In Peru and elsewhere, extractive industries are at the core of governmental projects and of mobilizations that seem to oppose frontally. However, a focus from the bottom-up, at the level of face-to-face interactions and involved people’s daily life, confirms the necessity to overcome the idea of an absolute dichotomy between the omnipotent dominant and the unanimously-resisting dominated. Based on an ethnography of the oldest oil concession’s surroundings in the Peruvian Amazon, this research analyses jointly protest and government of populations, reciprocal adjustments between modalities of (re)production of a social order at the national boundaries and practices of protest that seem to threaten governmental projects. Amazonia’s inhabitants and their representatives, when they protest against industrial contamination, invoke the state as the cause of the problem, the mediator as well as the solution. They “sit the state down” in the villages, through its representatives, to whom they express their grievances. In this way, they contribute to consolidating state power at the edge of the nation, to establishing its territorial, symbolical and practical bases. The daily life of the villages, their vicinity with the industrial world, as well as extraordinary moments of protest, eventually unveil the coproduction of the state by the inhabitants of the borders, by their representatives and by the governmental spokesperson, in the intertwining of protest and institution of extractive order.