Accepted: 16 August 2017

DOI: 10.1111/geoj.12239

REGULAR PAPER

Mining, meaning and memory in the Andes

Tom Perreault

Department of Geography, Syracuse

This paper examines the relationship between mining, memory and environmental
University, Syracuse, NY, USA
suffering on the Bolivian Altiplano (Andean plateau). Mining activity has had a
Correspondence long and well documented role in transforming landscapes throughout the Andean
Tom Perreault
Email: taperrea@maxwell.syr.edu region, and Bolivia provides some of South America’s starkest examples of mine-
related water and soil contamination. In Bolivia, mining is publicly memorialised
as central to the collective national experience, and public murals and monuments
help construct a national identity as a pa
ıs minero (mining country). Memory is
similarly important, though less public, for populations impacted by mine-related
pollution and their demands for remediation and reparation. In discussing these
conditions, residents of the region draw on memories of past landscapes and
waterscapes, which they often represent as verdant and bountiful. Such memory
narratives are less important for what they tell us about the former landscapes –
which were likely less pristine than reported – than what they tell us about con-
temporary conditions. Drawing on ethnographic research, I argue that memory –
as represented in stories told about past experience – necessarily requires selective
remembering and selective forgetting, and may function as a political and ideolog-
ical resource in its own right. In this sense, memory can be mobilised in various
forms and at a range of scales, from the individual to the national. As a represen-
tation of the past, memory is always also a representation of the present, and a
reflection of contemporary realities, which in turn informs political demands. The
paper ends by considering the potential and limitations of memory as a conceptual
tool for envisioning environmentally just futures.

KEYWORDS
Bolivia, environmental justice, ethnography, memory, mining, water contamination

The ruin indexes both the hope and hubris of the futures that never come to pass – whether early capitalism’s
promise of abundance and ease, or socialism’s vision of collective labour and equality. (DeSilvey & Edensor,
2012, p. 468)

Pollution lives a double life: one in objective space – in the air, water, streams, and soil. . . another one in the
bodies and minds of contaminated inhabitants. (Auyero & Swistun, 2009, p. 60)

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The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
© 2017 Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers).

The Geographical Journal. 2018;184:229–241. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/geoj | 229

