Article writing (550 words)

Read the article and watch the lecture first, then answer those question and write the article

Question:  “In what ways is this issue specifically Peruvian, and in what ways is this part of a wider global problem? Use specific examples from Dr. Goldstein’s work to make your argument.” 

Prompt:

Dr. Goldstein’s research in Peru explores the dangerous conditions that impoverished people working in illegal gold mines and sex work endure. The plight of these workers highlights important connections between illegal mining, multinational corporations, environmental destruction, health, and human trafficking. The Peruvian government is complicit in the mining and local police threaten to ‘exterminate’ these impoverished people if they are identified in speaking out against the mining corporations.

Article ( What’s in a name:

http://somatosphere.net/2015/whats-in-a-name.html/

)

lecture video (

)

 Some possible resources: 

 Overfishing and modern slavery:  

Overfishing and modern slavery – are marine workers are being exploited in the race to compete?

 

 Interpol rescues 85 children in Sudan trafficking ring:  

https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/11/africa/interpol-burst-trafficking-ring-sudan/index.html

 

 Madagascar: Next government must end human rights violations:  

Madagascar: Next government must end human rights violations

 

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The Virgin Mary, The Son of Jupiter: Mercury Rising

(Re)producing gendered-environmental racisms in a quickly heating planet

Mother and Child, Rainforest Mines, Mercury-Filled Water
(Photo shown with permission of Dado Galdieri 2011)

Mothers and Children in Madre de Dios

On a sweltering September day in 2011, I meet officer Alesandra and her infant daughter in front of

the police station. She is off-duty for a couple of hours, enjoying time with her baby daughter, asleep in the
stroller. We are in Mazuko, a growing gold mining town in Peru’s Amazonian region of Madre de Dios,
which translates as the “Mother of God” or the “Virgin Mary.” The region’s name lends itself to notions of
female “natural” purity, something that conservationists harness to mobilize environmental activism and
notions of gendered responsibility and ecological kinship with the land. From where Alesandra stands,
Madre de Dios is anything but virginal. She comments that political corruption, migration, deforestation and
mercury contamination of “pristine” rainforest, along with a proliferating sex-industry have become the
region’s defining features. Dubbed “El Dorado” for its gold-flecked soil, artisanal miners extract the shiny
particles with liquid mercury. The ecological impact has alarmed environmental engineers and social
scientists that this will destroy the “lungs of the earth” and “nature’s pharmacy” – the Amazon rainforest
(Bebbington 2010; Dourojeanni 2006). The environmental conservationists are not the only ones to engage
the metaphoric power of personified, gendered nature. One public official went so far as to refer to the
gold mining areas of Madre de Dios, transformed into desert by miner’s hands and their abundant use of
liquid mercury, as “a ruined and then abandoned landscape, just like a disgraced woman.”1

In 2011 and 2012, the governmental estimates put the number of gold miners in the region at
30,000 and the number of sex-workers at 5,000. In 2017, governmental officials and non-governmental
workers continue to cite these numbers, while also saying that there are likely more people, but that there
is no precise way of knowing in a rainforest region the size of Portugal, where, according to regional
authorities: “donde no hay Estado” (where there is no State). Despite the contaminated marks on its
reputation, Madre de Dios, nestled between Brazil and Bolivia, still boasts its reputation as “La Capital de la
Biodiversidad” albeit with a giant, rotting, wooden sign.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
1 Personal communication, Goldstein 2017. “Como una tierra arruinada, abandonada, como una mujer
deshonrada.”

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“The Capital of Biodiversity? We call it “El Dorado, or “El Wild West,” Alesandra had said. She
was from Cusco and the first time that she had heard of Mazuko was when she received her assignment,
learning that the town served as a trafficking hub for people, gold, mercury, cocaine and gasoline. “Most of
the miners are like me, from the Andes,” Alesandra explains. “From Cusco, from Puno, but I see Koreans,
Chinese, even Russians – at least, they don’t look like the others and this is what everyone says. There are
mafias deep inside the mines. I only meet the ones who make it out and they say it is hard to escape.”
Alesandra had not traveled far into the rainforest, nor had the other policemen. The force had two
motorcycles and one truck at their disposition. When the region’s police pulled together for special
operations, they also had to use motorcycles to enter, as trucks could not traffic on the narrow dirt paths.

“Mazuko is a gateway,” she had said, “everything that is going into the rainforest passes through
here.” In 2017, Mazuko has changed. It is now both a gateway and a check point. After a massive mining
strike in March of 2012, U.S officials brought resources and personnel to build security infrastructure to
survey traffic from the Andes to the Amazon on the Interoceanic Road, the only paved thoroughfare from
the mountains to the jungle in the region. The roadside town plays a crucial role in Peru’s extractive
politics, in part because of its geography along the relatively new Interoceanic Road, which runs, in its
entirety, sheer across Brazil and Peru. Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction company now under
investigation for corruption, along with three former Peruvian presidents (Alejandro Toledo, Alan Garcia,
and Ollanta Humala) finished paving the final section from the Andes to the Amazon in 2011. Despite
Alesandra’s commitment to her job, the move from the Andes to the Amazon had not been an easy one. She
was the only female police officer in an eleven-man police force. The policemen, she explained, were
having trouble communicating with sex-trafficked women and children. “They needed a woman’s touch…
or a mother’s touch….” Her attention drifted to her baby, little Sarita, who had started to cry in her sleep.
“Let’s walk a bit.” She moved the stroller back and forth as there wasn’t much room to walk between the
hustle of the gold-changers, so we stood in front of “Oro Fino,” which guaranteed solidarity, purity and
power for Peru.

These are not simply shops where one can exchange currency, but also where blowtorches do an
alchemist’s work. Artisanal gold mining in the region utilizes liquid mercury to amalgamate with gold dust
in the soil. The “gold-changers” transform the mercury-gold alloy by burning off the base metal. I held my
breath. Alesandra paused to watch the flames of the blowtorches and the men bent over the shallow plates,
often without goggles or respiratory protection.

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The mercury vapor is incredibly toxic, particularly for young children and fetuses, damaging brain

growth, kidney, and liver function (Diringer 2014; Fernandez 2011; UNEP 2013). In 2010, researchers
from Stanford’s Carnegie Amazon Mercury Ecosystem Project (CAMEP) found the mercury levels outside
of the cambios de oro to be ten times greater than the UN-mandated safety levels (Benko 2010; Fernandez
2010). I asked Alesandra what she thought about the dangers of heavy metal toxicity. She shrugged. “We
have human trafficking – children, teenagers, women, we have fatalities in the mines and traffic accidents
on the road. Is mercury really that dangerous?”2 Her question was, and is, a good one. Liquid mercury is
beautiful to look at, seemingly harmless to touch, and its vapor is as invisible as it is odorless – at least, to
the human senses. The suspicion that mercury might not really be all that toxic is one shared by many
miners and even some government inhabitants, regardless of how migratory. Or perhaps it is because they
are so migratory. Public health officials, lawyers, and environmentalists, those who consider Madre de Dios
to be “home” or “home” to much of the planet’s biodiversity, blame the transient (mostly Andean)
population for “poisoning” the “Pachamama” of Madre de Dios.

Ideas about “home,” the socially contaminated and contaminating category of the migrant, along
with notions of human and nonhuman female purity form the foundation of this article on the contaminating
effects of mercury and the reproduction of environmental racisms. While gold miners in Madre de Dios
tend not consider themselves to be indigenous, according to the State, they are. The Incan lineage of
indigeneity is a lucrative one. The UNESCO-designated tourist sites like that of Machu Picchu benefit from
this nostalgic framing of the Incan legacy, living in current day Quechua and Aymara communities that
honor the “Pachamama.” The State and the Peruvian press have engaged in smear campaign: painting the
Andean migrants as dirty, uneducated, and potentially former Shining Path members, which is to say:
criminal. They are “fallen” indians, rather than honoring their Pachamama, they are, instead, “raping” her.
They are a kind of “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966) – they belong in the mountains where they came
from, not in the jungle where the idealized Amazonian “indio” lives (Cusurichi Palacios 2003; García
Altamirano 2003).

In examining the global multivalences and ramifications of mercury in the air, water and soil, I
engage notions of the Pachamama and gendered “nature” with the Greek term “oikos” – or our “eco” –
bringing critical race theory and indigenous studies to bear on (eco)feminist scholarship. Oikos,” which
translates into myriad related definitions: “dwelling,” “household,” “home,” or “family,” lends itself to think
through the “eco” in “ecologies” and “economies” to consider the roles that that gender and sexuality play in
changing forms of kinship, citizenship, and (environmental) politics beyond and within the concept of the

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
2 “Tenemos trata de personas – niños, adolescentes, mujeres, tenemos fallecidos en las minas, de moto por
la carretera, que tán peligroso es el mercurio?”

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human. Concentrating on mercury in its conceptual and actual form, I trace levels of contamination in the
human bodies that labor in rainforest gold mines, the impact on maternal-fetal health, and mercury’s role in
theories of (social) contamination that (re)produce different kinds of environments and environmental
racisms. I ask how the concept of “home” in the “eco” structures ideas about who and what bodies carry a
toxic “body burden” (Agard-Jones forthcoming; Dillon 2015; Graeter 2015; Lamoreaux 2016; Shapiro
2015), and what the collapse of women’s bodies with the built landscape means for designating
responsibility in human and environmental health.

From claims about environmental disaster and irreparably accelerating climate change, “nature’s
pharmacy” and the “world’s lungs” – that is, the Amazon rainforest – represents a kind of “hot spot.” Or,
the Amazon as a physical and idealized space represents a “truth spot,” as Jason Pribilsky notes; a terrain
upon which anthropologists have posited and refuted claims about what really constitutes “human nature”
(2013)… usually through the bodies and bodily practices of indigenous peoples. Some regions of the world
lend themselves to specific kinds of analysis (Strathern 1990) and in this frontier Amazon region different
kinds of analyzing and imaginings about (human) nature (Raffles 2002; Sahlins 2013, 2005) emerge. In
Madre de Dios, diagnoses as well as prognoses about climate health are quite literally built on the levels of
mercury “rising” in the thermometer of a quickly heating planet. Mercury’s effects on climate change and
on fetal-maternal health have become the focus of both international and national agendas, linking
environmental contamination with human medical conditions (Diringer 2014; Fernandez 2013, UNEP
2013; Pan 2014). Through the figures of the mother-and-child and of nature’s body – gendered female,
public health officials and environmental scientists, call for eliminating the mercurial “body burden” placed
on human and nonhuman bodies, for a less toxic future.

Alesandra shrugs off my concern at the invisible threat of mercury vapor but kindly offers to find a
place to sit further away from the gold-changers. We settle into green plastic chair to talk, waiting for
Angela, the psychologist employed by a local Catholic missionary couple, Oscar and Ana Guadelupe, who
run a refuge for women and children as well as a legal defense council. The Guadelupes chose the name
“Huarayo” for their organization, which is an interesting choice as the term has undergone a revolution of
meanings, as Peruvian scholar María C. Chavarría notes. It initially represented a general insult to
Amazonian Indians, but with a particular ethnic affiliation to the Ese Eja. Now Huarayo refers to anyone
born in Madre de Dios. “Huarayos are tied to their land. If you are born in a place, it is always home.”
Place-based notions of identity are strong for Alesandra and other government officials who expressed
concerns that people were going to be reproducing children far from “home,” and this, not as much as the
mercury, can cause damage. “Are you feeling homesick?” Alesandra asks in greeting as Angela arrives. “I am
too,” she says, answering her own question. Angela does miss home, but people tend to see her more as a
“Huarayo.” They can tell from her features that she is not from Cusco, but Amazonian. They are right, but
she is not from this part of the rainforest. Both women miss home, which is made both harder and easier
working with the mothers and children who arrive at their doorsteps. Angela receives whomever the police
bring to her – children taken in police raids from the mines, women who report domestic abuse and need a
safe place to stay or to leave their children.

Alesandra asks Angela if she knows anything about the mercury poison. Angela nods her head. She
has been eating extra cilantro because she read it that can help with ridding the body of mercury. Alesandra
looks stricken. She does not like cilantro. She wonders aloud why the doctors at the clinic aren’t doing
more to tell people about the dangers of the gold-changers. But then, she acknowledges, there’s too much
happening already. With increasing car accidents on the road, the small clinic seems to be running in crisis
mode every time I am there. I have spoken with the doctors, one of whom had to excuse himself mid-
interview to deliver a child, but they find that their patients are not receptive to listening about the effects
of the mercury. But as newborns and young children begin demonstrate the effects of heavy metal
contamination, it proves an awful case in point.

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Through the entwined relationships between human and earth beings (de la Cadena 2015),
Alesandra’s relationship with the gold miners, and the children she received from the gold mines, I follow
mercury’s sometimes silvery, sometimes invisible trail. I analyze the heavy metal’s cosmological and earthly
effects and bodily affects in three movements, arguing that mercury has a multivalence – a quality of having
multiple values, meanings, and affinities. While itself a polluting substance, thinking with and through
mercury’s metaphoric as well as physiological abilities can offer possibilities to mitigate its toxic effects.

Mercury Rising and Reproducing Racisms

Sources of Mercury Pollution and Mercury’s Global Moves~ from Naomi Lubick and David
Malakoff’s 2013 report in Science

Mercury, Hermes, or quicksilver has seeped into the psyches of philosophers and emperors, mad-

hatters, sushi-eaters and cavity-fillers. As a mythological figure, Mercury is a trickster character, the god of
trade, speed, and communication. As a chemical element, mercury can “move” through the body, passing
the blood-brain barrier, swim through amniotic fluid, and change the body chemistry of all living
organisms. With global contamination levels rising, the United Nations Environment Programme convened
the 2013 Minamata Convention. The subsequent treaty aims to reduce human and environmental exposure,
by eliminating the heavy metal from pesticides, gold mining, pharmaceuticals, and factory emissions
(Malakoff and Lubick 2013; UNEP 2013). Artisanal and small-scale goldmining (ASGM) has become the
top source for anthropogenic mercury contamination, beating out fossil fuels (Diringer 2014; Malakoff and
Lubick 2013; UNEP 2013). The figure detailing mercury contamination bears further examination. The
numbers pit brown bodies laboring in the mines of Madre de Dios against the white collar corporations that
offer “clean(er)” mining strategies.

