never built.

This chapter studies Chilean and rioplatense politics in an age of military organization. Its aim is to understand why and how the Army of the Andes was created in the years 1814–1817, examining both the support given by the Buenos Aires government to José de San Martín’s plan to re-conquer Chile from the royalists and the role played by Chileans in this military enterprise.

This chapter delves deeper into Alexander von Humboldt's multilayered style. It traces Humboldt's language as it oscillates between superlatives and negation, amazement and protest, exaggeration and humility, detailed measurement, and silence. It also presents a multitude of representations of Humboldt's mountain climbs in his travel diary, letters, published travelogues, and pictorial atlases, which attest to a multifaceted, shifting, and often inconsistent discourse. The chapter looks into Humboldt's exploration of some of the highest mountains in the world, specifically the volcanoes of the Andean Cordillera, which was an integral and underpublicized aspect of Humboldt's trip to the Americas. It also mentions Humboldt's vision and anticipation for the era of reconnaissance climbing in the twentieth century, in which climbers acclimatized in gradual, graduated steps.

To make sense of how and why dance circulates so widely in the Philippines, one must start by considering how it emerged from folk and indigenous dance traditions shaped by the pioneering fieldwork of Francisca Reyes-Aquino earlier in the twentieth century. This chapter sets out a genealogy of dance that demonstrates both how Reyes’ work fed into creation of the core Bayanihan repertory of five foundational dance suites as well as how dance came to be codified and imbedded in the national physical education curriculum as a compulsory subject. The perception that all Filipinos can dance owes much to the fact that virtually every child learns local, regional, and other iconic national dances at school. This chapter also considers in some detail the features of two key “Suites” in the Bayanihan repertory, the so-called “Cordillera” and “Muslim Suites.”

This chapter examines the impact of Spanish colonial rule on the population of interior Luzon, with particular emphasis on groups living within the southern and central Cordillera. It begins with a brief review of the incidence and timing of Spanish contacts in the southern and central Cordillera, including the regions of Ituy and Paniqui, Italon and Abaca, and Igorot territory. It then considers the demographic history of the Igorot in Benguet, Kankanai and Bontoc, and Ifugao. It also discusses Dominican missionary efforts in northern Cordillera, along with demographic trends in the entire Cordillera region. It cites population estimates for interior Luzon for the period 1570–1800 and suggests that the region experienced an overall population decline of approximately 36 percent in 1570.

This chapter discusses the representation of indigenous women in the women's movements using sources from three organizations: Center for Women's Resources, Cordillera (CWERC); Innabuyog Philippines, which is allied with GABRIELA; and Igorota, founded by a feminist Maryknoll nun. While acknowledging that certain unique aspects distinguished indigenous women from the majority of Filipinas, activists focused on the similarities between highland women and their lowland counterparts. The chapter argues that women's movements focused on “sameness” with lowland women rather than on difference and suggests that a narrative that emphasized indigenous women's similarities with all Filipino women was an attempt to include them into the meta-history of the national lowland or mainstream women's movements. By emphasizing their sameness with lower-class Filipino women, however, indigenous women lost the chance to become alternative role models in the women's movements even though they were mythologized as resistance fighters.