Ecuador is the third largest foreign supplier of crude oil to the western United States. As the source of this
oil, the Ecuadorian Amazon has borne the far-reaching social and environmental consequences of a growing U.S. demand
for petroleum and the dynamics of economic globalization it necessitates. Crude Chronicles traces the emergence
during the 1990s of a highly organized indigenous movement and its struggles against a U.S. oil company and Ecuadorian
neoliberal policies. Against the backdrop of mounting government attempts to privatize and liberalize the national
economy, Suzana Sawyer shows how neoliberal reforms in Ecuador led to a crisis of governance, accountability, and
representation that spurred one of twentieth-century Latin America's strongest indigenous movements.
Through her rich ethnography of indigenous marches, demonstrations, occupations, and negotiations, Sawyer tracks
the growing sophistication of indigenous politics as Indians subverted, re-deployed, and, at times, capitulated
to the dictates and desires of a transnational neoliberal logic. At the same time, she follows the multiple maneuvers
and discourses that the multinational corporation and the Ecuadorian state used to circumscribe and contain indigenous
opposition. Ultimately, Sawyer reveals that indigenous struggles over land and oil operations in Ecuador were as
much about reconfiguring national and transnational inequality--that is, rupturing the silence around racial injustice,
exacting spaces of accountability, and rewriting narratives of national belonging--as they were about the material
use and extraction of rain forest resources.