When I first arrived to conduct fieldwork in Madre de Dios, crossing the border from Rio Branco,
Brazil, my research focused on the conceptual traffic between “nature” and culture” (Haraway 1989),
transits of empire (Byrd 2011), and the traffic of women (Rubin 1974), medicinal plants, and gold along the
Interoceanic Road (Goldstein 2015). Since 2009, I have lived and researched in Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia. I
had begun to travel the Interoceanic Road in 2010 from the Brazilian coast, following the Interoceanic Road
into Peru. I crossed the border into Madre de Dios in July 2011, with a Maria Emília Coelho, Brazilian
journalist-friend who had covered the road’s construction since its inception (Coelho 2009; 2010; 2011).
Together, we covered Alan Garcia’s inauguration of the “bridge of friendship” in Madre de Dios, the last

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piece of the road to connect Peru with Brazil. It was one of Garcia’s final presidential acts. The bridge was
not finished, however, and hours after the ceremony, workers continued their work until December of that
year. At the time, I had yet to learn about the role that mercury played in socio-environmental justice and
politics. Since entering the mines with government health workers and environmental engineers, I have
seen people – particularly children – with odd skin conditions, motor-coordination issues, and cognitive
disabilities. While the Peruvian doctors, health officials, and politicians that I worked with attribute these
physical conditions to mercury contamination, not all of them agree that the mercury contamination comes
from the gold mining.

In May of 2017, the regional government of Madre de Dios hosted epidemiologists and
toxicologists from Lima. They gave two day’s worth of presentations on mercury, lead, cadmium, and
arsenic. During a break on the first day, I spoke with the head doctor in Peru’s Ministry of Health working
on “strategic efforts” regarding heavy metals and chemical substances. We stood by the open door of the
public health classroom, munching on empanadas and downing an artificial version of chicha morada, a drink
traditionally made from purple corn. Dr. Caballero answered my questions about mercury contamination
in the region and said that the next session would be on mother-to-child transmission of heavy metal
toxicity. But he didn’t think the mercury came from the gold mining. He pointed to the small fires in the
small, overgrown field strewn with trash in front of us. Smoke wafted towards us, smelling of melting
plastic. “These fires… the gasoline… there are other ways that mercury enters the environment.” He is
right, of course, but later his colleague would show a slide of a young woman, pregnant at five months,
with liquid mercury in her system. Indigenous communities tell of seeing silver globules floating down the
river, a beautiful sight if the results were not so vexing. Mercury is entering the atmosphere on many levels
in many ways, which makes targeting a single source and villain that much harder, when working within the
confines of Western etiology. The doctors and nurses attending the capacitation workshop on heavy metals
and chemical substances work directly in the mining areas or along the side of the Interoceanic Road. Their
patients are gold miners and sex-workers. Fascinated by what they were learning, the health care workers
asked questions about how to tell their patients that they had a body burden and whether there was anything
to the data on violence and heavy metals contamination. They wondered how much people would listen,
when the gold to be made in the mines made the cost of mercury poisoning seem insignificant.

International press coverage on the gold mining’s dual contaminations – the mercurial devastation
in the rainforest and the sex-trafficking has been rising in the past few years. The pressure on the Peruvian
government to intervene in the entwined human-environmental health issues came to a head on May 23,
2016, when Peru’s Minister of the Environment declared a State of Emergency in Madre de Dios. The
government authorities cited alarmingly high levels of the heavy metal found in hair, urine, and blood
samples through three independently conducted studies by researchers from Stanford’s Carnegie Amazon
Mercury Ecosystem Project (CAMEP), Centro de Innovación Científica Amazónico (CINCIA), and Duke
University’s Global Health Institute. Roughly 40% of the population (48,000) people had reported
symptoms of mercury poisoning. The estimated amount of liquid mercury dumped into the environment
from illegal artisanal mining in Madre de Dios hovers around an annual 30-40 tons (ACA 2013; Benavides
2015; La Républica 2015; Prensa Andina 2015; Watsa 2015) and guesstimates of 400 tons of mercury
during the boom years of 2001 – 2013 (Reaño 2016) to some 650 tons between 1997 and 2015 (Benavides
2015) up to 721 tons by 2010 (Prensa Andina 2015). As Peruvian journalist Guillermo Reaño asked,
writing about the State of Emergency, when compared with the 82 tons of mercury that leaked into Japan’s
Minamata Bay, “Where does our country place in the rankings of catastrophes of this type if we consider

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that it is understood that the Japanese case is the Chernobyl of mercury contamination?”3 It is a good if not
also fascinating question of comparing disasters, contaminations, and motivations across time and space.

Francisco Román Dañobeyta, a conservation biologist working on mercury contamination in Madre
de Dios since 2012, finds himself, his wife and children with above-normal mercury toxicity levels in 2016
(Reaño 2016). My friend and collaborator, Julio Araújo Flores and his family, seem to have escaped that
fate. We met in 2011, when Julio was working on his doctoral research. He is a biologist, with a specialty
in aquatic creatures, though he is equally disposed to testing soils and animals on land. His doctoral research
brought him to Madre de Dios in the mid-2000s, before mercury had become a problem. Back in 2011, the
push to understand the levels of mercury toxicity was still in its inchoate form, but Luis Fernández of the
Carnegie Institute had begun to suspect that river fish, particularly carnivorous ones, likely carried mercury
from the mining areas down—and in some cases—upstream (Pan 2015; Swenson 2011). He hired Araújo
to study the levels of mercury toxicity in the fish as the bioaccumulation from fish to human passes easily
through the digestive system (Diringer 2014).

When we sit down to a meal of river fish in May 2017, Julio explains that he, his wife Gina and two
daughters regularly eat river fish – any of the ones that do not have high mercury levels. Yet Gina, when she
was pregnant had stayed away from anything that came out of the water. But now, the problem is also in
the soil. “Papayas, these are all over now, mostly going to Lima. But they absorb the river water used to
irrigate, and all this has mercury in it too.” The papayas, along with cacao are part of a joint governmental
and nongovernmental effort to promote agriculture in the region, as an option to gold mining. Gina, who is
from Lima, never imagined that her main concern in the rainforest would be heavy metal contamination.
“It’s everywhere! If it’s in the water, it is in the soil. Or if it is in the soil, it is in the water. Which means
anything grown in the region is likely contaminated.” While fruits and vegetables were previously
disregarded as major players in the toxicity game, there is a growing trend in toxicology demonstrates that
they can become saturated sources if the soil and water contains high levels of heavy metals (Massaquoi et al.
2015; Sharma et al. 2016). The conceptions of a pure mother nature in the rainforest were ones that Gina
carried with her and ones that she wishes to maintain. She works with reforestation and environmental
education efforts, having seen the effects of heavy metal contamination in Lima.

Lima as well as the surrounding copper mines in the Andes have a longstanding reputation for lead
toxicity, along with carrying racialized valence for the communities affected (Graeter 2015; Li 2015). The
social contamination that can predate, precipitate and then perpetuate the physiological contamination will
come under more analysis in the next section, in examining particulate and (in)articulate “bodies in the
system.”

For many people, Madre de Dios summons up images of large rivers that make serpentines through
lush green rainforest. “Mercury was not something that had ever crossed my radar,” Gina sighs. “But, I
suppose, like everyone else, we are benefitting from the gold mining because of all the studies on mercury.”
This kind of comment was also echoed by NGO workers committed to (or contracted) to combat human
trafficking. They noted that their livelihoods also depend on the existence of the gold mining in the region.
The economic benefits that NGO workers and environmental scientists gain from working in the region
represent the kinds of “toxic” markets – so-called because of their volatility – that both legitimate and
aggravate efforts to place monetary value on clean air, water, and land. Gina had also worked with Save the
Children and a local missionary organization called “Huarayo” (which is the local name of an Amazonian
ethnic group) to document and alleviate the trauma from sex-trafficking in women and children. “It was too
heavy. I can’t keep doing it. It infects (contamina) my dreams.” This is what Gina has said to me, over and
over again, throughout the years. She oscillates between frustration and hope when engaging with me on

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
3¿Qué lugar debería ocupar nuestro país en el ranking de las catástrofes de este tipo si consideramos que
para los entendidos el caso japonés es el Chernobil de la contaminación mercurial?

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my work with sex-trafficked women. The day-to-day, and often night-to-night interactions with people
who really do not want to be involved in the sex-trade can take its toll. “I know mercury is poison, but I
feel like I can control it,” Gina says. “The women… the girls… I just can’t. Please just stick with this
[mercury] topic.” Gina had always worried about becoming too involved in supportive those who
experience sexual trauma. She didn’t have the training or the mentality for it, she said. When the work
started to “infect” her dreams, her ability to care for her own children plunged. She began to have anxiety
attacks and lost her “happiness,” as she put it.

For Alesandra, there was no choice in whether or not to involve herself. This was her job, even if
she had to make some of it up as she went. Luckily, she had Angela. It was to Angela that Alesandra would
bring any of the women or children taken on police raids from the mines. Angela came from another part of
the Amazon. While she slipped into to prostibars to do her own research and blended in as a body, she
didn’t speak Quechua or Aymara. This marked her as being from elsewhere. But Alesandra did speak
Quechua. So unlike the other male police officers that would deposit their charges with Angela and then
leave, Alesandra would stay to help translate. Sometimes, she would bring along her infant daughter. Like
Gina, Alesandra’s concerns were also that she would not be fully able to parent well because of the many
hours that she worked, but her comfort with the miners, as a fellow andina, constituted different grounds
for interactions. She also found that taking her daughter with her into the police station meant that women
brought in for processing often responded differently to her, more willing to share their stories and a baby
often softened the attitude of male miners enough such that what might have been a tense interaction,
became a conversation.

The shared Quechua fluency and a Cuzqueña identity made Alesandra feel as though people greeted
her like a long lost family-member. “They are so happy to hear me great them with the Trés Principios or
address them in Quechua.” The “Three Principles” are the moral code of conduct and greeting: Ama Sua,
Ama Lulla, Ama Qu’ella that translate to: “Don’t Lie, Don’t Cheat, Don’t Steal.” These become the pride and
basis from which Peru would be rebuilt after the Fujimori years (Cabrero 2006).4 There is a shared
understanding of the world, of how to approach it, and a sense of decency that slips into a “moral definition
of race” (de la Cadena 2010) that, along colonial lines of plunder, asserts itself as a governing ethic for why
the Andean “colonos” or colonists as thus more deserving of Amazonian land because the indios of the forest
are wild, just like the land. “We are a good people,” Alesandra would say. Her words prompted me to think
of Cuzqueña scholar Marisol de la Cadena’s framing of “gente decente” (decent people). De la Cadena
examines the moral definitions of race that include education and family ties. “As the conduit of education
and morality, the biological family was a central component of decency” (de la Cadena 2000: 47). She
invokes an elite Cuzqueño saying that resonates beyond the city, that people gain “education and morality in
the cradle.” The circulation of the sayings about who are “decent people” falls along colonial lines of who
counts as a person. Family ties as well as education are important, but such decency begins with the
mother’s body and what kind of enculturated decency – or lack thereof – that she is passing on to her child.
These sedimented concerns about cultural decency are what trouble Alesandra and the other police officers
the most. They are far outnumbered by miners, asked to do an impossible job of “maintaining peace order,”
which to them, means keeping the cultural order of people. The passing of mercury through the earth’s
atmosphere, soil, and waterways – from gestating mother to fetus does show “on the radar,” to refer back
to Gina’s words, but quicksilver’s trace settles onto an already-deeply racialized landscape.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
4 As this article is in the process of publication, the rise of “Fujimorismo” with Alberto Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko, at the helm is
further toxifying Peruvian politics. This raises a host of relevant ironies with respect to father Fujimori’s forced sterilizations of
indigenous women, his daughter’s political persona as an embodied reproduction of her father’s policies, and her staunch support
of unfettered natural resource extraction and corruption ties to the builders of the Interoceanic Road.

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Upsetting the stereotypes of indigenous populations in the Amazon as being “wild” and lacking in
cultivation that comes from a perceived lack of lettered education are analytically well-trodden (Greene
2010; Hale 2004; Taussig 1987; Urteaga 2013). And yet they still inform governmental policies and State
officials’ ideas about who counts as a decent person, as one who deserves to make decisions about
reproducing themselves and having control over their bodies and their land. Indigenous women in Peru
have undergone forced sterilization (Molina 2017) most notably during the Fujimori years. In the jungle
mines the “mix” of people – of undocumented Andean miners with Andean women as well as the “wild”
women (mujeres salvajes) of the forest are concerns for Alesandra and her fellow police-officers. “La selva,”
which also means “the jungle” also means “the wild,” and characterized women who did not get married,
mostly because they hadn’t learned “to know” how to be decent. The play of words that people articulate in
Madre de Dios, of the “mujer salvaje” turns a woman from the jungle into a “wild woman.” Less of a threat
was the shaman or the “wild man” (Taussig 1987), so deeply had notions of decency (as well as decay)
become entwined with ideas of cleanliness in the daily life of a “cultured” person.

The officers view the mixing of people in the mines with unease. “It is a problem of convivencia,”
Alesandra explains. Convivencia means “living together,” which then leads to a mixing of blood and, rather
than having the stable morality of the cradle, suddenly, there is an unstable population of “indecency”. The
“enculturated racism” extant in Peru, traced and displaced by Marisol de la Cadena, as well as Mary
Weismantel (2001) and Daniella Gandolfo (2009), who take up de la Cadena’s critique, rests upon ideas of
moral and bodily hygiene, rooted in people’s geographical and social “place” in the world. This often comes
to mean that Lima’s urbanized space has a civilized “whiteness” and the Incanized mountain spaces take on a
encultured notion of educated whiteness, while the rainforest is a place not just of epistemic murk (Taussig
1987) but also where the Peruvian States tends to see bodies reproducing a hybrid cultural confusion.
Celebrated Peruvian author and one-time presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa has enabled such views
to gain traction and travel widely with his writings, both fiction and nonfiction. His ultimate conclusion is
that Peru’s “modernization is possible only with the sacrifice of the Indian cultures” (Vargas Llosa 1987:
53). His is certainly not a new notion – where the “birth of a nation” and its continued reincarnations
depend largely on the racist reproductions of whiteness and exterminations of all that which is not. It does
shed a darkened light on why mercury contamination that hits indigenous populations hardest, might not
ever be a State priority.

