Ni a favor ni en contra: Emotional geographies of life with mining

Abstract

The expansion of the extractive industries in Latin America has been met with a variety of responses by affected communities. Scholars have sought to understand why local people act as they do, highlighting contrasting interests and values between actors, relationships between companies and communities, identities, and issues of governance. This paper builds upon efforts to understand local responses to the extractive industries by focusing on emotion and ambivalence related to the perceptions of and positions toward the San José mine in Valles Centrales, Oaxaca, Mexico. Since 2009, contestation around the San José silver and gold mine has taken on different forms and intensities. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic research and using an emotional geography approach, I consider a range of responses local people have towards the mine more than a decade on. I focus on the emotional aspects of being for, against, indifferent or otherwise situated in relation to mining, arguing that people's positions towards mining are not only shaped by the political and material, but also the emotional. In doing so, I highlight the ambivalences of intra-community relationships, livelihood challenges, and forms of resistance and dissent, that together inform responses to mining in Valles Centrales.