Mining presence: extraction and embodiment in Valles Centrales, Oaxaca

ABSTRACT

This paper offers a critical reflection on the ways extractive industries manifest within and across place. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Mexico over 8 months in 2019–2020, this paper focuses on the experiences of residents living in a town adjacent to an underground silver mine in Valles Centrales, Oaxaca, Mexico. I argue that a focus on lived, sensory and long-term engagement between people and mining opens new avenues for geographers to consider ‘what mining does’. Looking beyond the language of ‘impacts’, I build upon work on cultural geographies of presence and absence to put forward the notion of ‘mining presence’: mining’s present and absent affects and materialities that interweave with residents’ everyday lives, homes, bodies, and landscapes. In other words, I explore the qualities of mining that bring the San José mine into a neighbouring town and mediate spaces of daily life. In doing so, this paper contributes to the geographies of the extractive industries by showing that attention to life with mining requires a re-thinking of the spatiotemporal relations of extraction itself.

RESUMEN

Este documento ofrece una reflexión crítica sobre las formas en que las industrias extractivas se manifiestan dentro y a través del lugar. Con base en una investigación etnográfica realizada en México durante ocho meses en 2019-2020, este documento se centra en las experiencias de los residentes que viven en un pueblo adyacente a una mina de plata subterránea en Valles Centrales, Oaxaca, México. Argumento que un enfoque en el compromiso vivido, sensorial y a largo plazo entre las personas y la minería abre nuevas vías para que los geógrafos consideren ‘lo que hace la minería’. Mirando más allá del lenguaje de los ‘impactos’, me baso en el trabajo sobre geografías culturales de presencia y ausencia para proponer la noción de ‘presencia minera’: los afectos y materialidades presentes y ausentes de la minería que se entrelazan con las vidas cotidianas de los residentes, sus hogares, sus cuerpos y los paisajes En otras palabras, exploro las cualidades de la minería que acercan a la mina de San José a un pueblo vecino y median los espacios de la vida cotidiana. Al hacerlo, este documento contribuye a las geografías de las industrias extractivas al mostrar que la atención a la vida minera requiere un replanteamiento de las relaciones espaciotemporales de la extracción misma.

KEYWORDS:

• Mexico
• embodiment
• extractive industries
• presence
• absence

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• México
• encarnación
• industrias extractivas
• presencia
• ausencia

1. Introduction

The first time I saw the mine I was looking out from the open back of a jeep returning from the Guelaguetza. The Guelaguetza is a yearly celebration of cultural traditions from the seven regions of Oaxaca. However, this Guelaguetza was the first in Valles Centrales, Oaxaca, to be themed ‘contra la minería’ (‘against mining’). The event brought community leaders, residents, and activists together to contest extractive mega-projects across Oaxaca, but emphasis was on the project in their midst: the San José silver mine. The mine rose out of the landscape as we shuttled towards it, its underground operations covered by an opaque silver cap.¹ Sheepishly, I asked my fellow passengers if that, there, was the mine. The subtext: is that all? I was embarrassed, unable to reconcile this staid silver dome as the mine at the centre of the pueblos’² concerns and the subject of previous conflicts in Valles Centrales. In my field notes, I wrote that I had imagined the San José mine to be ‘larger, more industrial, with its hazards writ large’.

This paper emerged from the dissonance between the mine I imagined, and the one I saw. Geographer Angeliki Balayannis (2019, p. 3) notes, ‘most contaminated landscapes are not-so-obvious or pronounced in their visualities’. Through her attentiveness to ordinary photographs of ‘extraordinary’ hazardous sites, she expounds new readings and politics of these spaces. In following, here, I aim to decentre the event or the arrival of the San José mine and violent confrontations between 2006 and 2014 (see Hernández Rodríguez, 2019; Villanueva, 2018), to focus on the ‘ordinary’ and continuing presence of the San José mine in the landscape and in residents’ lives.

The San José mine is in San José del Progreso, Valles Centrales region of Oaxaca, Mexico (Figure 1). The closest town to the mine aside from San José del Progreso is Magdalena Ocotlán, a municipality of 1500 people, less than 3 km away.³ Despite its proximity to Magdalena Ocotlán, the above-ground infrastructure of the San José mine does not overlap the municipal boundaries of Magdalena Ocotlán, and the property boundary of the mine only just abuts the municipal border (Figure 2). The headquarters of the Mexican mining company Cuzcatlán is located outside Magdalena Ocotlán in San José del Progreso and the corporate office of Fortuna Silver is based in Vancouver, Canada. According to this reading, the mine is physically and administratively absent in Magdalena Ocotlán. Magdalena Ocotlán was left out of consultations when the mine was established in 2011 and residents were not formally notified of subsequent expansion and development. Yet, the mine’s presence is felt by residents who ‘live with’ mining.

Figure 1. Valles Centrales region, Oaxaca, Mexico. Map credit: Chandra Jayasuriya.

Figure 2. Municipal boundaries. The urban area of Magdalena Ocotlán does not reach the municipal boundaries, i.e. fields and cultivated land is included within the boundary. Map credit: Chandra Jayasuriya.