I find thinking through Sara Ahmed’s ruminations on “reproducing whiteness” and the racialization
of space through an orientation of bodies and bodily movement to be helpful here (Ahmed 2014). I want to
highlight the focus on “family” and “home” in her analysis of “mixed orientations” of proximal or aspiring
whiteness, where inheritance can mean many things. In the spatializations of race and power, notions of
what constitutes a “home” and one’s kin can create the reference point for “racial otherness” and distance
from one’s “place” a mark of otherness. “Although ‘the other side of the world’ is associated with ‘racial
otherness,’ racial others become associated with the ‘other side of the world.’ They come to embody
distance. This embodiment of distance is what makes whiteness ‘proximate’ as the ‘starting point’ for
orientation. Whiteness becomes what is ‘here’ a line from which the world unfolds, making ‘there’ on ‘the
other side’” (Ahmed 2014: 98). In the mines, life can be messy and the migrant laborers are “out of place,”
far from home as well as from Lima, from which the whiteness of “there” departs to the elsewhere. The
Amazonian indigenous communities are split. Some of them are voluntarily involved in the mining
operations, others are coerced into compliance, while still others rebel openly. For Vargas Llosa and
subsequent politicians and writers – both in and outside of Peru – the mark of the migrant can slip all-too-
easily into that of terrorist (Ahmed 2004). These “affective economies” with labels that stick to gendered,
sexualized, and racialized (made mestizo or further indigenous) contributes to affective geographies. Ahmed
sees mixed orientations as acknowledging how bodies have histories and how when “we are talking about
race, we are describing how histories are bodily” (Ahmed 2014: 93). I want to consider how a mixed

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orientation approach, which “is not simply about what a body has, or even what a body can do, but also
involves a material and affective geography: affecting the way we gather: bodies, objects, worlds that come
together as well as break apart” (Ibid 94) might enable a better understanding of how environmental racism
settles along colonially inscribed unfoldings of inheritance and personhood. Those who inherit toxic body
burdens from their parents already carry socially-informed notions of who they are and what direction their
life should take. Their orientation has already been chosen for them, operating in an economic and
ecological “cis”tem not entirely of their choosing.

Particulate and (In)articulate Bodies in the “Cis”tem

This section’s title plays on Vanessa Agard-Jones’ article: “Bodies in the System,” a title which she in turn
riffs on, drawing from Michel-Rolph Trouillot to think about the relationship of Caribbean bodies caught in
– or exposed to – toxins and (the toxicity of) global power systems (2013). My intention here is similar, to
think about the scale of mercury as a molecule in the human body, the ecological body, and then its
circulation in the global economy on this planet we call “home.” I accept Agard-Jones’ provocation to “take
seriously the body and its constituent parts as another dimension of analysis to which we might turn” (2013:
183) and Mel Chen’s affirmation that questions “of ‘the body’ become particularly complex when taking
into account the various mixings, hybridizations, and impurities that accompany contemporary bodily
forms” (2012: 193).

Agard-Jones takes her lead from Trouillot’s Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy
where he asks: “Is there life beyond neocolonialism? Can we make sense of what dominated people say and
do in their daily lives without keeping silent about their forced integration in the international order and yet
without reducing their lives to the fact of that integration” (1988: 182)? In this final section, I am
influenced by Trouillot’s legacy in post-colonial scholarship, stretching his work from the Caribbean to
coasts, riverbanks, and mountains of Peru. My intention here is two-fold, not only to analyze the particulars
of human and environmental reproduction in the context of Amazonian mercury contamination, but also
the kinds of scholarly (re)productions of knowledge that come with citational practices – that is, the kinds
of intellectual environments that I wish to engender. In my attempt to “make sense” of life “beyond
neocolonialism” – which is an alchemical sort of foray for a white ethnographer – in addition to the work of
Agard-Jones and Chen, my engagement throughout this article and in this section has been engaging with
Peruvian scholars Marisol de la Cadena, María Elena García, Patricia Urteaga, Danny Pinedo, Alfredo
García Altamirano, María Chavarría well as indigenous scholars Antonio Iviche and Julio Cusurichi. A note
on indigenous scholars is important – so much goes spoken and less is written, particularly in the case of
indigenous women. Thus my engagement with them here is through the spoken word when it comes to
heavy metal contamination. I carry through Ahmed’s analysis of racialized bodies and mixed orientations
and what it means to “receive” or “possess” bodily toxicity. This is also an effort to take end-points as
starting points (Ahmed 2014) from queer scholars of color and indigenous thinkers to change the kinds of
academic offspring that come from thinking in straight lines of cistemic analysis.

In examining the social and physiological contamination that arises from racial assemblages (Kirksey
2017) that mix ecological contamination with toxic economic markets, I note that the complicated, and
often toxic indigenous politics in Peru stems from colonial missionary and hacienda systems of debt-
peonage. Yet, a promising and surprising “eco-ethno” politics (Greene 2006, 2010) continues to rise among
Amazonian and Andean communities. Perhaps these new solidarities point to the ways, that, even in the
face of deeply embedded systems of subjugation, unexpected affinities can occur. This is not to downplay,
however, that as quicksilver’s line on the thermometer climbs, as mercury levels rise in the soil, air and

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water, the slow violence of (environmental) racism impacts certain bodies harder than others on this planet
that we call “home.”

Michel Rolph-Trouillot’s work has been, for me, in conversation with Eduardo Galeano’s The Open
Veins of Latin America (1970). Galeano’s work lends itself particularly well to considering bodies of land in
and as systems, particularly when it comes to natural resource extraction. Galeano writes that: “In the
colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison” (1970: 8). This
alchemical transformation certainly resonates in the gold mines of Madre de Dios, where the colonial
circuits of exchange have changed little – the gold leaves for Europe, the United Arab Emirates, and the
United States. The mercury stays, in the open veins of Latin America and entering the blood streams of
human and nonhuman animals.

Indigenous communities – from the Andes to the Amazon – have become predictable pawns, as
well as players, in the extractive politics of Madre de Dios. Since the 1970s,Amazonian indigenous tribes
have engaged in small scale gold mining during the months when fishing, hunting, or Brazil-nut gathering
were not their source of food (García Altamirano 2003; Pinedo 2017), but this information doesn’t usually
make it into the environmental publications or press releases. What it means to be “indigenous” (in Madre
de Dios) and “care” for the Pachamama arise out of a colonial history that dates back to Incan times. Ideas
and policies for indigenous communities in Peru stand on about cultural purity that slate the “verdedero indio”
(true indio) as existing harmoniously with “Nature” and place the “dirty campesino” from the Andes as a
contaminating cultural force (Maria Elena Garcia; de la Cadena 2000; Weismantel 2001). While Andean
migrants might not (always) identify as indigenous or make claims to indigeneity in the language of the State
and international multiculturalism, they embody Peru’s claims to a Pre-Columbian heritage on touristic
display. This is what Shane Greene terms “the Incan Slot,” playing off of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s “the
Savage Slot.” Both “slots” operate in Madre de Dios, where Incan Andean and “Savage” Amazonian meet on
disintegrating soil, where claims of cultural heritage and the Pachamama are the stuff of tourist gold, except
when there is actual gold or black gold to extract.

A snapshot view of mercury-ridden Madre de Dios and the kinds of entangled ecologies and
economies will give a clearer general vision of how the particulate matter from the earth sifts into “slots”
created for indigenous populations to inhabit. An estimated 85,000 square kilometers of rainforest land has
turned into desert in the region (IIAP 2017; Pinto 2016), much of it in the Tambopata Nature Reserve and
the Amakaeri Communal Reserve. Both are “home” to indigenous communities of the Ese-Eja, Sonene,
Djine, and Harakmbut as well as isolated tribes pushed into making contact. Peru is among the top six
exporters of gold in the world, and some 20-30% of the country’s gold comes from Madre de Dios.
Environmental organizations report that this means that the region “produces” between 16,000-18,000
kilograms of gold per year for the world market. For each kilogram of gold, artisanal gold miners utilize 2.8
kilograms of mercury. Over the past 20 years, estimates that hover around 3,000 tons of mercury have
moved from the mines in Spain, the United States, and the mountains of Peru into Amazonian streams and
soil (IIAP 2017; Pinto 2016). With mercury use on the rise and rainforest turning into infertile terrain, the
political landscape has also become toxic. Those who work the land are caught in a larger web of “volatile”
economic assets, labeled “toxic,” that fluctuate wildly with the international market.

In Madre de Dios, studies conducted by the Carnegie group connected to Fernández’s research
group have shown that the body burden of those working in the mines is far above the international safety
average. What came as a disheartening surprise was that, even for indigenous inhabitants who weren’t
involved in artisanal or small scale gold mining carry as much as 27,44 ppm (parts per million) mercury
body burden. In the United States, the average citizen might not even come close to having 0,2 ppm. The
Fernández study, yet to be published, but heavily cited in the decision to declare a State of Emergency in
Madre de Dios, demonstrates that indigenous communities, the largest consumers of river fish, had
mercury levels more than 5 times greater than the level established by the World Health Organization

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(Fernandez 2015). This has, understandably, troubled the indigenous federation of Madre de Dios
(Federación Nativa del Río de Madre de Dios y Afluentes),5 which became even worse in April of 2017
when the Peruvian State announced that it would be eliminating the branch of the ministry of health that
specialized in indigenous and Afro-Peruvian communities (MINSA, Servindi 2017). Despite successful
advocacy work to reinstate health care for historically marginalized people in Peru, the indigenous
federation recognizes the precarity of the situation, reaching out to international organizations and
governments.6 Julio Cusurichi Palacios, a Shipibo and presidents of the indigenous federation voiced his
concern at the high level of contamination among his brethren. “We have to act. If we don’t, we are
participating in a genocide of our own people.” Juana Payaba, also Shipiba Indian from another village,
echoes his concern. “We can’t eat or drink without worry of being poisoned.” While they have both gained
international visibility, with Cusurichi winning the Goldman Environmental Prize for his work on
protecting isolated tribes in 2008 and Payaba honored by the Rainforest Alliance in 2016, it isn’t enough. It
is often through the Catholic Church that opportunities arise. From the church’s Social Action Commission
and its connections to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and Pope Francis’ visit to Madre
de Dios in January of 2018, but it does come at a price. This much needed support does, however, extend
claims over bodies to international terrain, where NGOs, particularly Catholic charities, tend to demand
specific guidelines be followed regarding women’s reproductive health – or particular heterosexual notions
of family when apportioning funding.

There is another concern. In addition to the bioaccumulation of mercury toxicity in human and
nonhuman bodies, the possibility that their communities and their biological data might also be circulated
on international display has also raised concerns about control over their bodies, the right to informed
consent, and the ability to keep their land. If the rivers and soil are deemed too toxic, the Peruvian State,
through the Ministry of Culture, has the right to (re)move people. This complicated politics of rights over
land, to maintaining a home and claims to what constitutes safe levels of mercury has its roots in control
over the minerals the lie within and beneath the soil. It was not until 1993, Patricia Urteaga notes, that the
terminology of “indigenous communities” entered national legislation (Urteaga 2003). The shifting political
alliances among indigenous groups and extractive economies existed long before national policy-makers
acknowledged the legal existence of indigenous groups. Danny Pinedo tracks the making “the Amazonian
subject” and indigenous mobilizations in Madre de Dios, noting how extractive industries take advantage of
ethnic splits to widen cultural and economic differences (2017). One community or ethnic group, like the
Harakmbut might be “open” to miners, loggers, and oil speculators while Shipibo communities are not.
Some of that also depends on just how much there is to extract.

The process of extracting gold and sifting soil is important to discuss as it entails a full-bodied effort
on the part of the gold miners, one that engages mercury’s particulate – and also peculiar kind of – matter.
The vulnerability of bodies to mercury (Chen 2012) and the slow violence (Nixon 2011) of heavy metal
contamination contributes to the conversation of human “bodies in the cistem,” while further examining
what flows through the increasingly perforated “veins of Latin America” (Galeano 1970) as well as and
through the life-ways of humans and nonhumans in whose veins mercury now runs.

There are two ways to mine for gold in Madre de Dios, either by river dredges, or by the floating
wood rafts that circle the open pits, equipped with a motor attached to a wide hose, “la chupadera” (the
sucker), so named because it sucks in the soil from the bottom of the pit, churning the water, sending gold-
flecked soil down a long chute that separates the larger sediment from minute pieces of gold. In the open-
pit gold mines, a raft holds the motor that runs the “chupadera” which sucks the silt from the bottom of the
pit and sends it down a long shoot to separate the gold flecks from the larger sediment.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
5 FENAMAD
6 Personal communication with Daniel Rodriguez, June 23, 2017; Servindi 2017.

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“La Chupadera” (The Sucker) Floating from a Raft – Sucks Sediment From the Watery Pit

Photo shown with permission of Edgar Estumbelo

Illegal Miners Wait While Environmental Engineers and Police Dismantle Their Equipment

Photo shown with permission of Edwin Huaman Peña

For the men laboring in the mines, their bodies in the continuation of a “mercantile” system (Nash

1980; Taussig 1991) means that they put their bodies into the murky mix. Miners pour liquid mercury into
old oil drums and mix it with gold-flecked sediment extracted from the open pits with bare hands and feet,
pants rolled up to their knees – or simply without any pants. In the style of traditional wine making, they
spend hours mixing this toxic mercury mush. Their bare skin is a porous contact zone for mercury to enter.

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Photo shown with permission of Bear Guerra Photo shown with permission of Vítor Elvira

The work in the gold mines tends to be strictly gendered, with the men in the mining pits and the
women in the prostibars. There is a strong affinity for “el mercurio,” seen as a strong male element. This
association of male strength connected to both the virility of the bull and to the matador’s ability to “matar”
(to kill) and thus prove themselves stronger than the bull, fed men’s affinity for the lithe liquid. The
harvesting of gold needs the alchemical interaction with mercury. Stories about the frivolous character of
gold, personified as a beautiful woman who lures men into the mines only to leave them with nothing,
abound. That quicksilver, the male element, “grabs” the gold particles, harnessing them into an amalgam,
makes the human affinity for the heavy metal that much stronger. The image is a powerful and a necessary
energizing one because work in the mines is grueling if not fatal.

