Feelings and resentments among border populations

Abstract

Iñapari, a Peruan city located in the triple-frontier (Brazil/Peru/Bolivia), although having a reduced population (2,000 inhabitants), does not escape from relationships framed by differences. Individuals and groups approach each other by means of work relationships, neighborhood, and family ties. However, they feel themselves apart or disaggregate themselves through the differentiation of "being born there" or being an "outsider", thus generating cultural frontiers between the native and the immigrant people, sheltering several tensions and conflicts. Such tensions reflect the uncertainties and unsafety, contained in the sociability of contemporary cities in the globalized world. These migrants are persons who dislocated themselves to Andean regions, looking for the boundary regions with the purpose to set a business and to gather some money; in order to be integrated, they reinvent their traditions, and by means of associations, they express feelings of solidarity, "to belong to", wishing to maintain different traces of their culture of origin.