This paper introduces ‘mining presence’ as a concept that directs attention to the lived dimensions of extraction. As literature on wastes and toxicities indicate, the materials and effects of extractive industries frequently cross borders and escape attempts at storage (Murphy, 2015; Ureta & Flores, 2018). The extractive industries and their effects can change and emerge over time and place (including beyond point sources of emission or extraction) and may only be perceived ‘slowly’ or through living with the toxicants themselves (Liboiron et al., 2018). Moreover, the movement of extraction, material and infrastructures, people and place articulate with and engage emotional and affective registers (Johnson et al., 2020; Prouse, 2021). These dynamics complicate existing understandings of extractives raising the question: where and when do extractive projects begin and end?

Considering the transversal materialities, timescales and politics that are enabled and reinforced by extractive projects (D’Angelo & Pijpers, 2018), the geographies of extraction must be approached with greater attention to form, temporal-spatial boundaries, and a sensitivity towards people and place histories. This also has implications for the way impact assessment and evaluation are conducted. Briefly, assessment tools such as environmental and social impact assessments and livelihood inventories, whilst central to extractive operations and struggles, tend to contain an inherent directionality – the impact of one thing upon another – and a spatial and temporal fixity (Howitt, 2011). Impact evaluations can designate the types of impacts that matter, or are deemed ‘manageable’, a sunk cost or liability (Ey, 2018). This is clear even in the definition of ‘externality’ where costs and benefits are not included in the project itself (Jalbert et al., 2017); what is considered an externality is in some way, a ruling on who and what is considered external, marginal, or not at the centre. As Anderson et al. (2020) suggest of emergencies, who is seen, what counts as an emergency and what warrants intervention is a racialized, gendered, and classed exercise of power. In the context of Latin America’s extractivism (Svampa, 2015) and the broader, global costs of extraction, scholars and practitioners must be attentive to exclusions and legacies of extractive colonization.

In step with work that considers everyday effects of environmental change (Kothari & Arnall, 2019) as well as scholarship that emphasizes the long-term violences of exposure and extraction (Davies, 2018; Liboiron et al., 2018; Valdivia, 2018), this paper highlights the affective and embodied qualities of extraction, that while lesser explored, also shapes life with extractives, with intimate and far-reaching effects. In doing so, it adds to existing geographical research on extractives, that has tended to focus on socio-economic, livelihood-based, political economic and ecological, and rights-based aspects of extraction (Bridge, 2017; Hilson, 2002; Horsley et al., 2015; Martinez-Alier, 2001). With a specific focus on mining’s presences and absences, I move away from capturing discrete environmental and social impacts, and the sometimes-spectacular visualities and archetypal environmental, livelihood and development impacts of extractive industries (c.f Balayannis, 2019), to examine the way mining manifests in place and bodies, as a presence that is lived with. Instead of adopting a single theory, I put my field work in conversation with diverse literatures in geography and anthropology, with reference to ‘affective atmospheres’ (Anderson, 2009; Bissell, 2010) and presence-absence (Maddrell, 2013), highlighting the tensions between the sometimes (im)material, (in)tangible, lived and sensed. Such an approach goes towards showing what else mining does, highlighting the ‘range of disruptions, flows and movements that remake place’ (Bebbington & Humphreys Bebbington, 2018, p. 7). Ultimately, this paper contributes to sociocultural work on extractives by emphasizing the present-absent spatialities that tell us about the affective and embodied aspects of life with mining.

2. Presence, absence, and mining

Presence and absence have been taken up in several subfields of geography. Studies of presence and absence and its variants ‘absent presence’ and ‘present absence’ are perhaps most closely linked to cultural and post-phenomenological geographies where they are central concerns (Anderson, 2017; Wyatt et al., 2016). In these fields, presence and absence have been used to describe affects, markers and structures of feeling (Edensor, 2008), memorialization, death and heritage (Maddrell, 2013; Micieli-Voutsinas, 2017), creative methodologies (C. Boyd, 2017), and consumptive geographies (Mansvelt, 2010). In other areas of geography, presence and absence have been used to question control, erasure, and agency in political space (Jones et al, 2021; Campos-Medina et al., 2020). Howitt et al. (2009), for instance, highlight how colonial narratives bestow both absence and presence of Indigenous people and colonial settlement in the logics of dispossession. Black and feminist geographers have also used presence and absence as powerful metaphors to challenge racist and patriarchal spaces (Johnson, 2009; Tolia-Kelly, 2017). These different readings of absence and presence point to the fruitfulness of presence-absence to highlight the nature of being, and the processes, qualities, and conditions that bring something into being, and/or obscure it from view.

However, less attention has been given to presence-absence in geographies of mining and the extractive industries. Yet, presences and absences are woven into the relations, practices, materials that constitute a resource and enable its extraction (Bridge, 2004). This can be seen in studies of resource materiality, where scholars reject natural resources as self-evident, instead highlighting the sociopolitical processes whereby resources ‘become’ (Bakker & Bridge, 2006; Richardson & Weszkalnys, 2014; Watts, 2001). Instead of linear processes of value-creation, these perspectives show how resources become through dynamic encounters involving markets, multi-level governance, transient norms and values, geological factors, and technologies – that present in varying intensities, durations and degrees. For instance, even the simplest method of gold mining plays on tensions associated with presence-absence: the prospector believes gold is there, but it is a present absence until it is unearthed (the same is found with other underground resources). The process by which gold is made valuable itself, is shaped by speculative finance, social structures and materialities where scarcity (absence) is produced (Schoenberger, 2011). Thus, the conditions that produce a mine or extractive project cohere with and through present and absent realities, hunches and projections.

While explicit engagement with presence and absence has been limited to geographies of the extractive industries, anthropology has explored presence-absence in mining in important and diverse ways. In June (Nash, 1993) foundational work in a Bolivian tin mining region, non-human presences like folk spirits and religious figures imbue the underground and surface, respectively, and geological structures are present-absent characters of legend, that shape the beliefs and actions of miners and their families. Marisol De la Cadena (2015) extends Nash’s ethnographic exploration of the co-present more-than-human by exploring relations between runakuna (Quechua people) and Ausangate, the mountain-Earth Being. In conversations with Nazario and Mariano Turpino, de la Cadena tells how Ausangate was present to Mariano in international tourism activities, archives, and contemporary legal proceedings – including proceedings around mining – but was unintelligible as a ‘being’ to other actors. Together, Nash and de la Cadena show how onto-epistemological beliefs can shape who or what is present or absent in extractive activities and sites of extraction (c.f. Povinelli, 2016).

Elizabeth Ferry’s (2005) focus on patrimony in a cooperatively owned silver mine in Guanajuato, Mexico, highlights absent presence where sacred spaces ‘enliven the presence of the mine’s patron saints and virgins’ (p. 112). She explores material and cultural traces left by mining, showing how presence-absence materialize to carry different values. Traces, as a symbol of presence and absence can also be found in the body. Latin American feminist scholars and activists show how the violence of extractive capitalism is lived and written on the body and connected to long-term struggle and resistance (Cabnal, 2010; Hernández Reyes, 2019; Rodríguez Castro, 2021). Pollution from extractive projects and bioaccumulation in human bodies and other organisms are also considered in the field of discard studies (Liboiron et al., 2018). Although diverse, this work richly illustrates the presence and absence in mining contexts. These literatures show that presence-absence develops over time and place, over multiple and cumulative exposures and in diverse forms (Jones et al., 2012). As presence and absence are perceived and encountered in mundane registers of life (Degnen, 2013), attention to presence and absence can tell us about the affective, bodily and pluriversal experiences of ordinary life with extraction. Such insights are well placed to enrich sociocultural work on the extractive industries such as in studies of extractives and ‘the everyday’ (Araya et al., 2019; Jenkins, 2017; Valdivia, 2018).

Moreover, presence and absence ask us to consider form, or the ways that extraction presents. This follows work such as Warnaars (2013) who describes everyday tensions and low-intensity conflict around a mine that had never been built in the Cordillera de Cóndor, Ecuador. Although the mine is at the centre of conflict, ‘the mine’ manifests in relational but largely immaterial ways. Weszkalnys (2016) similarly focuses on the long-anticipated oil project in island nation São Tomé and Príncipe. Here, oil is encountered through the affects of hope, doubt and expectation, and materialized as administrative process, and material and financial flows. Residents put agricultural livelihoods on hold as they waited for oil, demonstrating the material impacts that result from the ‘resource affect’ of oil (c.f Watts, 2001). Perreault (2018) also draws attention to diverse experiences of mining, by examining the past. He demonstrates how memory enhances and diminishes certain understandings of mining, highlighting the temporal claims of presence and absence and mining as collective memory.

From the above, extraction is seen in (im)material traces, spiritual figures, and fleeting resonances inhabiting bodies and place. Thus, attention to presence and absence in extraction points toward the diverse forms extraction takes, generating inquiry into the ways extraction is lived, felt and acknowledged, and into affects, materials and movements of extraction and the extractive industries. The nuances of these presences and absences are often missed in impact-informed lenses.

This paper seeks to address life with mining through the concept of ‘mining presence’. I show that mining is ‘lived with’ as different forms of presence, by paying attention to the ‘embodied and experiential’ and ‘elusive and evocative’ aspects of presence-absence (DeLyser, 2014)—in a place where mining infrastructure and extraction are physically absent (Figure 3). The paper draws on interviews and ethnographic field work conducted between 2019 and 2020 in Valles Centrales and Magdalena Ocotlán. It bears mentioning that the San José mine in Valles Centrales, is one of the three commercially operating mines in Oaxaca. Although the number of mining concessions is growing rapidly,⁴ the mining industry is relatively small compared to northern states of Mexico and does not share the same fame of colonial silver-mining cities such as San Luis Potosí, Guanajuato, Zacatecas, and Querétaro. As such, most residents from Oaxaca do not ‘live with’ or live in such proximity to commercially productive mines as San José.

Figure 3. Although the mine’s infrastructure is physically absent in Magdalena, this sign installed by Magdalena’s municipal government reads, ‘mining is prohibited in the territory of Magdalena Ocotlán’. Photo: Author’s own.