“El Español” – shown with permission of Víctor Elvira y DandoUnaVuelta.com

Public health officials, doctors and nurses who work along the paved Interoceanic road as well as
deeper in the jungle struggle to explain the affects of mercury poisoning. Quicksilver “poisoning” in
maternal-fetal health and in that of the Pachamama, her plants and animals has more immediate visibility
than it does in the hands of the mostly male miners who place the silvery liquid in their hands and shake
their heads to ask me, “esto es veneno?” How could anything this lovely be venomous? Even with the visible
marks on the earth and children’s development, life is the mines is often better than “home” for those who
migrate there. Mercury’s effects are often secondary to those of the poverty people left behind, or, for

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many of the women that Alesandra, Angela, and I saw, situations of domestic and sexual violence held more
immediate concern.

When entering the mines with environmental engineers or health workers employed by the State,
they requested that I also reciprocate and offer a presentation or information. The engineers would explain
and teach cleaner or more effective mining techniques and the health care workers would conduct rapid
HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis exams. So I learned to talk about mercury catchment systems and its effects on
human and environmental health. The incredulity that both the miners and the mothers felt at my cautions
about mercury toxicity was built both on the magic that mercury makes in the muck of the mines as well as
on my whiteness that carries with it the assumption of being “eco-centric”: that I care more about the earth
than I do about the people. Or rather, that white environmentalists care more about the earth as it affects
them and their sense of earthly goodness than they do about the brown people scraping a living out of the
land. Talking about the Pachamama – if one is white – has become synonymous with ideological guise.
Miners see countries like United States, Brazil, and European countries harnessing ecological concerns to
hide covert economic operations. The concerns over this extended form of colonialism, or more aptly,
“green colonialism” (Grove 1996; Klein 2016; Kwashirai 2009, Hauweiser 2015) form the bedrock of
mistrust when it comes to warnings about the enduring effects of mercury toxicity. Understandably, if
European countries or the United States were going to continue “milking the teats of the Pachamama” (las
tetas de la Pachamama) as the president of one illegal mining community put it, then why shouldn’t they, los
Peruanos, also benefit?

Yet since the 2013 Minamata Treaty on Mercury in Japan, artisanal gold mining stands as the main
culprit for global mercury contamination. This paves the way for corporate mining. The category of gold
miner has a racialized composition of non-white. The corporate mining, particularly in Peru, tends to be
from Canada, United States, Norway, and Finland. Gold miners thus carry double stigma and social
contamination – they mistreat women by engaging with prostitutes and they “rape” the landscape. This is
precisely the kind of language rendering of a victimized “mother nature” whose virginal forests have vast
“ecosystem potential” for natural capital logics. If the Roman God Mercury signifies trade and monetary
pursuits (among other trickster and messenger aspects), the irony of chemical mercury contamination in
adding value and weight to threats to “ecosystem services” and “natural capital” is that it so uncomfortably
ties ecological concerns with economic gain – for a few.

This unfortunate entanglement of economic and ecological concerns is one that the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank helped to foster by promoting “natural capital” as a way to pay back
loans and generate income. “Natural” resources like lumber, minerals, plants, animals, energy from wind
and water become collateral, weighed against national debt. The Unites Nations World Forum gives this
description: “Natural Capital can be defined as the world’s stocks of natural assets which include geology,
soil, air, water and all living things. It is from this natural capital that humans derive a wide range of
services, often called ecosystem services, which make human life possible” (World Forum on Natural
Capital). These kinds of ecosystem services extend from flood defense to carbon sequestration, even to
“inspiration we take from wildlife and the natural environment.”7 Such a framing of the value-added fruits of
nature can underwrite projects to keep “nature” healthy, which means that someone benefits from toxicity.

The economic concerns over “green colonialism,” which come out of ideas about protecting
“mother earth,” and this planet that (we) humans call home, is something that I will address shortly. Here, I
closely examine not only the “vulnerability of the human body” (Chen 2012) but also the vulnerability of
“Nature’s body” (Schiebinger 2005). I propose one answer, in the context of Madre de Dios, to
anthropologist Janelle Lamoreaux’s query of “what if the environment were a person”(2016)? Lamoreaux

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
7 http://naturalcapitalforum.com/about/

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poses this question in the context of epigenetics, which deepens the inquiry into the environment of the
mother’s womb and a fetus surrounded by heavy-metal contaminated amniotic fluid. What kind of person
the earth would be, in thinking about the constant feminizing of the Amazonian earthly body, is a helpful
line of flight for me to entertain here.

Male miners and governmental environmental engineers alike ask me about the environmental
catchphrase about the Amazon rainforest being “the lungs of the earth,” wondering instead about their
stomachs and their children’s stomachs. They would also ask an unfortunate riddle that collapsed the
fertility and accessibility of women’s bodies with those of earth bodies together:

“What is the difference between a mine and a woman?”

The answer was “Nothing. Because both are for exploitation.”

Lamoreaux asks us to consider the environment not just a single person, but rather as a “lineage of

personal and chemical exposures” that include “human and nonhuman environments of the past and the
present” (2016: 191). The region of the Mother of God, then, with “her” mothers (sex-workers and non-
sex-workers) bearing children in a mercury-contaminated gold mining area to men considered “rapists of
the rainforest” seems like a possible composite figure for thinking through the reproduction of different
kinds of different kinds of toxic exposures, past, present, and future. In the beginning of this article, I
mentioned a public health official who referred to the mercury-contaminated landscape as “a ruined – and
then abandoned – landscape, just like a disgraced woman.” While mothers certainly endure their share of
blame for babies born with heavy metal poisoning, male miners have become vilified by the Peruvian media
and successive governments as both “los contaminadores” (the contaminators / polluters) of the Pachamama,
but also as “los contaminados” (the contaminated). The latter plays off of the word “los condenados” (the
condemned). Many of the migrants operate under multiple life-sentences – those who come from the
Andes experienced the violence of the Peruvian government, El Sendero Luminoso (The Shining Path) and the
Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA). They also do not have a documented existence and are
often “condemned” to wander outside of the State’s social programs while also targeted as always-already
criminals. The lineage of environmental contaminations, then, refers to political as well as ecological
exposures.

The socially contaminated category of the Andean Indian is made worse by linguistic elitism. Most
of the recent migrants to Madre de Dios speak Quechua or Aymara, rather than Spanish, as their first
language. And then, of course, they are also condemned to mercury poisoning – memory loss, irascibility,
deteriorated motor control and physical coordination. While they are the hands that pour the liquid
mercury into rivers and rainforest soil, their choices are driven by a larger world economy that demands
goods they cannot easily produce. For those coming from the Cusco and Puno regions, they either worked
their own potato fields or harvested the “superfood” Maca and quinoa, which they no longer can afford to
consumer themselves. The responsibility of toxic ecologies and economies falls onto the laboring bodies
that do not control the means of production, but are rather part of the commodity chain.

In thinking about “Bodies in the System,” Agard-Jones reflects on Trouillot’s ability to examine
world systems through the “national, regional, and global processes at work at the scale of the everyday”
(Trouillot 1988: 167). His insistence that the ethnographic conceit of the isolated village needed
“deconstructing” – which reads as: “decolonizing” – to demonstrate that historical processes and global
political economies also shaped people’s lives in so-called isolated places. Trouillot was working in the small
banana-planting town of Wesley in Dominica and Agard-Jones places herself in another Caribbean island,
Martinique, where the effects of the pesticide, chlordécone, that produces endocrine altering effects in
humans (and one would imagine, nonhumans as well). Following in Trouillot’s decolonizing lead to

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understand the flows of chlordécone through the human bodies in Martinique, Agard-Jones points to the
“processes of production, consumption, and accumulation and to what they could tell us about colonial
power.” Her intellectual investment similarly aims to show how “ethnographic research might reveal the
cracks in the system, and might point toward possibilities for change” (Agard-Jones 2013: 185-86).

In the summer of 2016, after embarking on a 200km motorcycle trip with Miguel, the only chemist
licensed to sell chemicals (to clean the heavy machinery, motors, and excess mercury) in the mining zone, I
was feeling a visceral despair at seeing the rainforest disappear. Miguel had not met Alesandra, but because
she had been one of the first female police officers in the region, news of her presence had circulated. He
asked me if she was still in Mazuko. I shook my head “no” as I climb on the bike. As we drive, I explain that
she had rotated out as most of the government officials do, after their contractual two years have passed.
She wanted to return to Cuzco. Alesandra had never been entirely convinced that the mercury vapor was an
issue and ultimately did not have a bodily encounter with the liquid mercury. Now there is a new wave of
female recruits, forming a strong presence of officers and a women’s police station, specifically to receive
those experiencing domestic violence or sex-trafficking.

As we pass pockmarked landscape, I ask Miguel if he feels any hesitation at selling his chemicals,
without which the machinery would not properly function. I am struggling with seeing a landscape
decidedly more desolate than I had last seen it in years past. Sand has overtaken forest. Piles of plastic
bottles, discarded motors, tin, and oil drums encroach on the road. Miguel has to dodge as we pass
mechanic after mechanic shop, brothel after brothel.

Miguel can hear the tightness in my voice when I ask him how he felt about his participation in the
mercurial deforestation.

“Listen, you know better. We are condemned as the polluters, but we are really like puppets. We
aren’t the ones who pull the strings on the global economy.”8 He then asks what kind of choice there is, not
only for the miners, but also for himself. Miguel’s marks himself within a broader economic system where
he is both participant-actor but also knows that the mercury contamination also acts on him, as it does
anyone who spends long periods in the gold mines. His articulation of being part of the strings of the global
economy resonates with Agard-Jones’ framing of Martinican residents who see their choices as limited by
powerful forces beyond their control. Any understanding of their health “would be incomplete without an
analysis of how their bodies are produced through and via engagements with the local, regional, and global
forms of power that have made the island’s chlordécone contamination possible” where chlordécone signals
how “Martinican bodies are connected to commodity chains, to uneven relations of colonial/postcolonial
power, and thus to world systems” (2013: 191).

Artisanal gold miners are, as Miguel notes, connected to commodity chains as are the indigenous
communities not involved in mining activities, speaking to the uneven and continuing colonial lines of
power. With the global demand for gold still on the rise, artisanal mining will not stop. Mercury imports
are illegal, except for medical – especially dental – usage. The contested landscape of what counts as
“toxic” – be they economic assets, volatile politics aggravated by colonial tactics of pitting disenfranchised
groups against one another aligns with Mel Chen’s reminder that: “If the definition of toxin has always been
the outcome of political negotiation and a threshold value on a set of selected tests, its conditionality is no
more true in medical discourse than in social discourse, in which one’s definition of toxic irritant coincides
with habitual scapegoats of ableist, sexist, and racist, systems” (2012: 192). Artisanal miners have become
the leading scapegoats for mercury pollution and irascible character – the contaminated and the
contaminators at the same time. Something that Alesandra does not find fair or fitting.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
8 “Somos condenados como contaminadores, pero somos más como marionetas, no es nosotros que tocan las cuerdas de la
economía global.”

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Conclusion:

The last time that I meet with Alesandra she is breast-feeding her daughter, in uniform, at the

police station. There are several women and children who have arrived at Huarayo’s refuge and Angelica
has come to talk with Alesandra too. Angela is especially upset today, feeling what she calls, “the burden of
seeing too much.” The three of us discuss the unfortunate “mines are like women” riddle. Both Angela and
Alesandra see indigenous women’s bodies as most vulnerable to exploitation, but what it means to be
“indigenous” is not always so clear. For Alesandra, being “Andean” is not the same thing as being “indian” or
indigenous. Yet she does see the Andean women in the jungle brothels as particularly susceptible to
manipulation. When I ask them why, indigenous women’s fates are so easily collapsed with those of the
rainforest bodies, their answer is “poverty” and “closer to the earth.” Given the reliance on gold mining for
native Quechua speakers, Amazonian fish for Amazonian native communities, women and their children are
“closer to the earth” and tend to be less moneyed than the men. They are more apt to be included in
riddlesome gendered-claims that collapse women’s bodies with the (built) landscape.

Angela and Alessandra note the bitter irony of exploiting the Amazon rainforest and women’s
bodies. “You are left with nothing,” Alessandra says, her daughter finished eating, now sleeping in her arms.
“If you destroy the mother earth (pachamama) then you have nothing… no ecology. That is like destroying
all the human mothers too. You have nothing left, nothing at all.” Alesandra and Angela note
heteronormative ideas about reproduction in an Amazonian forest landscape also gendered female, where
the inheritance of toxicity rests on the women who reproduce life. In the last published study on maternal-
fetal health in Madre de Dios, awareness and concern for mercury contamination had increased, as had
mercury levels in mothers and children (Gonzalez 2015). But where protein sources are most easily
obtained in wild fish for adults and breast milk for infants, there are no healthier alternatives.

In ending where I began, with Alesandra, I wish to highlight the resonance with Sara Ahmed’s point
about “the deviants” of the family. “Although some points of deviation might be necessary for the
continuation of a line, other points threaten that line by not receiving the ‘qualities’ that are assumed to pass
along it…. One way of defending the line is to make the deviant ‘an end point.’ A mixed and queer
genealogy might even unfold from such points” (2014: 100). A queer and mixed genealogy sounds like
healthy antidote to unfortunate notions about human, nonhuman, and intellectual reproduction. The
contribution of queer ecologies – à la Chen and Agard-Jones – unsettles ideas of what constitutes nature and
culture, which in turn disrupts related binaries of human nonhuman, male and female, has a particular
valence and weight when considering heavy metals. Chen’s framing of heavy metals as “critically mobile”
where “their status as toxins derives from their potential threat to valued human integrities” means that
mercury, like lead “threaten to overrun what a species hierarchy would seek to lock in place” (Chen 2012:
159). As a substance, mercury can travel, perhaps not on godly wings, but with birds and fish, in human,
atmospheric, and in water bodies. In the shifting landscape of Madre de Dios, both liquid and landfilled, fish
and mercury, not just people, are on the move. Anaerobic microorganisms in the soil sediment transform
methylate mercury (MHg) into monomethylmercury (MeHg), which is the most neurotoxic form of the
heavy metal that “biomagnifies” in aquatic food chains (Diringer et al 2014; Hsu-Kim et al 2013). While it is
tempting to look as Chen does, at the lower end of the animacy scale, towards a less toxic future,
bioremediation of mercury is not so easy. It can ultimately shift what reproduction of humans and
nonhumans looks like on this planet.