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1 | INTRODUCTION
This paper examines the relationship between environmental suffering, collective memory and the possibilities for environ-
mentally just futures. As suggested by the epigraphs above, it does so by considering the relationship between ruins and
the lost dreams of progress they represent, and what Auyero and Swistun (2009) refer to as the double life of pollution.
The ruins that concern me are not the vestiges of past civilisations or decaying artefacts examined by authors such as
DeSilvey and Edensor (2012), but rather the ruins of landscapes and environments, of rivers and wetlands, of pastures and
agricultural fields, and of lives and communities upended by acute mining contamination. In short, the paper concerns
social and environmental ruination wrought by resource extraction and years of official neglect. In particular, I examine
memories of mine-related water pollution and environmental transformation, as narrated by indigenous campesino (small-
holder farmer) residents of the Huanuni river valley, downstream from the Huanuni tin mine in Oruro department, on Boli-
via’s central Altiplano (Andean plateau). Memory, whether expressed verbally as spoken and written narratives, or visually
through public art and monuments, plays a fundamental role in how residents of the Huanuni valley understand environ-
mental suffering, its causes and potential remedies. In Bolivia, mining is memorialised as central to the collective national
experience and helps construct a national identity as a pa
ıs minero (mining country). Memory is similarly important, though
less public, for populations impacted by mine-related pollution and their demands for remediation and reparation. I argue
that memory – as represented in stories told about past experience – necessarily requires selective remembering and selec-
tive forgetting, and may serve as a political and ideological resource in its own right. In this sense, memory can be mobi-
lised in various forms and at a range of scales, from the individual to the national. As a representation of the past, memory
is always also a representation of the present, and a reflection of contemporary realities, which in turn informs political
demands. In this way, memory may play a potential role in envisioning environmentally just futures. Such a role is far from
guaranteed, however, and the limitations of memory in informing social mobilisation are considered below.
The research on which this paper is based is part of a broader project focused on mining, water and rural livelihoods in
Bolivia, and involved roughly 10 months of fieldwork in the department of Oruro. My research was primarily ethnographic
in focus and involved in-depth, semi-structured and unstructured interviews with community residents; participant observa-
tion in indigenous-campesino1 communities and community meetings; focus group workshops; a livelihood survey of 125
households in 14 communities; and semi-structured interviews with state officials, mine company representatives, research-
ers and development practitioners working in the region. To assure the anonymity of research participants, in this paper I
use pseudonyms for all interviewees and indigenous-campesino communities. I conducted all interviews and surveys in
Spanish, recorded them when feasible (and with permission), and later transcribed and translated them. Interviews covered
a range of topics, including livelihood strategies, water use, community history, and perceptions of environmental change.
Interviews with community members were typically conducted in the interviewee’s home or, in some cases, in a public
space (such as a schoolhouse or community centre). I gained entry to and trust within the communities with the help of a
research assistant, whom I shall call Don Fernando.2 A man in his 60s, with deep roots in the Huanuni valley, Don Fer-
nando spent his youth working in the mines, and later served as an indigenous authority and campesino leader. Don Fer-
nando introduced me to community leaders and served as a guide (and occasionally a translator, with the few monolingual
Quechua speakers I met) over the course of my research period. While I conducted the bulk of my fieldwork in 2011, my
research in the region began in 2009 and I have returned most years for follow-up visits.
In the following section, I consider the concept of collective memory and its political uses. I then discuss mining and its
social and environmental implications on the Bolivian Altiplano, followed by a discussion of memory representation, begin-
ning with public monuments and murals and then individual memory narratives. The paper ends by considering the poten-
tial role and limitations of memory as a political resource for making claims to environmental justice.

2 | MEMORY, ENVIRONMENT AND JUSTICE

Memory – how we remember what we remember, individually and collectively – has been a central focus of Western
thought since at least the time of the classical philosophers. Historically, the object of inquiry was individual memory and
the ability of individuals to recall events and affective experiences from their past. As Brockmeier (2002b, p. 16) notes, for
Plato the concept of anamnesis (recollection) signified the highest path to intellectual and spiritual enlightenment and was
juxtaposed to forgetting, characterised by darkness, ignorance and bewilderment. This normative coding of remembering
and forgetting, along with the privileged figure of the self-sovereign individual, has been carried through modern psychoan-
alytic theory, beginning with Freud (Brockmeier, 2002a). Recollections can tell us much about past experiences and their
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contemporary interpretations, but those interpretations are typically far from individualised. Individual memories are
recalled, interpreted, understood and represented in the context of contemporary social relations, in what Maurice Halb-
wachs referred to as “collective frameworks”. Writing in the 1920s, Halbwachs argued that:

The past is not preserved but is reconstructed on the basis of the present . . . Collective frameworks are . . . pre-
cisely the instruments used by the collective memory to reconstruct an image of the past which is in accord, in
each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society. (Halbwachs, 1992 [1951], p. 40, cited in French,
2012, p. 339).

In this sense, memory, even individual recollection, is a social act, insofar as personal memories can only be understood in
the context of collective forms of discourse and representation (Canessa, 2012). As Molden (2016) argues, the past is
always represented in such a way that makes it relevant to, and even puts it to work in the service of, the present. Such an
understanding of collective memory, then, helps shift analytical focus from the recollections of self-sovereign individuals
toward the construction of collective cognitive frameworks that serve to filter, shape and give meaning to personal
memories.
This recognition allows us to understand memory as operating at a multiplicity of scales and through a diversity of
social forms. Of particular interest here is the dialectical relationship between the individual and the collective. Just as per-
sonal recollections are communicated and given meaning through contemporary discursive frameworks, so too are these
(collective) discursive frames shaped by, and thus actively produced through, the accretion and “distribution throughout
society of what individuals know, believe, and feel about the past” (Schwartz, 2016, p. 10). As Legg notes:

Collective memory must be dereified and viewed as a product of individual and institutional memories, as well
as their precursor. . . It is the imprecise and variable nature of individual recall, combined with its ability to
encourage sociocultural cohesion, which bestows upon memory its political potential. (Legg, 2007, p. 459,
emphasis in original)

Here, Legg points not only to the collective, social nature of individual memory, but also the potential (though not the
inevitability) it holds for inspiring political action. As I discuss in further detail below, these tensions – between individual
and collective memory and between political potential and the inconsistent nature of political action – are at play on the
Bolivian Altiplano.
Collective memories are constructed in a number of ways. As with nationalism, of which the production of collectively
shared memories is a fundamental component, memory lies at the intersection of history and geography (Anderson, 1983;
Said, 2000). A sense of a shared past and a common territory is vital to the production of collective memory, and may use-
fully be viewed through the lens of landscape. Collective memory is often at the core of how we understand landscape,
whether through affective connection with material remnants of the past (e.g., DeSilvey & Edensor, 2012; Gordillo, 2014),
the role of monuments and memorials in producing a collective history (Foote, 1997), street names and other toponyms
(Alderman, 2000), or the mediation of nostalgia (Blunt, 2003). As Andermann (2015, p. 6) notes in his study of memoriali-
sation practices in post-dictatorship Latin America, “places of memory” such as monuments and museums must be under-
stood both in terms of the physical, material sites they occupy, and the symbolic forms and practices such sites represent
(see also Foote & Azaryahu, 2007). In Latin America, considerable attention has been paid to such sites and their associ-
ated memorial practices in the context of post-conflict reconciliation processes (e.g., Gomez-Barris, 2009; Meade, 2001).
Far less is known, however, about the ways that “natural” landscapes are remembered individually and collectively, and the
potential – often unmet – that these memories hold for political action (Legg, 2007).
One exception is the work of Auyero and Swistun (2009), who examine environmental suffering in the Buenos Aires
barrio of Flammable (Inflamable in Spanish), which is surrounded and acutely contaminated by petrochemical plants. Older
residents of Flammable, whose experience of the barrio predates the arrival of the chemical industry, recall swimming and
fishing in a pristine river, and cultivating gardens on fertile green fields. Auyero and Swistun note, however, that such
memories likely reflect a certain nostalgia for an idealised past. As they put it:

One way to convey the present uneasiness is to contrast it with a time and place that may have never existed
in quite the form it is remembered, but the need to do this strongly indicates the depth of one’s present dis-
comfort. (Auyero & Swistun, 2009, p. 56).
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Such idealised representations may be thought of as examples of what Blunt (2003, p. 722) calls “productive nostalgia”
which, as opposed to forms of nostalgia commonly disparaged as maudlin and apolitical (Lowenthal, 1989), holds potential
for collective political action. This perspective resonates strongly with Sultana’s (2011) work on the political ecologies of
emotion. Drawing on Bondi (2005) and Davidson, Bondi, and Smith (2005), Sultana elucidates the emotional nature of
water access in rural Bangladesh, as recounted by people subject to arsenic contamination. Attention to emotion (in the case
of this paper, as represented in memory) can similarly illuminate the embodied and highly variegated lived experience of
environmental suffering in Bolivia. By “environmental suffering” I am referring to the physical experience of water and soil
contamination, as well as the emotional sense of loss associated with environmental degradation. Both experiences – the
physical and the emotional – are present in the memory narratives presented below.
In what follows, I examine the ways that mining is remembered and memorialised in the department of Oruro, Bolivia.
I begin with a brief overview of mining activity in the Altiplano and its environmental implications. I then examine the
ways mining is officially memorialised in Oruro, through murals and monuments. I argue that these processes of memorial-
isation are both reflective and productive of a hegemonic sense of a shared experience of mining. I then discuss the ways
that mining activity, and particularly the environmental effects of mining waste, is recalled through the memory of residents
of Oruro’s Huanuni Valley. Such recollections represent what Legg (2007, p. 460) calls “countermemory”, and stand in
contrast to the official, collective memory of mining. Widespread collective action is notable by its absence, however, so I
end the paper by considering both the promise and the limitations of memory as a political basis for making claims to envi-
ronmental justice.