The paper is organized around three aspects of mining presence: ever-presence, presence-absence and embodied presence. I conclude by considering how mining presence can broaden geographies of the extractive industries by considering the everyday, affective and embodied presence-absence of extraction. Finally, I follow other geographers who do not see presence and absence as binary categories, instead noting their complex and overlapping expressions (Jones et al., 2012): absence can be a palpable presence, presence and absence may be grasped simultaneously, and presence may allude to strong sense of absence or a state that does not exist (Moran & Disney, 2019). It is from these affective, transitory, and ontological possibilities that I attend to the presence and absence of the San José mine in Magdalena Ocotlán.

3. Ever-presence

It looks like vapour. The air looks distinct like in Mexico City. – Teresa.⁵

At one and two in the morning, you can see red dust. You can see the view, the sky looks red. The stars are like those in Mexico City where you can’t see them at 10, 11 at night. I have family there and when they come to visit, they say the same thing: you can’t see the stars. – Ximena.

Like other residents, Teresa and Ximena report that the sky is changing. Residents say the mine produces dust, vapour, fog and mist that thickens the breeze and clouds the sky. The mine’s bearing upon Magdalena’s local forecast is a fitting image in which to consider mining presence as an ever-present atmospheric force. Atmospheres have an enveloping quality, like the gaseous atmosphere buffering Earth. At the same time, to speak about an ‘atmosphere’ of a gathering for example, is to speak of something that is ‘given off’; say, festivity or crowdedness. The San José mine envelops and ‘gives-off’ in varying degrees. Anderson (2009) and Bissell (2010) propose that atmospheres as affective spaces, are always present in everyday life like backdrops that can be sensed by bodies, but, as affective forces, they escape attempts to be captured or made visible. Using affective atmospheres as metaphor (c.f Verlie, 2019), this section suggests that mining presence is experienced as an ever-present and enveloping atmosphere.

The San José mine was mined intermittently before it was bought by Cuzcatlán through Fortuna Silver in 2009 (Fortuna Silver, 2019). Minerales de Oaxaca S.A (MIOXSA) mined the area sporadically between the 1960s and 2006 with a small-scale shrinkage stoping operation.⁶ Prior to this, the deposit was mined by residents from around San José del Progreso with ‘pico y pala’ (pick and shovel). Only a handful of residents I interviewed worked at the mine before Fortuna Silver-Cuzcatlán or knew of others that did. Most described the mine at that time unremarkably. In Flor’s words, it was ‘just a pit in the ground and a pile of dirt’. Margarita remembers ‘it was very small’. Geraldo noted the manual labour involved in hauling rock: ‘the mine used to be mined by pulling up buckets. It used to be 300 metres deep then, around [the year] 1915’.

According to these descriptions, the mine appears to be lifeless and dormant before Fortuna Silver-Cuzcatlán’s acquisition. Indeed, some residents called it the ‘old’ mine, suggesting it was a different mine altogether, rather than the same one enlarged. Referring to the scale of the operation, residents drew attention to the mechanization of mining that enabled the mine to expand.⁷ Residents commonly expressed that, ‘ahora es pura maquinaria’ – now, it’s pure[ly] machinery. Juan, who used to work in the old mine puts it like this, ‘some things are similar, but the scale is different. It was already deep; you could throw a rock down there and not hear it hit the bottom’.

Where the ‘old’ mine was overlooked and unremarkable, the ‘new’ mine is distinguished by its life and movement. In Valles Centrales, the routine ebb and flow of mine workers associates movement with the mine as if the dormant silver mountain is a veil over the pulsing activity below. Flor remarks that, ‘It is like a city underground. There are trucks transporting mineral at night – with security. What could they possibly be transporting then?’

Mechanization also led to overlapping 12hour shifts that allowed the mine to operate 24 hours a day. Many residents were familiar with these shifts, even if they did not work at the mine, identifying 30-day work cycle. The coordinated shift times where everyone starts, eats, and returns together projects a rhythmic routine for workers as well as for the pueblo. Where it is acknowledged that work at the mine is long and tough, participants also note the mine – described as an entity in itself—‘never stops’. Summing up several participants’ reflections on the 24/7 operation, Flor continues, ‘the mine doesn’t rest. It works while we sleep’.

Quoting sociologist John Urry, David Bissell suggests that atmospheres are often perceived ‘through movement’ (Bissell, 2010, p. 272). From the above, there is the metaphorical understanding of movement through the mine’s constant extraction at the same time the routinized schedule for mine workers gives-off a ‘workaday’ rhythm when miners leave and return to Magdalena. These small movements contribute to a sense of something being there sensu Urry and Bissell, humming along, not in the foreground, but ever-present nonetheless. Movement may be sensed through bodily encounters, rather than through conscious, cognitive register.

Sound and vibration too were sensed viscerally. Rosario showed off the floor he installed after the previous tiles cracked during the mining exploration phase. Like other residents, he referred to the explosions from the dynamite used to blast rocks apart in the mine. Jezabel, living in one of the homes closest to the mine, told how her windows and door frames shook at night, over time causing a gap between the frame and the door, making it difficult to shut. The rumbling is also perceived aurally, affecting residents’ sleep.

Curiously, some participants mentioned that the explosions have quietened in recent years. While this might be seen as welcome relief, residents make sense of the lull by suggesting the mine installed a muffler (silenciador) to stifle the sound. Sonia’s parents say they can ‘no longer feel the mine, but they’re used to it, and they know they [the mine] is still working. It [the mine] must be far below’. Similarly, Ximena cannot see the mine from her house, but she, ‘knows it is there, because I [she] can feel it’. The belief that a muffler was installed, rather than a belief in the reduction or caseation of mining activity, suggests residents believe, feel, or sense a presence-absence of the mine. As Himley and Marston (2020) note, ‘the unique qualities of the subterranean create a sensorially rich experience that has an impact on material flesh’ (p. 175). Here, ominous underground effects are perceived in the body and are enrolled into an expansive imaginary of the San José mine.

Alongside the underground rumblings, real and imagined, is a belief that the mine has ‘already tunnelled underneath’ Magdalena. Several residents remarked that the mine has been draining the aquifers. Another participant feared the ground would collapse during earthquakes (Oaxaca is as an earthquake-prone region), intimating that the mine created cavities beneath their homes. The sense of inevitability that mining will not stop also suggests, as some say, that the mine is ‘already there’ or that it has or will arrive in Magdalena.

Such indication of being below ground or the imminent arrival of mining underground, highlights the spatial and temporal ‘ever-presence’ of the mine: the ‘maybe’ presence, physically, and the ‘always presence’ viscerally. Being underground shifts scales: instead of being somewhere out there or across the highway, the mine is directly below and within the home. Being there ‘already’ gestures towards a temporal inference that residents are currently living with mining, that is different to the mine haunting place (c.f Edensor, 2008). It is not a past mine coming to meet the present town; instead, the mine shares the same present as residents and modifies the future.

Several residents like Aurora say they are already experiencing what they expect for the future: consistent sickness, respiratory problems, dry land—’the truth is, it’s [the mine] affecting us, it will continue affecting us, and it will affect us’. Marta, Esperanza and her mother-in-law, Carlota, tell how the community was worried the mine would cause pollution and affect water, around 2009 when residents protested the mining company. Now they reflect that what was predicted is now happening:

Carlota: They said we were going to be finished, that the animals would die—[they said] how we would be after this, that we would be affected by the water they use to wash the minerals … [the mine] was going to dry the plants and there, you can see it, how the animals have gone.

Esperanza In fact, it’s happening right now. I imagine you know this plant called epazote? Before, it used to grow when it was put in the ground. Now it sprouts, but it starts to dry out, and no one wants it anymore. No one has that plant anymore …

Carlota [people] say the plant is like that because of [mining], but in reality, we don’t know if that’s so, or what it is.

Despite the uncertainty surrounding the causes of dryness and degradation, residents acknowledge these conditions are now part of life. As Ruben puts it, ‘esto es lo que ya estamos viviendo’—this is what we are already living with – living with mining. Future scenarios are also generally tied to the continued existence of the mine (c.f Weszkalnys, 2016). For some the mine is a future source of employment and prosperity, for others, the cause of future drought, health issues, low crop yields and out-migration. In the latter case, residents suggested the mine would continue indefinitely, but others were afraid the mine would vacate and leave Magdalena barren. Here, older residents noted parallels with the gold and silver-led exploitation of the Americas: ‘They are extracting the wealth, leaving a shell behind’. ‘They are robbing Mexico’.

From these readings, the mine is ever-present, manifesting in movement, meanwhile the future of Magdalena is also seen as one with a mine, or the long-term effects of mining. Less prominently, yet important nonetheless, narratives of Magdalena were recast to reflect the mining present (c.f Auyero & Swistun, 2009, p. 56); the ‘old mine’, previously uninteresting, became a foil to the ‘new’ mine: suddenly centuries-old, and there from time immemorial. Like Himley (2014) and Perreault (2018) show, memories of the past can be mobilized, always selectively, as a way of making sense of the present. Here, living with mining sharpens spatiotemporal understandings of the mine, suggesting that the mine is ever-present by always having been there, being felt there presently, and being imagined into the future.

4. Presence-absence

Of course, mining presence is not only diffuse ever-presence. Mining presence can be tangible, taking on physical forms, such as when the absence of something becomes so intense ‘their very absence is tangible’ (Maddrell, 2013, p. 504, original emphasis). Sometimes, it is the presence of material and physical things in the absence of other expected things, scenes and environments that produces such unsettling affects and experiences of absence-presence (Edensor, 2008). Avril Maddrell (2013) elaborates on the affects of the physical-material in her work on memorialization and living with the deceased. The emphasis on manifestation of absent presence in this work is instructive in understanding mining presence. Her reading of artwork that focuses on absent-present aspects of death suggests presence emerges from what (or in their case, who) is absent:

Through the experiential and relational tension between the physical absence (not being there) and emotional presence (a sense of still being there), i.e. absence-presence is greater than the sum of the parts. Absence is not merely a ‘presence’ in and of itself, but rather the absent is evoked, made present, in and through enfolded blendings of the visual, material, haptic, aural, olfactory, emotional-affective and spiritual planes, prompting memories and invoking a literal sense of continued ‘presence’ … (p. 505)

Similarly, it is not simply the absence or presence of something alone, that produces a sense of mining presence. Instead, engagement with ‘everyday’ physical-material, environmental and livelihood-related presences and absences brings about presence and suffuses on-going processes of meaning and place making. Below, I unpack some of the absences and presences that indicate mining presence in Magdalena. Beginning with an encounter with resident, Ana, this section focuses on the present-absent, physical, ‘everyday’ and climatic, traces and beliefs that bring about mining’s presence that in turn, reflects the diverse spatiotemporal experiences of mining.

We are just about to leave Ana’s mother-in-law’s place when she points out the stubby tree in the middle of the yard. Ana has told us about the coyotes, tecolotes (native owls) and lechuzas (barn owls) that frequented the terrenos (fields) when she was a child but are now rarely seen or heard. As we stand up, she remembers something else:

This tree used to be full of birds. There used to be so many in all the branches. Sometimes we would eat them. Now there aren’t as many … . I’ve been seeing some dead ones. They fly here, and the next day I find them dead on the ground. Some others come and sit in the tree carrying like a white pebble or something in their beak. Maybe it’s white or grey dust. Maybe gravel.

We contemplated how eerie it was to find dead birds in the yard, the population literally dropping off. The origins of the pebble – from the mill at the mine? Having recently heard Ana say effluent from the mine’s tailing facility affected the vegetation and water sources in Magdalena, it was difficult to reject the possibility that it was the mine causing the disappearance of birdlife. It was not only my research assistants and I who had this suspicion. Like Ana, Señora Lidia and María also observed dead birds in their yards, tunas (nopal cactus with fruit) and terrenos, saying these deaths were caused by chemicals spread from the mine, that contaminated water, plants, grass, and trees animals consumed. Consistent with the interpretations of the aural and haptic sensations discussed in the previous section, residents also viewed environmental changes along a spectrum between those who strongly implicated the mine and others who rejected its involvement.

The mine does not actually have to cause these events for mining presence to manifest, however. Some may look to the gravel and dead birds as physical evidence of the mine with them, but the effects associated with this physical ‘evidence’ may be perceived more tacitly. Consider, the empty tree in Ana’s mother-in-law’s yard may be symbolic of the mine, as the birds vacate its branches and the dust settles, however, physical-materials may also ‘symbolize and evoke … absent presence as well as situating absence-presence and [acting] as a conduit for the practice of continuing relationship’ (Maddrell, 2013, p. 517; emphasis added). The continuing relationship to which Maddrell refers is between the deceased and the bereaved; however, if we consider place as relational and ‘always becoming’ (Pred, 1984), ‘continuing relationship’ here could be taken to mean residents’ relationship to place. In this way, the presence of some things can evoke and symbolize, constituting continuing relationships, or layering understandings of place. Everyday exposure to traces such as these physical-material ones, as well as variegated absences, i.e. disappearance of birdlife, then, may be incorporated into a sense of place where mining is made present. More broadly, this suggests that sense of place has as much to do with the absent as with the present (Linder, 2022).

The ‘everyday’ dimension of place means that presence is more readily perceived over time. Unlike spectacular events where the ‘impact’ of something is extreme or perturbing that it is palpable, the presence of mining in Magdalena arises from ‘slow observation’ (Davies, 2018), informed by the relationship between people and place, known and lived with over time. María recalls that the rocks on the edge of the watering hole used to look ‘very beautiful’. She now insists that the mine was responsible for them turning yellow. Perhaps for María, who grew up in Magdalena, the tension between memories of the terrenos before mining and stained rocks in front of her gave rise to a sense of presence in the landscape, that I was not struck by as an outsider.

Other participants also noted changes in the present environment, observed over time that were called upon to describe life now. This ranged from long-standing tunilles (type of cactus) drying and falling over, increasing dryness and heat, and diminishing harvests and the ability to grow fruit trees and crops. Several participants noted changes in water, with many describing reduced rainfall – it no longer rained whenever one wanted’—and disappearing rivers, water bodies and wells, that coincided with the arrival of mining. Again, the underground presence of the mine casts a shadowy presence as residents dig deep wells, where they once only dug five metres down. Despite the macro causes of climate change, residents interpretations of change make sense given the undeniable physical and material changes that have occurred since the mine became a lively agent. Put differently, the absence of green vegetation, piles of stored milpa, and abundant water, are thrown into sharp relief with the presence of dry monte (uncultivated countryside), intense sun, stained rocks, and contaminated water: suggestions of the presence of mining.

Furthermore, the prevalence of fish in Valles Centrales indicates that presences and absences in the environment can be signifiers of mining, even as they are read differently. When the tailings facility spilled into the Río Coyote towards the end of 2018, NGOs used two main images to capture the aftermath: white cloudy water and rotting fish. Participants said fish began dying roughly a month after the spill. Later in 2019, fish were found without tails or eyes (Bajo Palabra, 2019). These occurrences contain a striking ‘eventfulness’, however, residents observed the declining population over time. It was through day-to-day observations, that even Pedro, who rejected mining impacts conceded the absence of fish over time was noticeable, that pointed towards an evocative absence and presence of contaminants in the water.

However, the presence of fish in the mine’ tailing’s ponds signified the opposite. Talking about the controversy over the tailings spill and the possibility of contamination in surrounding pueblos, Elias, a miner from Valles Centrales has a different reading:

There are animals—so how is it possible it [the pond] is contaminated? If it was contaminated they [the animals] would already be dead … the mud that is here is drying up, but plants grew; plants sprouted so it cannot be that it is contaminated to a degree that there is no life. There is life there. I tell you that there are fish there, there are pelicans, there are ducks. Yes, there are animals in the water of the dam.

In contrast to Pedro, Elias suggests that the presence of fish and animals at the site of the mine refutes claims of contamination in surrounding pueblos. Although the fish are present and absent in different areas, the readings of presence and absent phenomena is informed by individual experiences and relations to place and their interpretation of the mine.

5. Embodied presence

Across the previous sections, mining presence is perceived sensorily, through the body. Yet, mining presence may also emerge through physical incursions in the terrenos of Magdalena, and in the body themselves. Life-long resident, Señor Román, in his 70s, explains the physical manifestation of mining through dust:

The dust, it sticks with the sun. This fine dust burns the leaves of the plant [the milpa], [this] is what the mine is doing … And how much is the wind doing? ‘The south’ the wind is called, well, when they [the mine] work, there’s a lot of wind and the dust that the mill makes, this whirlwind over there— well, all of that dust, a part of it comes to us, from here at the ground to there. You can see the dust all the way up to the hillsides. All of that, the mine is doing.

He continues,

we’re seeing lots of things. The compañeros who grow near the mine, over there–their milpas are full of dust, dust that the mills produce. The dust settles in the leaves of the milpa. Yes, we see that, that it’s contaminated.

In Señor Román’s description, dust is clearly tied to the presence of mining. However, more than being suggestive of mining or simply being its residue, the description suggests that dust is a vehicle for the mine itself. He makes this even clearer when he remarks, ‘the mine is contaminating the children’. This arresting phrase speaks powerfully to the direct exposure of children’s bodies to the mine (c.f Fiske, 2018); expressed as a contaminant, it is as though the mine – not the dust – permeates them. Indeed, the mine appears to be inscribed in dust: it is seen, handled, inhaled, brushed off and consumed in the milpa, every day.

Contamination and its health effects, particularly for children, was also a palpable concern among other residents. Even some who were indifferent to the mine were worried about the mine’s impact on health and connected the mine to the hepatitis and malaria outbreak in 2019 to early 2020, which led to temporary closure of the kindergarten and a month-long suspension of the primary school. It was often within conversations about children’s health, that residents expressed their suspicion that mining was behind these sicknesses. The observations offered by Señor Román, and the collective concern of other residents around contamination, health and children once again demonstrate the symbolic and evocative means through which mining presence emerges. The prominence of the term ‘contamination’ especially, highlights the affective nature of mining presence. So far, mine contamination in Magdalena has not been recognized by the state or mining company, however such conversation, heightened awareness and concern around contamination suggests that contamination is ‘real’ and that residents are living with it. This discourse of contamination, and its immanence through presences and absences – water, crops and terrenos contaminated ‘with mining’—partly constitutes a sense that the mine dwells with them, in Magdalena (c.f Roberts, 2017).

In addition to anxieties, fear and uncertainty spurred by mining, the threat of contamination also changes behaviour and practices. Notably, many residents in Magdalena now purchase drinking water instead of relying on Magdalena’s water supply since the tailings spill. This change is significant given residents have always consumed water from the region, and that bottled water in Magdalena is priced higher than in Oaxaca City. Jessica says, ‘We buy water now, but it’s a cost, especially for those with larger families. [The bottled water] is sufficient for two people, but for others … ’ Diana elaborates on the differentiated effect of contaminated water. She points out that older people who rely on field cultivation are most affected. ‘How will they eat’ she asks, if their crops fail and their animals die from contaminated water.

This marked behaviour change, and at this cost, alongside the worries of ‘consuming the mine’ through water, food and air further illustrates that mining presence is embodied. In some ways the mine embodied might be akin to a chronic ailment carried by the body. Not only is disease ever-present, but it shapes relations between place, people, bodies, and scale – as we saw through the COVID-19 pandemic (Linder, 2022). Mining presence too casts light upon people and place, inserting itself through narratives, affects, bodies and the physical environment. But unlike a bodily infection or disease, a body that senses the presence of mining cannot be inspected for mining (and perhaps this is beside the point). The presence of mining is already made real, as evidenced by the ‘real’ and differentiated experiences of residents living in Magdalena. The suspicion of mining contamination is alive in the absence of formal medical reports or peer-reviewed studies of water and air quality. Although the mine’s impact on health has not been ‘proven’, the mine’s incursion into the body and place is evident as what Murphy (2006) calls the ‘congealed conditions of possibility … what was and was not sayable, perceivable, doable, natural, possible’ (p. 13).