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The Virgin Mary, The Son of Jupiter: Mercury Rising

(Re)producing gendered-environmental racisms in a quickly heating planet

Mother and Child, Rainforest Mines, Mercury-Filled Water
(Photo shown with permission of Dado Galdieri 2011)

Mothers and Children in Madre de Dios

On a sweltering September day in 2011, I meet officer Alesandra and her infant daughter in front of

the police station. She is off-duty for a couple of hours, enjoying time with her baby daughter, asleep in the
stroller. We are in Mazuko, a growing gold mining town in Peru’s Amazonian region of Madre de Dios,
which translates as the “Mother of God” or the “Virgin Mary.” The region’s name lends itself to notions of
female “natural” purity, something that conservationists harness to mobilize environmental activism and
notions of gendered responsibility and ecological kinship with the land. From where Alesandra stands,
Madre de Dios is anything but virginal. She comments that political corruption, migration, deforestation and
mercury contamination of “pristine” rainforest, along with a proliferating sex-industry have become the
region’s defining features. Dubbed “El Dorado” for its gold-flecked soil, artisanal miners extract the shiny
particles with liquid mercury. The ecological impact has alarmed environmental engineers and social
scientists that this will destroy the “lungs of the earth” and “nature’s pharmacy” – the Amazon rainforest
(Bebbington 2010; Dourojeanni 2006). The environmental conservationists are not the only ones to engage
the metaphoric power of personified, gendered nature. One public official went so far as to refer to the
gold mining areas of Madre de Dios, transformed into desert by miner’s hands and their abundant use of
liquid mercury, as “a ruined and then abandoned landscape, just like a disgraced woman.”1

In 2011 and 2012, the governmental estimates put the number of gold miners in the region at
30,000 and the number of sex-workers at 5,000. In 2017, governmental officials and non-governmental
workers continue to cite these numbers, while also saying that there are likely more people, but that there
is no precise way of knowing in a rainforest region the size of Portugal, where, according to regional
authorities: “donde no hay Estado” (where there is no State). Despite the contaminated marks on its
reputation, Madre de Dios, nestled between Brazil and Bolivia, still boasts its reputation as “La Capital de la
Biodiversidad” albeit with a giant, rotting, wooden sign.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
1 Personal communication, Goldstein 2017. “Como una tierra arruinada, abandonada, como una mujer
deshonrada.”

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“The Capital of Biodiversity? We call it “El Dorado, or “El Wild West,” Alesandra had said. She
was from Cusco and the first time that she had heard of Mazuko was when she received her assignment,
learning that the town served as a trafficking hub for people, gold, mercury, cocaine and gasoline. “Most of
the miners are like me, from the Andes,” Alesandra explains. “From Cusco, from Puno, but I see Koreans,
Chinese, even Russians – at least, they don’t look like the others and this is what everyone says. There are
mafias deep inside the mines. I only meet the ones who make it out and they say it is hard to escape.”
Alesandra had not traveled far into the rainforest, nor had the other policemen. The force had two
motorcycles and one truck at their disposition. When the region’s police pulled together for special
operations, they also had to use motorcycles to enter, as trucks could not traffic on the narrow dirt paths.

“Mazuko is a gateway,” she had said, “everything that is going into the rainforest passes through
here.” In 2017, Mazuko has changed. It is now both a gateway and a check point. After a massive mining
strike in March of 2012, U.S officials brought resources and personnel to build security infrastructure to
survey traffic from the Andes to the Amazon on the Interoceanic Road, the only paved thoroughfare from
the mountains to the jungle in the region. The roadside town plays a crucial role in Peru’s extractive
politics, in part because of its geography along the relatively new Interoceanic Road, which runs, in its
entirety, sheer across Brazil and Peru. Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction company now under
investigation for corruption, along with three former Peruvian presidents (Alejandro Toledo, Alan Garcia,
and Ollanta Humala) finished paving the final section from the Andes to the Amazon in 2011. Despite
Alesandra’s commitment to her job, the move from the Andes to the Amazon had not been an easy one. She
was the only female police officer in an eleven-man police force. The policemen, she explained, were
having trouble communicating with sex-trafficked women and children. “They needed a woman’s touch…
or a mother’s touch….” Her attention drifted to her baby, little Sarita, who had started to cry in her sleep.
“Let’s walk a bit.” She moved the stroller back and forth as there wasn’t much room to walk between the
hustle of the gold-changers, so we stood in front of “Oro Fino,” which guaranteed solidarity, purity and
power for Peru.

These are not simply shops where one can exchange currency, but also where blowtorches do an
alchemist’s work. Artisanal gold mining in the region utilizes liquid mercury to amalgamate with gold dust
in the soil. The “gold-changers” transform the mercury-gold alloy by burning off the base metal. I held my
breath. Alesandra paused to watch the flames of the blowtorches and the men bent over the shallow plates,
often without goggles or respiratory protection.

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The mercury vapor is incredibly toxic, particularly for young children and fetuses, damaging brain

growth, kidney, and liver function (Diringer 2014; Fernandez 2011; UNEP 2013). In 2010, researchers
from Stanford’s Carnegie Amazon Mercury Ecosystem Project (CAMEP) found the mercury levels outside
of the cambios de oro to be ten times greater than the UN-mandated safety levels (Benko 2010; Fernandez
2010). I asked Alesandra what she thought about the dangers of heavy metal toxicity. She shrugged. “We
have human trafficking – children, teenagers, women, we have fatalities in the mines and traffic accidents
on the road. Is mercury really that dangerous?”2 Her question was, and is, a good one. Liquid mercury is
beautiful to look at, seemingly harmless to touch, and its vapor is as invisible as it is odorless – at least, to
the human senses. The suspicion that mercury might not really be all that toxic is one shared by many
miners and even some government inhabitants, regardless of how migratory. Or perhaps it is because they
are so migratory. Public health officials, lawyers, and environmentalists, those who consider Madre de Dios
to be “home” or “home” to much of the planet’s biodiversity, blame the transient (mostly Andean)
population for “poisoning” the “Pachamama” of Madre de Dios.

Ideas about “home,” the socially contaminated and contaminating category of the migrant, along
with notions of human and nonhuman female purity form the foundation of this article on the contaminating
effects of mercury and the reproduction of environmental racisms. While gold miners in Madre de Dios
tend not consider themselves to be indigenous, according to the State, they are. The Incan lineage of
indigeneity is a lucrative one. The UNESCO-designated tourist sites like that of Machu Picchu benefit from
this nostalgic framing of the Incan legacy, living in current day Quechua and Aymara communities that
honor the “Pachamama.” The State and the Peruvian press have engaged in smear campaign: painting the
Andean migrants as dirty, uneducated, and potentially former Shining Path members, which is to say:
criminal. They are “fallen” indians, rather than honoring their Pachamama, they are, instead, “raping” her.
They are a kind of “matter out of place” (Douglas 1966) – they belong in the mountains where they came
from, not in the jungle where the idealized Amazonian “indio” lives (Cusurichi Palacios 2003; García
Altamirano 2003).

In examining the global multivalences and ramifications of mercury in the air, water and soil, I
engage notions of the Pachamama and gendered “nature” with the Greek term “oikos” – or our “eco” –
bringing critical race theory and indigenous studies to bear on (eco)feminist scholarship. Oikos,” which
translates into myriad related definitions: “dwelling,” “household,” “home,” or “family,” lends itself to think
through the “eco” in “ecologies” and “economies” to consider the roles that that gender and sexuality play in
changing forms of kinship, citizenship, and (environmental) politics beyond and within the concept of the

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
2 “Tenemos trata de personas – niños, adolescentes, mujeres, tenemos fallecidos en las minas, de moto por
la carretera, que tán peligroso es el mercurio?”

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human. Concentrating on mercury in its conceptual and actual form, I trace levels of contamination in the
human bodies that labor in rainforest gold mines, the impact on maternal-fetal health, and mercury’s role in
theories of (social) contamination that (re)produce different kinds of environments and environmental
racisms. I ask how the concept of “home” in the “eco” structures ideas about who and what bodies carry a
toxic “body burden” (Agard-Jones forthcoming; Dillon 2015; Graeter 2015; Lamoreaux 2016; Shapiro
2015), and what the collapse of women’s bodies with the built landscape means for designating
responsibility in human and environmental health.

From claims about environmental disaster and irreparably accelerating climate change, “nature’s
pharmacy” and the “world’s lungs” – that is, the Amazon rainforest – represents a kind of “hot spot.” Or,
the Amazon as a physical and idealized space represents a “truth spot,” as Jason Pribilsky notes; a terrain
upon which anthropologists have posited and refuted claims about what really constitutes “human nature”
(2013)… usually through the bodies and bodily practices of indigenous peoples. Some regions of the world
lend themselves to specific kinds of analysis (Strathern 1990) and in this frontier Amazon region different
kinds of analyzing and imaginings about (human) nature (Raffles 2002; Sahlins 2013, 2005) emerge. In
Madre de Dios, diagnoses as well as prognoses about climate health are quite literally built on the levels of
mercury “rising” in the thermometer of a quickly heating planet. Mercury’s effects on climate change and
on fetal-maternal health have become the focus of both international and national agendas, linking
environmental contamination with human medical conditions (Diringer 2014; Fernandez 2013, UNEP
2013; Pan 2014). Through the figures of the mother-and-child and of nature’s body – gendered female,
public health officials and environmental scientists, call for eliminating the mercurial “body burden” placed
on human and nonhuman bodies, for a less toxic future.

Alesandra shrugs off my concern at the invisible threat of mercury vapor but kindly offers to find a
place to sit further away from the gold-changers. We settle into green plastic chair to talk, waiting for
Angela, the psychologist employed by a local Catholic missionary couple, Oscar and Ana Guadelupe, who
run a refuge for women and children as well as a legal defense council. The Guadelupes chose the name
“Huarayo” for their organization, which is an interesting choice as the term has undergone a revolution of
meanings, as Peruvian scholar María C. Chavarría notes. It initially represented a general insult to
Amazonian Indians, but with a particular ethnic affiliation to the Ese Eja. Now Huarayo refers to anyone
born in Madre de Dios. “Huarayos are tied to their land. If you are born in a place, it is always home.”
Place-based notions of identity are strong for Alesandra and other government officials who expressed
concerns that people were going to be reproducing children far from “home,” and this, not as much as the
mercury, can cause damage. “Are you feeling homesick?” Alesandra asks in greeting as Angela arrives. “I am
too,” she says, answering her own question. Angela does miss home, but people tend to see her more as a
“Huarayo.” They can tell from her features that she is not from Cusco, but Amazonian. They are right, but
she is not from this part of the rainforest. Both women miss home, which is made both harder and easier
working with the mothers and children who arrive at their doorsteps. Angela receives whomever the police
bring to her – children taken in police raids from the mines, women who report domestic abuse and need a
safe place to stay or to leave their children.

Alesandra asks Angela if she knows anything about the mercury poison. Angela nods her head. She
has been eating extra cilantro because she read it that can help with ridding the body of mercury. Alesandra
looks stricken. She does not like cilantro. She wonders aloud why the doctors at the clinic aren’t doing
more to tell people about the dangers of the gold-changers. But then, she acknowledges, there’s too much
happening already. With increasing car accidents on the road, the small clinic seems to be running in crisis
mode every time I am there. I have spoken with the doctors, one of whom had to excuse himself mid-
interview to deliver a child, but they find that their patients are not receptive to listening about the effects
of the mercury. But as newborns and young children begin demonstrate the effects of heavy metal
contamination, it proves an awful case in point.

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Through the entwined relationships between human and earth beings (de la Cadena 2015),
Alesandra’s relationship with the gold miners, and the children she received from the gold mines, I follow
mercury’s sometimes silvery, sometimes invisible trail. I analyze the heavy metal’s cosmological and earthly
effects and bodily affects in three movements, arguing that mercury has a multivalence – a quality of having
multiple values, meanings, and affinities. While itself a polluting substance, thinking with and through
mercury’s metaphoric as well as physiological abilities can offer possibilities to mitigate its toxic effects.

Mercury Rising and Reproducing Racisms

Sources of Mercury Pollution and Mercury’s Global Moves~ from Naomi Lubick and David
Malakoff’s 2013 report in Science

Mercury, Hermes, or quicksilver has seeped into the psyches of philosophers and emperors, mad-

hatters, sushi-eaters and cavity-fillers. As a mythological figure, Mercury is a trickster character, the god of
trade, speed, and communication. As a chemical element, mercury can “move” through the body, passing
the blood-brain barrier, swim through amniotic fluid, and change the body chemistry of all living
organisms. With global contamination levels rising, the United Nations Environment Programme convened
the 2013 Minamata Convention. The subsequent treaty aims to reduce human and environmental exposure,
by eliminating the heavy metal from pesticides, gold mining, pharmaceuticals, and factory emissions
(Malakoff and Lubick 2013; UNEP 2013). Artisanal and small-scale goldmining (ASGM) has become the
top source for anthropogenic mercury contamination, beating out fossil fuels (Diringer 2014; Malakoff and
Lubick 2013; UNEP 2013). The figure detailing mercury contamination bears further examination. The
numbers pit brown bodies laboring in the mines of Madre de Dios against the white collar corporations that
offer “clean(er)” mining strategies.

When I first arrived to conduct fieldwork in Madre de Dios, crossing the border from Rio Branco,
Brazil, my research focused on the conceptual traffic between “nature” and culture” (Haraway 1989),
transits of empire (Byrd 2011), and the traffic of women (Rubin 1974), medicinal plants, and gold along the
Interoceanic Road (Goldstein 2015). Since 2009, I have lived and researched in Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia. I
had begun to travel the Interoceanic Road in 2010 from the Brazilian coast, following the Interoceanic Road
into Peru. I crossed the border into Madre de Dios in July 2011, with a Maria Emília Coelho, Brazilian
journalist-friend who had covered the road’s construction since its inception (Coelho 2009; 2010; 2011).
Together, we covered Alan Garcia’s inauguration of the “bridge of friendship” in Madre de Dios, the last

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piece of the road to connect Peru with Brazil. It was one of Garcia’s final presidential acts. The bridge was
not finished, however, and hours after the ceremony, workers continued their work until December of that
year. At the time, I had yet to learn about the role that mercury played in socio-environmental justice and
politics. Since entering the mines with government health workers and environmental engineers, I have
seen people – particularly children – with odd skin conditions, motor-coordination issues, and cognitive
disabilities. While the Peruvian doctors, health officials, and politicians that I worked with attribute these
physical conditions to mercury contamination, not all of them agree that the mercury contamination comes
from the gold mining.

In May of 2017, the regional government of Madre de Dios hosted epidemiologists and
toxicologists from Lima. They gave two day’s worth of presentations on mercury, lead, cadmium, and
arsenic. During a break on the first day, I spoke with the head doctor in Peru’s Ministry of Health working
on “strategic efforts” regarding heavy metals and chemical substances. We stood by the open door of the
public health classroom, munching on empanadas and downing an artificial version of chicha morada, a drink
traditionally made from purple corn. Dr. Caballero answered my questions about mercury contamination
in the region and said that the next session would be on mother-to-child transmission of heavy metal
toxicity. But he didn’t think the mercury came from the gold mining. He pointed to the small fires in the
small, overgrown field strewn with trash in front of us. Smoke wafted towards us, smelling of melting
plastic. “These fires… the gasoline… there are other ways that mercury enters the environment.” He is
right, of course, but later his colleague would show a slide of a young woman, pregnant at five months,
with liquid mercury in her system. Indigenous communities tell of seeing silver globules floating down the
river, a beautiful sight if the results were not so vexing. Mercury is entering the atmosphere on many levels
in many ways, which makes targeting a single source and villain that much harder, when working within the
confines of Western etiology. The doctors and nurses attending the capacitation workshop on heavy metals
and chemical substances work directly in the mining areas or along the side of the Interoceanic Road. Their
patients are gold miners and sex-workers. Fascinated by what they were learning, the health care workers
asked questions about how to tell their patients that they had a body burden and whether there was anything
to the data on violence and heavy metals contamination. They wondered how much people would listen,
when the gold to be made in the mines made the cost of mercury poisoning seem insignificant.

International press coverage on the gold mining’s dual contaminations – the mercurial devastation
in the rainforest and the sex-trafficking has been rising in the past few years. The pressure on the Peruvian
government to intervene in the entwined human-environmental health issues came to a head on May 23,
2016, when Peru’s Minister of the Environment declared a State of Emergency in Madre de Dios. The
government authorities cited alarmingly high levels of the heavy metal found in hair, urine, and blood
samples through three independently conducted studies by researchers from Stanford’s Carnegie Amazon
Mercury Ecosystem Project (CAMEP), Centro de Innovación Científica Amazónico (CINCIA), and Duke
University’s Global Health Institute. Roughly 40% of the population (48,000) people had reported
symptoms of mercury poisoning. The estimated amount of liquid mercury dumped into the environment
from illegal artisanal mining in Madre de Dios hovers around an annual 30-40 tons (ACA 2013; Benavides
2015; La Républica 2015; Prensa Andina 2015; Watsa 2015) and guesstimates of 400 tons of mercury
during the boom years of 2001 – 2013 (Reaño 2016) to some 650 tons between 1997 and 2015 (Benavides
2015) up to 721 tons by 2010 (Prensa Andina 2015). As Peruvian journalist Guillermo Reaño asked,
writing about the State of Emergency, when compared with the 82 tons of mercury that leaked into Japan’s
Minamata Bay, “Where does our country place in the rankings of catastrophes of this type if we consider

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that it is understood that the Japanese case is the Chernobyl of mercury contamination?”3 It is a good if not
also fascinating question of comparing disasters, contaminations, and motivations across time and space.

Francisco Román Dañobeyta, a conservation biologist working on mercury contamination in Madre
de Dios since 2012, finds himself, his wife and children with above-normal mercury toxicity levels in 2016
(Reaño 2016). My friend and collaborator, Julio Araújo Flores and his family, seem to have escaped that
fate. We met in 2011, when Julio was working on his doctoral research. He is a biologist, with a specialty
in aquatic creatures, though he is equally disposed to testing soils and animals on land. His doctoral research
brought him to Madre de Dios in the mid-2000s, before mercury had become a problem. Back in 2011, the
push to understand the levels of mercury toxicity was still in its inchoate form, but Luis Fernández of the
Carnegie Institute had begun to suspect that river fish, particularly carnivorous ones, likely carried mercury
from the mining areas down—and in some cases—upstream (Pan 2015; Swenson 2011). He hired Araújo
to study the levels of mercury toxicity in the fish as the bioaccumulation from fish to human passes easily
through the digestive system (Diringer 2014).

When we sit down to a meal of river fish in May 2017, Julio explains that he, his wife Gina and two
daughters regularly eat river fish – any of the ones that do not have high mercury levels. Yet Gina, when she
was pregnant had stayed away from anything that came out of the water. But now, the problem is also in
the soil. “Papayas, these are all over now, mostly going to Lima. But they absorb the river water used to
irrigate, and all this has mercury in it too.” The papayas, along with cacao are part of a joint governmental
and nongovernmental effort to promote agriculture in the region, as an option to gold mining. Gina, who is
from Lima, never imagined that her main concern in the rainforest would be heavy metal contamination.
“It’s everywhere! If it’s in the water, it is in the soil. Or if it is in the soil, it is in the water. Which means
anything grown in the region is likely contaminated.” While fruits and vegetables were previously
disregarded as major players in the toxicity game, there is a growing trend in toxicology demonstrates that
they can become saturated sources if the soil and water contains high levels of heavy metals (Massaquoi et al.
2015; Sharma et al. 2016). The conceptions of a pure mother nature in the rainforest were ones that Gina
carried with her and ones that she wishes to maintain. She works with reforestation and environmental
education efforts, having seen the effects of heavy metal contamination in Lima.

Lima as well as the surrounding copper mines in the Andes have a longstanding reputation for lead
toxicity, along with carrying racialized valence for the communities affected (Graeter 2015; Li 2015). The
social contamination that can predate, precipitate and then perpetuate the physiological contamination will
come under more analysis in the next section, in examining particulate and (in)articulate “bodies in the
system.”

For many people, Madre de Dios summons up images of large rivers that make serpentines through
lush green rainforest. “Mercury was not something that had ever crossed my radar,” Gina sighs. “But, I
suppose, like everyone else, we are benefitting from the gold mining because of all the studies on mercury.”
This kind of comment was also echoed by NGO workers committed to (or contracted) to combat human
trafficking. They noted that their livelihoods also depend on the existence of the gold mining in the region.
The economic benefits that NGO workers and environmental scientists gain from working in the region
represent the kinds of “toxic” markets – so-called because of their volatility – that both legitimate and
aggravate efforts to place monetary value on clean air, water, and land. Gina had also worked with Save the
Children and a local missionary organization called “Huarayo” (which is the local name of an Amazonian
ethnic group) to document and alleviate the trauma from sex-trafficking in women and children. “It was too
heavy. I can’t keep doing it. It infects (contamina) my dreams.” This is what Gina has said to me, over and
over again, throughout the years. She oscillates between frustration and hope when engaging with me on

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
3¿Qué lugar debería ocupar nuestro país en el ranking de las catástrofes de este tipo si consideramos que
para los entendidos el caso japonés es el Chernobil de la contaminación mercurial?

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my work with sex-trafficked women. The day-to-day, and often night-to-night interactions with people
who really do not want to be involved in the sex-trade can take its toll. “I know mercury is poison, but I
feel like I can control it,” Gina says. “The women… the girls… I just can’t. Please just stick with this
[mercury] topic.” Gina had always worried about becoming too involved in supportive those who
experience sexual trauma. She didn’t have the training or the mentality for it, she said. When the work
started to “infect” her dreams, her ability to care for her own children plunged. She began to have anxiety
attacks and lost her “happiness,” as she put it.

For Alesandra, there was no choice in whether or not to involve herself. This was her job, even if
she had to make some of it up as she went. Luckily, she had Angela. It was to Angela that Alesandra would
bring any of the women or children taken on police raids from the mines. Angela came from another part of
the Amazon. While she slipped into to prostibars to do her own research and blended in as a body, she
didn’t speak Quechua or Aymara. This marked her as being from elsewhere. But Alesandra did speak
Quechua. So unlike the other male police officers that would deposit their charges with Angela and then
leave, Alesandra would stay to help translate. Sometimes, she would bring along her infant daughter. Like
Gina, Alesandra’s concerns were also that she would not be fully able to parent well because of the many
hours that she worked, but her comfort with the miners, as a fellow andina, constituted different grounds
for interactions. She also found that taking her daughter with her into the police station meant that women
brought in for processing often responded differently to her, more willing to share their stories and a baby
often softened the attitude of male miners enough such that what might have been a tense interaction,
became a conversation.

The shared Quechua fluency and a Cuzqueña identity made Alesandra feel as though people greeted
her like a long lost family-member. “They are so happy to hear me great them with the Trés Principios or
address them in Quechua.” The “Three Principles” are the moral code of conduct and greeting: Ama Sua,
Ama Lulla, Ama Qu’ella that translate to: “Don’t Lie, Don’t Cheat, Don’t Steal.” These become the pride and
basis from which Peru would be rebuilt after the Fujimori years (Cabrero 2006).4 There is a shared
understanding of the world, of how to approach it, and a sense of decency that slips into a “moral definition
of race” (de la Cadena 2010) that, along colonial lines of plunder, asserts itself as a governing ethic for why
the Andean “colonos” or colonists as thus more deserving of Amazonian land because the indios of the forest
are wild, just like the land. “We are a good people,” Alesandra would say. Her words prompted me to think
of Cuzqueña scholar Marisol de la Cadena’s framing of “gente decente” (decent people). De la Cadena
examines the moral definitions of race that include education and family ties. “As the conduit of education
and morality, the biological family was a central component of decency” (de la Cadena 2000: 47). She
invokes an elite Cuzqueño saying that resonates beyond the city, that people gain “education and morality in
the cradle.” The circulation of the sayings about who are “decent people” falls along colonial lines of who
counts as a person. Family ties as well as education are important, but such decency begins with the
mother’s body and what kind of enculturated decency – or lack thereof – that she is passing on to her child.
These sedimented concerns about cultural decency are what trouble Alesandra and the other police officers
the most. They are far outnumbered by miners, asked to do an impossible job of “maintaining peace order,”
which to them, means keeping the cultural order of people. The passing of mercury through the earth’s
atmosphere, soil, and waterways – from gestating mother to fetus does show “on the radar,” to refer back
to Gina’s words, but quicksilver’s trace settles onto an already-deeply racialized landscape.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
4 As this article is in the process of publication, the rise of “Fujimorismo” with Alberto Fujimori’s daughter, Keiko, at the helm is
further toxifying Peruvian politics. This raises a host of relevant ironies with respect to father Fujimori’s forced sterilizations of
indigenous women, his daughter’s political persona as an embodied reproduction of her father’s policies, and her staunch support
of unfettered natural resource extraction and corruption ties to the builders of the Interoceanic Road.

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Upsetting the stereotypes of indigenous populations in the Amazon as being “wild” and lacking in
cultivation that comes from a perceived lack of lettered education are analytically well-trodden (Greene
2010; Hale 2004; Taussig 1987; Urteaga 2013). And yet they still inform governmental policies and State
officials’ ideas about who counts as a decent person, as one who deserves to make decisions about
reproducing themselves and having control over their bodies and their land. Indigenous women in Peru
have undergone forced sterilization (Molina 2017) most notably during the Fujimori years. In the jungle
mines the “mix” of people – of undocumented Andean miners with Andean women as well as the “wild”
women (mujeres salvajes) of the forest are concerns for Alesandra and her fellow police-officers. “La selva,”
which also means “the jungle” also means “the wild,” and characterized women who did not get married,
mostly because they hadn’t learned “to know” how to be decent. The play of words that people articulate in
Madre de Dios, of the “mujer salvaje” turns a woman from the jungle into a “wild woman.” Less of a threat
was the shaman or the “wild man” (Taussig 1987), so deeply had notions of decency (as well as decay)
become entwined with ideas of cleanliness in the daily life of a “cultured” person.

The officers view the mixing of people in the mines with unease. “It is a problem of convivencia,”
Alesandra explains. Convivencia means “living together,” which then leads to a mixing of blood and, rather
than having the stable morality of the cradle, suddenly, there is an unstable population of “indecency”. The
“enculturated racism” extant in Peru, traced and displaced by Marisol de la Cadena, as well as Mary
Weismantel (2001) and Daniella Gandolfo (2009), who take up de la Cadena’s critique, rests upon ideas of
moral and bodily hygiene, rooted in people’s geographical and social “place” in the world. This often comes
to mean that Lima’s urbanized space has a civilized “whiteness” and the Incanized mountain spaces take on a
encultured notion of educated whiteness, while the rainforest is a place not just of epistemic murk (Taussig
1987) but also where the Peruvian States tends to see bodies reproducing a hybrid cultural confusion.
Celebrated Peruvian author and one-time presidential candidate Mario Vargas Llosa has enabled such views
to gain traction and travel widely with his writings, both fiction and nonfiction. His ultimate conclusion is
that Peru’s “modernization is possible only with the sacrifice of the Indian cultures” (Vargas Llosa 1987:
53). His is certainly not a new notion – where the “birth of a nation” and its continued reincarnations
depend largely on the racist reproductions of whiteness and exterminations of all that which is not. It does
shed a darkened light on why mercury contamination that hits indigenous populations hardest, might not
ever be a State priority.

I find thinking through Sara Ahmed’s ruminations on “reproducing whiteness” and the racialization
of space through an orientation of bodies and bodily movement to be helpful here (Ahmed 2014). I want to
highlight the focus on “family” and “home” in her analysis of “mixed orientations” of proximal or aspiring
whiteness, where inheritance can mean many things. In the spatializations of race and power, notions of
what constitutes a “home” and one’s kin can create the reference point for “racial otherness” and distance
from one’s “place” a mark of otherness. “Although ‘the other side of the world’ is associated with ‘racial
otherness,’ racial others become associated with the ‘other side of the world.’ They come to embody
distance. This embodiment of distance is what makes whiteness ‘proximate’ as the ‘starting point’ for
orientation. Whiteness becomes what is ‘here’ a line from which the world unfolds, making ‘there’ on ‘the
other side’” (Ahmed 2014: 98). In the mines, life can be messy and the migrant laborers are “out of place,”
far from home as well as from Lima, from which the whiteness of “there” departs to the elsewhere. The
Amazonian indigenous communities are split. Some of them are voluntarily involved in the mining
operations, others are coerced into compliance, while still others rebel openly. For Vargas Llosa and
subsequent politicians and writers – both in and outside of Peru – the mark of the migrant can slip all-too-
easily into that of terrorist (Ahmed 2004). These “affective economies” with labels that stick to gendered,
sexualized, and racialized (made mestizo or further indigenous) contributes to affective geographies. Ahmed
sees mixed orientations as acknowledging how bodies have histories and how when “we are talking about
race, we are describing how histories are bodily” (Ahmed 2014: 93). I want to consider how a mixed

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orientation approach, which “is not simply about what a body has, or even what a body can do, but also
involves a material and affective geography: affecting the way we gather: bodies, objects, worlds that come
together as well as break apart” (Ibid 94) might enable a better understanding of how environmental racism
settles along colonially inscribed unfoldings of inheritance and personhood. Those who inherit toxic body
burdens from their parents already carry socially-informed notions of who they are and what direction their
life should take. Their orientation has already been chosen for them, operating in an economic and
ecological “cis”tem not entirely of their choosing.

Particulate and (In)articulate Bodies in the “Cis”tem

This section’s title plays on Vanessa Agard-Jones’ article: “Bodies in the System,” a title which she in turn
riffs on, drawing from Michel-Rolph Trouillot to think about the relationship of Caribbean bodies caught in
– or exposed to – toxins and (the toxicity of) global power systems (2013). My intention here is similar, to
think about the scale of mercury as a molecule in the human body, the ecological body, and then its
circulation in the global economy on this planet we call “home.” I accept Agard-Jones’ provocation to “take
seriously the body and its constituent parts as another dimension of analysis to which we might turn” (2013:
183) and Mel Chen’s affirmation that questions “of ‘the body’ become particularly complex when taking
into account the various mixings, hybridizations, and impurities that accompany contemporary bodily
forms” (2012: 193).

Agard-Jones takes her lead from Trouillot’s Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy
where he asks: “Is there life beyond neocolonialism? Can we make sense of what dominated people say and
do in their daily lives without keeping silent about their forced integration in the international order and yet
without reducing their lives to the fact of that integration” (1988: 182)? In this final section, I am
influenced by Trouillot’s legacy in post-colonial scholarship, stretching his work from the Caribbean to
coasts, riverbanks, and mountains of Peru. My intention here is two-fold, not only to analyze the particulars
of human and environmental reproduction in the context of Amazonian mercury contamination, but also
the kinds of scholarly (re)productions of knowledge that come with citational practices – that is, the kinds
of intellectual environments that I wish to engender. In my attempt to “make sense” of life “beyond
neocolonialism” – which is an alchemical sort of foray for a white ethnographer – in addition to the work of
Agard-Jones and Chen, my engagement throughout this article and in this section has been engaging with
Peruvian scholars Marisol de la Cadena, María Elena García, Patricia Urteaga, Danny Pinedo, Alfredo
García Altamirano, María Chavarría well as indigenous scholars Antonio Iviche and Julio Cusurichi. A note
on indigenous scholars is important – so much goes spoken and less is written, particularly in the case of
indigenous women. Thus my engagement with them here is through the spoken word when it comes to
heavy metal contamination. I carry through Ahmed’s analysis of racialized bodies and mixed orientations
and what it means to “receive” or “possess” bodily toxicity. This is also an effort to take end-points as
starting points (Ahmed 2014) from queer scholars of color and indigenous thinkers to change the kinds of
academic offspring that come from thinking in straight lines of cistemic analysis.

In examining the social and physiological contamination that arises from racial assemblages (Kirksey
2017) that mix ecological contamination with toxic economic markets, I note that the complicated, and
often toxic indigenous politics in Peru stems from colonial missionary and hacienda systems of debt-
peonage. Yet, a promising and surprising “eco-ethno” politics (Greene 2006, 2010) continues to rise among
Amazonian and Andean communities. Perhaps these new solidarities point to the ways, that, even in the
face of deeply embedded systems of subjugation, unexpected affinities can occur. This is not to downplay,
however, that as quicksilver’s line on the thermometer climbs, as mercury levels rise in the soil, air and

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water, the slow violence of (environmental) racism impacts certain bodies harder than others on this planet
that we call “home.”

Michel Rolph-Trouillot’s work has been, for me, in conversation with Eduardo Galeano’s The Open
Veins of Latin America (1970). Galeano’s work lends itself particularly well to considering bodies of land in
and as systems, particularly when it comes to natural resource extraction. Galeano writes that: “In the
colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison” (1970: 8). This
alchemical transformation certainly resonates in the gold mines of Madre de Dios, where the colonial
circuits of exchange have changed little – the gold leaves for Europe, the United Arab Emirates, and the
United States. The mercury stays, in the open veins of Latin America and entering the blood streams of
human and nonhuman animals.

Indigenous communities – from the Andes to the Amazon – have become predictable pawns, as
well as players, in the extractive politics of Madre de Dios. Since the 1970s,Amazonian indigenous tribes
have engaged in small scale gold mining during the months when fishing, hunting, or Brazil-nut gathering
were not their source of food (García Altamirano 2003; Pinedo 2017), but this information doesn’t usually
make it into the environmental publications or press releases. What it means to be “indigenous” (in Madre
de Dios) and “care” for the Pachamama arise out of a colonial history that dates back to Incan times. Ideas
and policies for indigenous communities in Peru stand on about cultural purity that slate the “verdedero indio”
(true indio) as existing harmoniously with “Nature” and place the “dirty campesino” from the Andes as a
contaminating cultural force (Maria Elena Garcia; de la Cadena 2000; Weismantel 2001). While Andean
migrants might not (always) identify as indigenous or make claims to indigeneity in the language of the State
and international multiculturalism, they embody Peru’s claims to a Pre-Columbian heritage on touristic
display. This is what Shane Greene terms “the Incan Slot,” playing off of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s “the
Savage Slot.” Both “slots” operate in Madre de Dios, where Incan Andean and “Savage” Amazonian meet on
disintegrating soil, where claims of cultural heritage and the Pachamama are the stuff of tourist gold, except
when there is actual gold or black gold to extract.

A snapshot view of mercury-ridden Madre de Dios and the kinds of entangled ecologies and
economies will give a clearer general vision of how the particulate matter from the earth sifts into “slots”
created for indigenous populations to inhabit. An estimated 85,000 square kilometers of rainforest land has
turned into desert in the region (IIAP 2017; Pinto 2016), much of it in the Tambopata Nature Reserve and
the Amakaeri Communal Reserve. Both are “home” to indigenous communities of the Ese-Eja, Sonene,
Djine, and Harakmbut as well as isolated tribes pushed into making contact. Peru is among the top six
exporters of gold in the world, and some 20-30% of the country’s gold comes from Madre de Dios.
Environmental organizations report that this means that the region “produces” between 16,000-18,000
kilograms of gold per year for the world market. For each kilogram of gold, artisanal gold miners utilize 2.8
kilograms of mercury. Over the past 20 years, estimates that hover around 3,000 tons of mercury have
moved from the mines in Spain, the United States, and the mountains of Peru into Amazonian streams and
soil (IIAP 2017; Pinto 2016). With mercury use on the rise and rainforest turning into infertile terrain, the
political landscape has also become toxic. Those who work the land are caught in a larger web of “volatile”
economic assets, labeled “toxic,” that fluctuate wildly with the international market.

In Madre de Dios, studies conducted by the Carnegie group connected to Fernández’s research
group have shown that the body burden of those working in the mines is far above the international safety
average. What came as a disheartening surprise was that, even for indigenous inhabitants who weren’t
involved in artisanal or small scale gold mining carry as much as 27,44 ppm (parts per million) mercury
body burden. In the United States, the average citizen might not even come close to having 0,2 ppm. The
Fernández study, yet to be published, but heavily cited in the decision to declare a State of Emergency in
Madre de Dios, demonstrates that indigenous communities, the largest consumers of river fish, had
mercury levels more than 5 times greater than the level established by the World Health Organization

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(Fernandez 2015). This has, understandably, troubled the indigenous federation of Madre de Dios
(Federación Nativa del Río de Madre de Dios y Afluentes),5 which became even worse in April of 2017
when the Peruvian State announced that it would be eliminating the branch of the ministry of health that
specialized in indigenous and Afro-Peruvian communities (MINSA, Servindi 2017). Despite successful
advocacy work to reinstate health care for historically marginalized people in Peru, the indigenous
federation recognizes the precarity of the situation, reaching out to international organizations and
governments.6 Julio Cusurichi Palacios, a Shipibo and presidents of the indigenous federation voiced his
concern at the high level of contamination among his brethren. “We have to act. If we don’t, we are
participating in a genocide of our own people.” Juana Payaba, also Shipiba Indian from another village,
echoes his concern. “We can’t eat or drink without worry of being poisoned.” While they have both gained
international visibility, with Cusurichi winning the Goldman Environmental Prize for his work on
protecting isolated tribes in 2008 and Payaba honored by the Rainforest Alliance in 2016, it isn’t enough. It
is often through the Catholic Church that opportunities arise. From the church’s Social Action Commission
and its connections to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and Pope Francis’ visit to Madre
de Dios in January of 2018, but it does come at a price. This much needed support does, however, extend
claims over bodies to international terrain, where NGOs, particularly Catholic charities, tend to demand
specific guidelines be followed regarding women’s reproductive health – or particular heterosexual notions
of family when apportioning funding.

There is another concern. In addition to the bioaccumulation of mercury toxicity in human and
nonhuman bodies, the possibility that their communities and their biological data might also be circulated
on international display has also raised concerns about control over their bodies, the right to informed
consent, and the ability to keep their land. If the rivers and soil are deemed too toxic, the Peruvian State,
through the Ministry of Culture, has the right to (re)move people. This complicated politics of rights over
land, to maintaining a home and claims to what constitutes safe levels of mercury has its roots in control
over the minerals the lie within and beneath the soil. It was not until 1993, Patricia Urteaga notes, that the
terminology of “indigenous communities” entered national legislation (Urteaga 2003). The shifting political
alliances among indigenous groups and extractive economies existed long before national policy-makers
acknowledged the legal existence of indigenous groups. Danny Pinedo tracks the making “the Amazonian
subject” and indigenous mobilizations in Madre de Dios, noting how extractive industries take advantage of
ethnic splits to widen cultural and economic differences (2017). One community or ethnic group, like the
Harakmbut might be “open” to miners, loggers, and oil speculators while Shipibo communities are not.
Some of that also depends on just how much there is to extract.

The process of extracting gold and sifting soil is important to discuss as it entails a full-bodied effort
on the part of the gold miners, one that engages mercury’s particulate – and also peculiar kind of – matter.
The vulnerability of bodies to mercury (Chen 2012) and the slow violence (Nixon 2011) of heavy metal
contamination contributes to the conversation of human “bodies in the cistem,” while further examining
what flows through the increasingly perforated “veins of Latin America” (Galeano 1970) as well as and
through the life-ways of humans and nonhumans in whose veins mercury now runs.

There are two ways to mine for gold in Madre de Dios, either by river dredges, or by the floating
wood rafts that circle the open pits, equipped with a motor attached to a wide hose, “la chupadera” (the
sucker), so named because it sucks in the soil from the bottom of the pit, churning the water, sending gold-
flecked soil down a long chute that separates the larger sediment from minute pieces of gold. In the open-
pit gold mines, a raft holds the motor that runs the “chupadera” which sucks the silt from the bottom of the
pit and sends it down a long shoot to separate the gold flecks from the larger sediment.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
5 FENAMAD
6 Personal communication with Daniel Rodriguez, June 23, 2017; Servindi 2017.

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“La Chupadera” (The Sucker) Floating from a Raft – Sucks Sediment From the Watery Pit

Photo shown with permission of Edgar Estumbelo

Illegal Miners Wait While Environmental Engineers and Police Dismantle Their Equipment

Photo shown with permission of Edwin Huaman Peña

For the men laboring in the mines, their bodies in the continuation of a “mercantile” system (Nash

1980; Taussig 1991) means that they put their bodies into the murky mix. Miners pour liquid mercury into
old oil drums and mix it with gold-flecked sediment extracted from the open pits with bare hands and feet,
pants rolled up to their knees – or simply without any pants. In the style of traditional wine making, they
spend hours mixing this toxic mercury mush. Their bare skin is a porous contact zone for mercury to enter.

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Photo shown with permission of Bear Guerra Photo shown with permission of Vítor Elvira

The work in the gold mines tends to be strictly gendered, with the men in the mining pits and the
women in the prostibars. There is a strong affinity for “el mercurio,” seen as a strong male element. This
association of male strength connected to both the virility of the bull and to the matador’s ability to “matar”
(to kill) and thus prove themselves stronger than the bull, fed men’s affinity for the lithe liquid. The
harvesting of gold needs the alchemical interaction with mercury. Stories about the frivolous character of
gold, personified as a beautiful woman who lures men into the mines only to leave them with nothing,
abound. That quicksilver, the male element, “grabs” the gold particles, harnessing them into an amalgam,
makes the human affinity for the heavy metal that much stronger. The image is a powerful and a necessary
energizing one because work in the mines is grueling if not fatal.