3 | MINING, MEANING AND MEMORY

3.1 | Extraction and water contamination in Oruro
The mining regions of Oruro department are home to numerous Quechua-speaking agro-minero (mixed agro-pastoral and
mining) indigenous-campesino communities. This high-altitude region (the city of Oruro is located at an elevation of
3,800 m) is characterised by a cold and semi-arid climate, and in many areas its soils are highly saline. Rural residents
have long engaged in semi-subsistence agriculture, typically growing potatoes and other tubers, fava beans and quinoa,
along with a mix of vegetables where soil and water conditions permit. Residents raise sheep, cattle and sometimes llamas,
and sell milk, yogurt and soft, fresh cheese for local consumption. Confronted by the lack of economic opportunities and
the difficulties of rural life, many residents leave their communities for urban centres such as La Paz, Cochabamba, Buenos
Aires or S~ao Paulo.
The Huanuni tin mine is the region’s single largest source of mine-related water and soil contamination. During its
nearly 100 years of operation it has lacked adequate retention facilities to dispose of waste materials, which it has instead
dumped directly into the Huanuni river. This flows southwards to Lake Uru Uru, past several indigenous campesino com-
munities. In addition to the direct release of contaminated water and chemicals used in processing ore, the valley’s soils
and surface waters are subject to acid mine drainage, which lowers the pH of rivers and lakes. Heavy metals such as lead,
arsenic, cadmium, iron and zinc have been recorded in rivers throughout the broader Lake Poopo watershed of which the
Huanuni river is a part (Quintanilla & Garcıa, 2009), invariably at levels exceeding limits permissible under Bolivian law
(see also L opez, 2011; L opez et al., 2010).3 Water and soil testing has demonstrated similar conditions in the Huanuni
Valley (Montoya et al., 2010; Perreault, 2013).
While mining’s environmental impacts are various and spatially diffuse, they are most evident in terms of water. Mining
activity consumes massive quantities of water, primarily in the processing of ore. Modern techniques of mineral processing
rely on chemicals to concentrate minerals, whether in the form of cyanide heap-leaching (commonly employed in large-
scale open pit mining) or the froth flotation process (also known as “sink and float”), which uses chemical reagents to bind
with minerals. Both techniques are chemicals intensive and can be highly contaminating if proper environmental controls
are not employed (Bridge, 2004). In addition to their impact on water quality, these processing techniques have dramatic
implications for water quantity as well. The Huanuni mine consumes over 28 million litres of water per day, roughly the
same quantity as the 300,000 residents of the city of Oruro. Meanwhile, Bolivia’s largest mine, the massive open pit San
obal gold mine, consumes over 45 million litres per day, in the arid and impoverished southern Altiplano in Potosı
Crist
department (Emilio Madrid, Colectivo CASA, personal communication). While some water used in processing is recycled
in a closed-loop system, mines must continually replenish their supplies by diverting water from surrounding watersheds.
The Huanuni mine captures water from the river above the mine, leaving upstream communities with no water to irrigate
crops. Below the mine, water is diverted from springs and conveyed via open canal to a small ingenio (mineral
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concentration plant) near the town of Machacamarca, depriving residents of access to water that passes through their com-
munities. Deterioration in water quality and quantity is reflected in the memory narratives of the area’s residents, as dis-
cussed below.

3.2 | Memorialising mining and the nation

Bolivia has long been known as a pa
ıs minero, a mining country. Indeed, Nash (1993, p. 17) scarcely exaggerates when
she asserts that “Bolivia’s entry into world history begins with the mines”. The Inca and other pre-Columbian peoples
demonstrated extraordinary skill at extracting and working gold, but it was during the Colonial period that the mines of
what is now the Bolivian Altiplano gained their historic importance. Beginning with the silver rush of 1545 (sparked by
the discovery of abandoned Inca mines at Cerro Rico), the mines of Potosı were a source of spectacular wealth for the
Spanish empire throughout much of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Brown, 2012). Silver mining at Potosı, and to
a lesser extent Oruro, profoundly reconfigured regional economies, drawing people, manufactured goods and agricultural
products to remote urban centres; and left a toxic legacy of mercury poisoning that exists to this day (Robins, 2011; see
also Dore, 2000). In a pattern characteristic of extractive economies nearly everywhere, silver mining and associated urban
centres on the Altiplano experienced boom and bust cycles throughout the colonial era (Gavira Marquez, 2001; Klein,
1992). As silver production declined in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Bolivia’s economic centre of gravity shifted
northward from Potosı to Oruro. Since the establishment of the region’s first tin mines in the eighteenth century, Oruro’s
fortunes were increasingly linked to that metal, and by the 1940s Bolivia was one of the world’s leading tin producers and
the miners themselves were a potent political force (Dunkerley, 1984; Gavira Marquez, 2005).
Nationally, mining’s economic and political importance has since declined, and export earnings from natural gas now
far exceed those from mining. Locally and regionally, however, mining retains its economic importance. In Oruro and
Potosı, mining still has potent symbolic significance, as integrally connected to Bolivia’s Social Revolution and thus to the
emergence of the modern Bolivian nation. Moreover, since the vast majority of Bolivia’s miners (like most of Bolivia’s
poor and working classes) are of indigenous descent – mostly Quechua and Aymara speakers – the intertwined histories of
mining and the Bolivian nation are further imbricated with a generalised and often idealised sense of Andean indigenous
cultural history. These histories are represented visually in murals and monuments found in cities throughout the Altiplano,
which serve to memorialise miners and place them squarely in the national story (see Figures 1–3). Such public memoriali-
sations – typically commissioned by local governments and displayed in prominent public spaces – reflect commonly

F I G U R E 1 Detail of street mural, central La Paz. Note the nationalist iconography with miners placed at the centre of the national story.
[Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
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F I G U R E 2 Detail of street mural, Oruro. This mural represents a pailliri (woman stone breaker) in her traditionally feminine role as mother
and naturalised as in harmony with the Andean landscape. [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]

F I G U R E 3 Monument to the miner, central Oruro. Note the rifle and the broken chains, symbolising the miners’ role in the 1952 Social
Revolution, and their liberation of the working class from the bonds of exploitation under capitalism. [Colour figure can be viewed at
wileyonlinelibrary.com]

accepted views of the heroic miners and their role in Bolivia’s national story. These officially sanctioned and very public
displays of collective memory – examples of what Molden (2016) refers to as “mnemonic hegemony” – may be read as an
effort to maintain a specific understanding of mining’s role as central to Bolivian history (see also Brockmeier, 2002b).
The construction of these official national narratives necessarily involves selective remembering and, equally important,
selective forgetting, whether “willful, organized or unconscious” (Blight, 2009, p. 239; cf. Simpson & Corbridge, 2006).
PERREAULT | 235