6. Conclusion

This paper introduced ‘mining presence’ to describe the embodied and affective aspects of life with mining. I focused upon the suspicions, traces and feelings that contributed to a sense that residents of Magdalena Ocotlán were living with the San José mine. Specifically, I explored the ever-presence of mining, through the metaphor of atmospheres, and the sensory apprehension of mining’s spatiotemporal rhythms. I then discussed processes of meaning-making, where mining presence emerged out of presences and absences in landscape and livelihoods, observed over time and space. Finally, I discussed the embodiment of mining presence, highlighting the affective discourse of contamination. Through mining presence, I showed how the presence of materials, traces, dust and debris and the deterioration of environments, can transcend the physical, instilling a sense that the mine is presently there.

This attunement to the present-absent and experiential in everyday life has conceptual and substantive promise. Primarily, ‘mining presence’ approaches experiences of extraction from outside of the language of ‘impact’. Life with mining is diverse and more complex than what is routinely captured through impact-driven approaches, like environmental and social evaluations, that by virtue of their form require them to demonstrate impact. But where there is a focus on impact, the discussion invariably turns to ‘how much?’ Such a line of questioning limits what can be known about mining and the extractive industries; it suggests experiences of mining are significant only when they are captured as quantifiable impact. Instead, an approach inspired by the presences and absences of extraction can expand our understandings of the felt, just perceptible and cumulative dimensions of extraction that makes for a more robust geography of extraction. To be clear, this paper is not ‘anti-impact’, but the goal of this paper was to emphasize the forms and experiences of life with mining, providing insight into the character of extraction and its relations with people and place. In the case of Magdalena Ocotlán, mining is a presence, carried through disturbed sleep, shaky ground, concerns about water, harvest, health, and atmospheric change.

Furthermore, asking questions of everyday life with extractives connects with spatio-temporal concerns around extractive projects and their effects (D’Angelo & Pijpers, 2018; Fent & Kojola, 2020). Like Anderson et al. (2020) identify, emergencies, environmental or otherwise, can unfold slowly – as ‘forms of attritional lethality and the ordinary dynamics of enervating conditions’ (p 635). This paper has drawn attention to the ordinariness and ‘everyday-ness’ of (life with) extractive industries that operates alongside other timescales in which extraction takes place (e.g. project timelines, financial years, exploration-operation-closure stages, previous mining). Particular attention to affect and embodiment in everyday life, the present and cumulative, might be considered an orientation to lived time (Crang, 2001); this focus is different from longitudinal studies of extraction and environmental change that may narrate disembodied extractive histories (c.f Ramalho, 2020). Paying attention to presence-absence yields lived and embodied histories, memories, and stories of place allows for the ‘becoming’ of mining, or the evoking and symbolizing that instils a sense the mine is presently there, even when, say, mining operations do not occur physically. This complicates understandings of the spaces and temporalities from which extraction occurs, showing it is possible to ‘live with mining’ where mining does not ‘exist’ or where extractive activity is not demarcated in municipal boundaries and project timelines.

In sum, this research provokes new questions for the geographies of extraction. Crucially, the research asks us to consider where mining begins and ends, spatially and temporally and at what scales; what counts as mining, and it’s differentiated and far-reaching effects. It highlights a need to attend to that which does not present itself, visually, or catastrophically, and in unexpected places.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the residents of Magdalena Ocotlán, for their participation, generosity, and openness in this research. I thank Jonas Olvera and Itzel Cruz for their companionship in the field. I am grateful to my supervisors, Anthony Bebbington and Vanessa Lamb for their feedback on earlier drafts and on-going guidance. My sincere thanks to Sharlene Mollett and the two anonymous reviewers for their encouraging and insightful comments. Special thanks to Chandra Jayasuriya for creating the maps. This paper was written on Wurundjeri Country.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The mine appears to be covered; however, the ‘cap’ is comprised of dried and compacted mine tailings called dry stack tailings. This is a method of mine tailings management, where tailings are dried and compacted, then stacked in a mound.

2. A pueblo or pueblos (plural) refers to a town or village in Spanish but can also be used to connote ‘people’ and ‘community’.

3. Three kilometres is roughly the distance between the mine and the urban area of Magdalena. The San José mine property area (Figure 1) overlaps the cultivated fields of Magdalena but the infrastructure of the mine is not located within the municipal boundary.

4. There were 405 mining concessions in Oaxaca in 2020 (SEMARNAT, 2020). Available at: https://apps1.semarnat.gob.mx:8443/dgeia/compendio_2020/dgeiawf.semarnat.gob.mx_8080/ibi_apps/WFServlet21b5.html.

5. All names are pseudonyms.

6. A method of mining where broken ore remains in the mine as a foundation from which miners work.

7. The San José deposit is now mined using a mechanized overhand cut-and-fill method, similar to stoping. The mine has expanded twice since it’s purchase, including the addition of the dry stack tailings facility (Fortuna Silver, 2019).