“El Español” – shown with permission of Víctor Elvira y DandoUnaVuelta.com

Public health officials, doctors and nurses who work along the paved Interoceanic road as well as
deeper in the jungle struggle to explain the affects of mercury poisoning. Quicksilver “poisoning” in
maternal-fetal health and in that of the Pachamama, her plants and animals has more immediate visibility
than it does in the hands of the mostly male miners who place the silvery liquid in their hands and shake
their heads to ask me, “esto es veneno?” How could anything this lovely be venomous? Even with the visible
marks on the earth and children’s development, life is the mines is often better than “home” for those who
migrate there. Mercury’s effects are often secondary to those of the poverty people left behind, or, for

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many of the women that Alesandra, Angela, and I saw, situations of domestic and sexual violence held more
immediate concern.

When entering the mines with environmental engineers or health workers employed by the State,
they requested that I also reciprocate and offer a presentation or information. The engineers would explain
and teach cleaner or more effective mining techniques and the health care workers would conduct rapid
HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis exams. So I learned to talk about mercury catchment systems and its effects on
human and environmental health. The incredulity that both the miners and the mothers felt at my cautions
about mercury toxicity was built both on the magic that mercury makes in the muck of the mines as well as
on my whiteness that carries with it the assumption of being “eco-centric”: that I care more about the earth
than I do about the people. Or rather, that white environmentalists care more about the earth as it affects
them and their sense of earthly goodness than they do about the brown people scraping a living out of the
land. Talking about the Pachamama – if one is white – has become synonymous with ideological guise.
Miners see countries like United States, Brazil, and European countries harnessing ecological concerns to
hide covert economic operations. The concerns over this extended form of colonialism, or more aptly,
“green colonialism” (Grove 1996; Klein 2016; Kwashirai 2009, Hauweiser 2015) form the bedrock of
mistrust when it comes to warnings about the enduring effects of mercury toxicity. Understandably, if
European countries or the United States were going to continue “milking the teats of the Pachamama” (las
tetas de la Pachamama) as the president of one illegal mining community put it, then why shouldn’t they, los
Peruanos, also benefit?

Yet since the 2013 Minamata Treaty on Mercury in Japan, artisanal gold mining stands as the main
culprit for global mercury contamination. This paves the way for corporate mining. The category of gold
miner has a racialized composition of non-white. The corporate mining, particularly in Peru, tends to be
from Canada, United States, Norway, and Finland. Gold miners thus carry double stigma and social
contamination – they mistreat women by engaging with prostitutes and they “rape” the landscape. This is
precisely the kind of language rendering of a victimized “mother nature” whose virginal forests have vast
“ecosystem potential” for natural capital logics. If the Roman God Mercury signifies trade and monetary
pursuits (among other trickster and messenger aspects), the irony of chemical mercury contamination in
adding value and weight to threats to “ecosystem services” and “natural capital” is that it so uncomfortably
ties ecological concerns with economic gain – for a few.

This unfortunate entanglement of economic and ecological concerns is one that the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank helped to foster by promoting “natural capital” as a way to pay back
loans and generate income. “Natural” resources like lumber, minerals, plants, animals, energy from wind
and water become collateral, weighed against national debt. The Unites Nations World Forum gives this
description: “Natural Capital can be defined as the world’s stocks of natural assets which include geology,
soil, air, water and all living things. It is from this natural capital that humans derive a wide range of
services, often called ecosystem services, which make human life possible” (World Forum on Natural
Capital). These kinds of ecosystem services extend from flood defense to carbon sequestration, even to
“inspiration we take from wildlife and the natural environment.”7 Such a framing of the value-added fruits of
nature can underwrite projects to keep “nature” healthy, which means that someone benefits from toxicity.

The economic concerns over “green colonialism,” which come out of ideas about protecting
“mother earth,” and this planet that (we) humans call home, is something that I will address shortly. Here, I
closely examine not only the “vulnerability of the human body” (Chen 2012) but also the vulnerability of
“Nature’s body” (Schiebinger 2005). I propose one answer, in the context of Madre de Dios, to
anthropologist Janelle Lamoreaux’s query of “what if the environment were a person”(2016)? Lamoreaux

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
7 http://naturalcapitalforum.com/about/

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poses this question in the context of epigenetics, which deepens the inquiry into the environment of the
mother’s womb and a fetus surrounded by heavy-metal contaminated amniotic fluid. What kind of person
the earth would be, in thinking about the constant feminizing of the Amazonian earthly body, is a helpful
line of flight for me to entertain here.

Male miners and governmental environmental engineers alike ask me about the environmental
catchphrase about the Amazon rainforest being “the lungs of the earth,” wondering instead about their
stomachs and their children’s stomachs. They would also ask an unfortunate riddle that collapsed the
fertility and accessibility of women’s bodies with those of earth bodies together:

“What is the difference between a mine and a woman?”

The answer was “Nothing. Because both are for exploitation.”

Lamoreaux asks us to consider the environment not just a single person, but rather as a “lineage of

personal and chemical exposures” that include “human and nonhuman environments of the past and the
present” (2016: 191). The region of the Mother of God, then, with “her” mothers (sex-workers and non-
sex-workers) bearing children in a mercury-contaminated gold mining area to men considered “rapists of
the rainforest” seems like a possible composite figure for thinking through the reproduction of different
kinds of different kinds of toxic exposures, past, present, and future. In the beginning of this article, I
mentioned a public health official who referred to the mercury-contaminated landscape as “a ruined – and
then abandoned – landscape, just like a disgraced woman.” While mothers certainly endure their share of
blame for babies born with heavy metal poisoning, male miners have become vilified by the Peruvian media
and successive governments as both “los contaminadores” (the contaminators / polluters) of the Pachamama,
but also as “los contaminados” (the contaminated). The latter plays off of the word “los condenados” (the
condemned). Many of the migrants operate under multiple life-sentences – those who come from the
Andes experienced the violence of the Peruvian government, El Sendero Luminoso (The Shining Path) and the
Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA). They also do not have a documented existence and are
often “condemned” to wander outside of the State’s social programs while also targeted as always-already
criminals. The lineage of environmental contaminations, then, refers to political as well as ecological
exposures.

The socially contaminated category of the Andean Indian is made worse by linguistic elitism. Most
of the recent migrants to Madre de Dios speak Quechua or Aymara, rather than Spanish, as their first
language. And then, of course, they are also condemned to mercury poisoning – memory loss, irascibility,
deteriorated motor control and physical coordination. While they are the hands that pour the liquid
mercury into rivers and rainforest soil, their choices are driven by a larger world economy that demands
goods they cannot easily produce. For those coming from the Cusco and Puno regions, they either worked
their own potato fields or harvested the “superfood” Maca and quinoa, which they no longer can afford to
consumer themselves. The responsibility of toxic ecologies and economies falls onto the laboring bodies
that do not control the means of production, but are rather part of the commodity chain.

In thinking about “Bodies in the System,” Agard-Jones reflects on Trouillot’s ability to examine
world systems through the “national, regional, and global processes at work at the scale of the everyday”
(Trouillot 1988: 167). His insistence that the ethnographic conceit of the isolated village needed
“deconstructing” – which reads as: “decolonizing” – to demonstrate that historical processes and global
political economies also shaped people’s lives in so-called isolated places. Trouillot was working in the small
banana-planting town of Wesley in Dominica and Agard-Jones places herself in another Caribbean island,
Martinique, where the effects of the pesticide, chlordécone, that produces endocrine altering effects in
humans (and one would imagine, nonhumans as well). Following in Trouillot’s decolonizing lead to

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understand the flows of chlordécone through the human bodies in Martinique, Agard-Jones points to the
“processes of production, consumption, and accumulation and to what they could tell us about colonial
power.” Her intellectual investment similarly aims to show how “ethnographic research might reveal the
cracks in the system, and might point toward possibilities for change” (Agard-Jones 2013: 185-86).

In the summer of 2016, after embarking on a 200km motorcycle trip with Miguel, the only chemist
licensed to sell chemicals (to clean the heavy machinery, motors, and excess mercury) in the mining zone, I
was feeling a visceral despair at seeing the rainforest disappear. Miguel had not met Alesandra, but because
she had been one of the first female police officers in the region, news of her presence had circulated. He
asked me if she was still in Mazuko. I shook my head “no” as I climb on the bike. As we drive, I explain that
she had rotated out as most of the government officials do, after their contractual two years have passed.
She wanted to return to Cuzco. Alesandra had never been entirely convinced that the mercury vapor was an
issue and ultimately did not have a bodily encounter with the liquid mercury. Now there is a new wave of
female recruits, forming a strong presence of officers and a women’s police station, specifically to receive
those experiencing domestic violence or sex-trafficking.

As we pass pockmarked landscape, I ask Miguel if he feels any hesitation at selling his chemicals,
without which the machinery would not properly function. I am struggling with seeing a landscape
decidedly more desolate than I had last seen it in years past. Sand has overtaken forest. Piles of plastic
bottles, discarded motors, tin, and oil drums encroach on the road. Miguel has to dodge as we pass
mechanic after mechanic shop, brothel after brothel.

Miguel can hear the tightness in my voice when I ask him how he felt about his participation in the
mercurial deforestation.

“Listen, you know better. We are condemned as the polluters, but we are really like puppets. We
aren’t the ones who pull the strings on the global economy.”8 He then asks what kind of choice there is, not
only for the miners, but also for himself. Miguel’s marks himself within a broader economic system where
he is both participant-actor but also knows that the mercury contamination also acts on him, as it does
anyone who spends long periods in the gold mines. His articulation of being part of the strings of the global
economy resonates with Agard-Jones’ framing of Martinican residents who see their choices as limited by
powerful forces beyond their control. Any understanding of their health “would be incomplete without an
analysis of how their bodies are produced through and via engagements with the local, regional, and global
forms of power that have made the island’s chlordécone contamination possible” where chlordécone signals
how “Martinican bodies are connected to commodity chains, to uneven relations of colonial/postcolonial
power, and thus to world systems” (2013: 191).

Artisanal gold miners are, as Miguel notes, connected to commodity chains as are the indigenous
communities not involved in mining activities, speaking to the uneven and continuing colonial lines of
power. With the global demand for gold still on the rise, artisanal mining will not stop. Mercury imports
are illegal, except for medical – especially dental – usage. The contested landscape of what counts as
“toxic” – be they economic assets, volatile politics aggravated by colonial tactics of pitting disenfranchised
groups against one another aligns with Mel Chen’s reminder that: “If the definition of toxin has always been
the outcome of political negotiation and a threshold value on a set of selected tests, its conditionality is no
more true in medical discourse than in social discourse, in which one’s definition of toxic irritant coincides
with habitual scapegoats of ableist, sexist, and racist, systems” (2012: 192). Artisanal miners have become
the leading scapegoats for mercury pollution and irascible character – the contaminated and the
contaminators at the same time. Something that Alesandra does not find fair or fitting.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
8 “Somos condenados como contaminadores, pero somos más como marionetas, no es nosotros que tocan las cuerdas de la
economía global.”

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Conclusion:

The last time that I meet with Alesandra she is breast-feeding her daughter, in uniform, at the

police station. There are several women and children who have arrived at Huarayo’s refuge and Angelica
has come to talk with Alesandra too. Angela is especially upset today, feeling what she calls, “the burden of
seeing too much.” The three of us discuss the unfortunate “mines are like women” riddle. Both Angela and
Alesandra see indigenous women’s bodies as most vulnerable to exploitation, but what it means to be
“indigenous” is not always so clear. For Alesandra, being “Andean” is not the same thing as being “indian” or
indigenous. Yet she does see the Andean women in the jungle brothels as particularly susceptible to
manipulation. When I ask them why, indigenous women’s fates are so easily collapsed with those of the
rainforest bodies, their answer is “poverty” and “closer to the earth.” Given the reliance on gold mining for
native Quechua speakers, Amazonian fish for Amazonian native communities, women and their children are
“closer to the earth” and tend to be less moneyed than the men. They are more apt to be included in
riddlesome gendered-claims that collapse women’s bodies with the (built) landscape.

Angela and Alessandra note the bitter irony of exploiting the Amazon rainforest and women’s
bodies. “You are left with nothing,” Alessandra says, her daughter finished eating, now sleeping in her arms.
“If you destroy the mother earth (pachamama) then you have nothing… no ecology. That is like destroying
all the human mothers too. You have nothing left, nothing at all.” Alesandra and Angela note
heteronormative ideas about reproduction in an Amazonian forest landscape also gendered female, where
the inheritance of toxicity rests on the women who reproduce life. In the last published study on maternal-
fetal health in Madre de Dios, awareness and concern for mercury contamination had increased, as had
mercury levels in mothers and children (Gonzalez 2015). But where protein sources are most easily
obtained in wild fish for adults and breast milk for infants, there are no healthier alternatives.

In ending where I began, with Alesandra, I wish to highlight the resonance with Sara Ahmed’s point
about “the deviants” of the family. “Although some points of deviation might be necessary for the
continuation of a line, other points threaten that line by not receiving the ‘qualities’ that are assumed to pass
along it…. One way of defending the line is to make the deviant ‘an end point.’ A mixed and queer
genealogy might even unfold from such points” (2014: 100). A queer and mixed genealogy sounds like
healthy antidote to unfortunate notions about human, nonhuman, and intellectual reproduction. The
contribution of queer ecologies – à la Chen and Agard-Jones – unsettles ideas of what constitutes nature and
culture, which in turn disrupts related binaries of human nonhuman, male and female, has a particular
valence and weight when considering heavy metals. Chen’s framing of heavy metals as “critically mobile”
where “their status as toxins derives from their potential threat to valued human integrities” means that
mercury, like lead “threaten to overrun what a species hierarchy would seek to lock in place” (Chen 2012:
159). As a substance, mercury can travel, perhaps not on godly wings, but with birds and fish, in human,
atmospheric, and in water bodies. In the shifting landscape of Madre de Dios, both liquid and landfilled, fish
and mercury, not just people, are on the move. Anaerobic microorganisms in the soil sediment transform
methylate mercury (MHg) into monomethylmercury (MeHg), which is the most neurotoxic form of the
heavy metal that “biomagnifies” in aquatic food chains (Diringer et al 2014; Hsu-Kim et al 2013). While it is
tempting to look as Chen does, at the lower end of the animacy scale, towards a less toxic future,
bioremediation of mercury is not so easy. It can ultimately shift what reproduction of humans and
nonhumans looks like on this planet.

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