Architectures of Extraction: Labor and Industrial Ruination in Highland Bolivia

Abstract

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.