Post-Rubber Eschatology. A Consequence of the Contact Between the People of the Center and Catholicism

Abstract

This article studies a subtle consequence of the contact between the People of the Center, i.e. the Amazonian Indigenous survivors of the Casa Arana massacre (1903-1933), and the Catalan Capuchin missionaries that arrived in the interfluvial Caquetá-Putumayo
during the first years of the Post-Rubber era which began in 1933. The aforementioned consequence was unnoticed because the previous studies that have tackled this specific contact case only focused on its more evident destructive consequences. Here, in contrast, we explore the way in which the missionaries constructively strengthened one important basic belief of the Indigenous survivors of the Casa Arana massacre: The belief that considers the period of the rubber fields dominated by the Casa Arana as an eschatological instant of the history of the People of the Center.