Abstract

This article is based on an ethnographic study of the land route that connects the port of Iquique (Chile) and the city of Oruro (Bolivia). The route carries much of the flow of goods and people between the two countries. The authors describe a new phase of capitalist expansion led by the local transportation industry and its articulation of kinship-based economic strategies, the overlapping of local political power and rituals, and the appropriation of the international border as an economic and political space for rolling out those strategies.