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In 2017 El Niño Costero devastated the northern coast of Peru. This article seeks to learn from this experience for future large central and eastern Pacific-driven El Niño events. It directs attention away from dominant disaster narratives to reflect on the opportunities that El Niño rains have generated for desert livelihoods over time. We make a call for and set out the key elements of a historical geographical ethnography approach in environmental geography, which, as well as examining climate dimensions (paleoclimatology, dendrochronological, and atmospheric changes) of El Niño, also aims to consider its impacts on the livelihoods and management strategies of desert communities over time. We take as a starting point the responses of people who themselves come directly into contact with environmental change, yet whose agency and experiences are often marginal in knowledge production about El Niño. Responding to recent calls for qualitative geography researchers to be more explicit about how data are collected and analyzed, we explain how and why it is important to compare stakeholder interviews and climate records with newspaper archives and community memories of the 1983 and 1998 El Niño events. We illustrate that for desert populations in northern Peru, El Niño can represent abundance as well as disaster and make visible their role in managing change after El Niño flooding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine state and indigenous education in Bolivia. Focusing on debates about the hidden curriculum, we conceptualize the school as a political space where tensions between the overlapping jurisdictional powers of the hispanicizing state and indigenous authorities are played out. Our analysis of these tensions highlights the contested way in which indigenous educational policy is negotiated in Bolivia and points to the importance of the deep structures of the hidden curriculum in constructing the school as a territorial authority and a site of struggle in indigenous communities. Using the communities of Raqaypampa, Cochabamba as a case study, we show how local struggles over indigenous education in the 1980s and 1990s became scaled up to influence national educational policy and donor intervention strategies in Bolivia. (Contains 23 notes.)