Architectures of Extraction: Labor and Industrial Ruination in Highland Bolivia

ABSTRACT

What happens when the architectures of extraction, once intimately constituted by capitalist and racial forms of exclusion, begin to rot? Focusing on a Bolivian tin mine, this paper examines the social effects of deteriorating “architectures of extraction,” a category that includes both aboveground infrastructures and belowground networks of tunnels and scaffolding. First, I argue that when Llallagua’s extractive architecture was built, it helped shore up a connection between tin mining, working-class identity, and revolutionary nationalism – which in turn became bound up with mestizaje, an ideology of racial and cultural whitening. Second, I argue that the ruination of this extractive architecture has had ambivalent implications for the racial politics of contemporary small-scale mining operations that continue to operate inside the mountain. On the one hand, the rotting structures reinforce regional racial hierarchies in a variety of ways, but on the other hand, the slow degradation of the physical structures has made the corresponding social structures more porous, if not fully permeable, to members of regional Indigenous ayllus. While access to the financial benefits of mining is far from unambiguously liberatory, this paper nevertheless suggests that the political possibilities contained within the ruins of extractive architectures are not uniformly adverse.

KEYWORDS:

• Resource extraction
• built environment
• infrastructure
• ruination
• race
• Bolivia

Acknowledgements

Thanks are owed primarily to the people of Llallagua and Uncía who shared time and knowledge with me, including tin miners, COMIBOL archivists, colleagues at the Universidad Nacional Siglo XX, and journalists at Radio Pio XII. I also benefited enormously from the feedback of Kirsten Francescone, Jen Rose Smith, Dylan Harris, and Joshua Mullenite.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ethnicity, culture, language, and race are entangled and historically shifting categories in Bolivia, as they are elsewhere; I follow Wade (1997) in asserting that there is no essential and immutable difference between ethnicity and race, and Barragán and Loza (2009) in exploring how class categories and differences in employment in Bolivia have also been racialized.

2 See Absi (2005) for a similar point about mining cooperatives in the city of Potosí, and Barragán (2017) for a discussion of the relationship between contemporary cooperative miners and the k’ajchas, or organized ore thieves, who proliferated during the colonial era.

3 There were always some linkages between mines and ayllus, however. Beyond some ayllu members going to work in the mines, salaried miners’ wives also traveled to rural markets to trade supplies from the company store for fresh produce (Godoy 1985a).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies.