Some images from my latest project, El árbol que llora (The Crying Tree), the culminating chapter of my project, Mi país imaginado (My Imagined Country).

Between 1879 and 1912, the Peruvian Amazon endured a brutal era of rubber extraction, often termed “ethnocide” or “genocide.” This history, deliberately omitted from our national narrative, cost the lives of over 40,000 Indigenous people under the Peruvian Amazon Company. Financed by British capital and led by Peruvian Julio César Arana, the company’s operations in the Putumayo River region relied on mistreatment, starvation, torture, and murder.

To shed light on this hidden history, I superimposed historical documents onto the pages of Rubber, a Wonder Story, a children’s book published in 1919 by the United States Rubber Company. This propaganda piece glorifies the rubber industry and obscures the atrocities committed to fuel the growing demand for automobiles and other rubber products.

El árbol que llora asks who gets remembered, who gets erased, and who benefits when a history like this stays out of the national story.