Several tropes emerge from these images. First, this is a distinctly populist vision of resource nationalism, in which
those represented are the miners themselves. To the limited extent that mine owners, such as tin baron Simon I. Pati~ no, are
depicted, it is only as venal capitalists serving foreign interests. For instance, Figure 1, a detail from a large mural visible
until recently on a major boulevard in central La Paz, depicts miners literally at the centre of Bolivian history, with the
colonial and Republican past to the left and contemporary economic progress to the right. A pair of stern-faced miners peer
out of a mineshaft, while a large fist, seemingly breaking through a wall of rock, clenches the Pulacayo Thesis, a treatise
adopted in 1946 by the national miners’ union (FSTMB), and inspired by the Trotskyite principle of permanent revolution
(and widely seen as a call to arms in the years prior to the 1952 National Revolution). Second, this is a highly gendered
form of resource nationalism, in which men are often represented heroically: shirtless and muscular, in poses recalling
socialist realism. By contrast, women are represented as traditionally feminine and in harmony with nature. They are also
in decidedly supporting roles: as pailliris (women stone breakers who work aboveground), as revolutionaries alongside men
or as mothers. For instance, Figure 2 is a detail from a mural painted in Oruro in December 2015 (and commissioned by
the mayor’s office), which runs for some 200 m along a major boulevard. As a whole, the mural represents mining
throughout Bolivian history, from before the conquest to futuristic representations of mining in the years to come. The
detail shown in Figure 2 depicts a stylised pailliri as a mother holding her baby in her left arm, while in her outstretched
right arm she holds her hammer out toward the viewer. Her shawl mirrors the distant mountains, and the colours she wears
are those of the Wiphala, the chequered rainbow flag of indigenous Andean peoples, and adopted by the Morales govern-
ment as a symbol of the plurinational state. The figure of the pailliri is herself a memory of the past, as the need for
(women) stone breakers was made obsolete in the 1950s and 1960s by the adoption of the more economically efficient
sink-and-float method of separating ore, leaving many women without a means to a livelihood and further consolidating
male domination of the mining economy (Nash, 1993).
Third, these monuments and murals are explicit about the role mining plays in the national story. Monuments erected
after 1952 often represent miners with broken chains and carrying the bolt-action Mauser rifles used by the army and the
miners alike in the National Revolution. Figure 3 is iconic in this regard. Located in central Oruro, near the chapel of the
Virgin of the Mineshaft (Virgin del Socov
on), its masculinist ideals are obvious. Shirtless and heroic, the miner holds his
Mauser aloft while the broken chains of oppression (by the state and capitalist oligarchy) hang from his wrists. Similar
monuments are found in mining centres throughout the Altiplano, typically commissioned by local governments and dis-
played in prominent public spaces in the centres of their respective cities. As such, they can be considered to reflect com-
monly accepted views of mining and its centrality to Bolivian history. In this way, they serve as examples of hegemonic
memory practices (Brockmeier, 2002b; Legg, 2007) inasmuch as they both reflect and reproduce official historical narra-
tives. As Simpson and Corbridge (2006) note in the case of earthquake recovery in India, such memorial practices serve to
erase the multitude of conflicting memories, while at the same time constructing a sense of shared historical experience and
regional identity. What is neglected in these heroic monuments and nationalist murals is the memory of everyday experi-
ence, and, in particular, of those negatively affected by mining’s toxic legacy. It is to these memories that the paper now
turns.

3.3 | Memories of water: Everyday experiences of mining contamination

In Oruro, the inherent difficulties of agricultural production that farmers experience elsewhere on the Bolivian Altiplano
– cold temperatures, high altitudes, intense solar radiation, saline soils, a dry climate (with highly pronounced seasonal
fluctuations in precipitation) – are exacerbated by acute mine-related water and soil contamination. Environmental degra-
dation is experienced in a myriad of ways by those living downstream and downwind. In Oruro’s southern neighbour-
hoods, which abut the tailings and processing facilities of the Baremsa metallurgy plant and lie just downhill from the
Itos mine, residents breathe the dust that blows off the slag heaps during the dry season (April–October), while in the
rainy season (November–March), acid runoff drains downstream, polluting streams and soil. In the communities of Mal-
lku Cocha and Huayra, downstream from COMIBOL’s Huanuni mine, sediments laden with heavy metals, salts and
chemical toxins are deposited in the river’s floodplain, adjacent to agricultural fields and pastures (Lopez et al., 2010;
Montoya et al., 2010; Perreault, 2013). Residents complain of respiratory and skin ailments, and have watched their crops
wither and their livestock die. Stories of deformed calves and lambs (or deformed stillborn fetuses) are commonplace.
Profound environmental deterioration frames peoples’ everyday conversations, and provides a touchstone by which people
come to understand their lives.
In her book, Women, water and memory, Nefissa Naguib (2009, p. 14) examines women’s life experiences in a Pales-
tinian village before and after the introduction of piped water. Women in the village were suspicious of the modernising
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influence of the new water infrastructure, and commented that it disrupted social practices of water gathering (and time
spent with friends at communal wells) and negatively affected the sensuous qualities of water. For Naguib, such narratives
call into being the ‘“poetics of water” in which women not only talk about water, but evoke images of a total landscape in
which their lives are carried out’. The stories women told recall affective qualities of fetching water, of social relations
involved in water procurement and consumption, of water’s appearance and taste. Memories of water thus formed part of
the women’s lived experience, and helped shape their understanding of contemporary village life – including their sceptical
view of piped water and the forms of modernity it represents. For residents of the Huanuni valley, like those of the village
discussed by Naguib, narratives of past lives and landscapes represent both a moral order and a way of making sense of
their current experiences. In what follows, I present selections from some of the many interviews I conducted in indigenous
campesino communities in the Huanuni valley.
Don Gerardo, an official with the departmental government at the time of our interview, described his community, Mal-
lku Kocha, which is among the most acutely contaminated by mining waste. Talking in his office in the centre of Oruro,
his voice rising as he spoke, he told me that sedimentation has made agriculture in the community all but impossible:

Look, this place used to be an orchard [vergel], filled with totora (reeds), this whole place. All this area that is
now a (barren) plain, really used to be an orchard. The rivers that are now clogged with sediment, that you’ve
seen yourself, were deep rivers. I used to see fish, no problem, it was crystal clear. There were duck eggs and
eggs of other birds too – I used to go gather them in quantity. There were cattle. I had my boat – there was so
much water that I had to travel by boat. Look, these lands that really produced well have converted into a
desert. And it’s advancing more and more. (Author interview, May 2011)

The practice of gathering wild duck eggs – once an important source of protein – has all but vanished, along with most
of the area’s once-abundant waterfowl, and the area Don Gerardo describes is now a barren plain. As the water became
progressively more polluted, people experienced this transformation bodily, through the taste and feel of the water. Mining
contamination was not an abstraction, to be measured only in terms of biochemical parameters such as pH, dissolved oxy-
gen, or heavy metal content. Water was experienced as “thicker” and as tasting bad. Talking in the courtyard of a neigh-
bour’s house, Do~na Eugenia Sula Canki put it to me this way:

(The pollution) has affected us this way: the water, the land too, now it’s not like it was before, it’s completely
spent, the land is all white; white, ugly, salty [salado]. And now the water has also turned salt. (Author inter-
view, June 2016)

Residents discuss the past as a time of plenty, with clean water and fertile pastures. Do~na Celestina Mamani, who now
lives in the town of Machacamarca, told me of her childhood growing up in the community of Allku Mayu:

When I was a little girl, the community was beautiful, no? In the first place, we had lots of livestock: we had
sheep, cows, pigs, burros. We had lots of them. The pastures were good. There were all types of pasture, and
food for the sheep. . . the water was clean [era dulce]. So with all this we had large numbers of livestock and
crops also. We also had plenty to eat: milk, cheese, lots of meat, also potatoes, dried potatoes [chu~no], quinoa,
dried fava beans, no? Fresh fava beans. We never lacked for food. But as the years went by, our life changed.
(Author interview, June 2016)

Indeed, life for residents of the valley has changed in a number of ways. Out-migration has increased dramatically, as
part of a broader trend toward urbanisation in Bolivia (and throughout Latin America), and it is now common for house-
holds to be divided between multiple places – with older people remaining full time in the community, children often away
at school in Oruro, and younger adults working in one of Bolivia’s larger cities or doing menial labour abroad. These pro-
cesses are complex and driven by many factors, including the degradation of the region’s environment, which has severely
limited the livelihood options for rural residents. When we spoke in the courtyard of her home in Machacamarca, Do~ na
Eugenia related a similar story:

We had cows, sheep and also burros . . . There was so much totora (reeds) that people would get lost. That’s
how it was. Cows would enter the water and we would lose the cows (in the totora). It was good before,
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everything was good. When I was a little girl I saw all this, same when I was a teenager. But now, now it’s
not like that with the pollution. (Author interview, June 2016)

As opposed to sudden changes caused by an oil spill or flood, the accumulation of mining waste is a form of “slow vio-
lence” (Nixon, 2013) to which people gradually adjust their lives and which seldom merits government attention. Don Fer-
nando told me of how technological changes at the mines irreparably altered water quality for communities downstream:

So as the years passed, the problem was when the tin barons, the owners here in the valley, in this watershed,
only worked with calcination [calcinaci
on]. They burned the tin. This red water that passed (downriver) could
still be used for irrigation. And the people in the community of Urku Pampa irrigated with this water. There
was production of fava beans, everything. With this water, nothing happened. From there, the new technology
that arrived in this time, they changed to chemical reagents . . . From there started the reactivation (of mining)
then, the new technology, they started to use xanthate [xantato], the famous cyanide, and later sulphuric acid,
and later copper sulphate . . . So, little by little, little by little, year by year, what’s happening? The water
began to change its flavour. The water started to get a little thicker, yeah? It changed its flavour. (Author inter-
view, May 2016)

Again, changes in water quality are related not in terms of chemical parameters (although Don Fernando is well aware
of the chemical processes involved in the water’s contamination), but rather in terms of affective, experiential and embod-
ied qualities: taste, texture, and appearance.
There is a striking uniformity to the memory narratives presented here. It is possible that in re-telling a familiar story to
an outsider, residents are engaging in a sort of performance. There is, indeed, a performative quality to Bolivian rhetorical
style, which I have witnessed many times in public meetings organised by state environmental agencies (and attended by
few foreigners) concerning mine-related contamination. In these meetings men and women alike relate their experience with
pollution, at times their voices quivering in angering, at other times they are barely able to hold back tears (cf. Perreault,
2015). While interviewees rarely shouted or cried during our conversations, they were well aware of my status as a foreign
researcher (albeit one with whom they were familiar). Nevertheless, I believe their narratives derive less from their perfor-
mative qualities than from the emotion-laden experience of environmental suffering that residents share. The pictures
painted by interviewees draw on images and experiences common in such descriptions, and which I heard repeatedly during
in our conversations: crystalline waters, wetlands full of totora reeds, plentiful fish and waterfowl, bountiful agricultural
production. I do not doubt that there is truth in these representations, and it is certainly the case that mining contamination
has resulted in profound environmental and social deterioration. However, one must interpret such reminiscences with care.
Given the long history of mining in the region, environmental conditions are unlikely to have been as idyllic as these resi-
dents describe. Moreover, their communities, which are among the most affected by mining contamination, were also sub-
ject to the forced labour and racialised subjugation of the hacienda system until its abolition by the agrarian reform of
1953. Most of the people I interviewed came of age after the end of the hacienda system, but their parents were all born
into it. While the 1950s and 1960s was a time of social progress, it was also a time of widespread and entrenched poverty,
racism and frequent political turmoil. But as Auyero and Swistun (2009) note, statements about the past are never only
about the past, and are always also reflections on the present. Such reminiscences, then, serve to measure what people
experience as a much-diminished present, by holding it up as a lens through which they view an idealised, vanished past.
Naguib (2009, p. 23) puts it this way: “The point is not what is true and what is false in a historical sense, but the ways in
which the content of narratives creates real lives for the people who tell them”. In this sense, then, memory plays a central
role in the production of meaning, and the way people come to understand the water contamination that has so affected
their lives.

4 | MEMORY, LANDSCAPE AND POSSIBILITIES FOR ENVIRONMENTAL

JUSTICE

Nearly all residents of the Huanuni valley engage in semi-subsistence agriculture and livestock raising, in combination with
small-scale market-oriented agriculture and/or occasional wage labour. People’s livelihoods – their ability to eat and earn a
living – depend in large part on access to clean water and fertile land. The steady decline of water, cropland and pasture
due to mine-related contamination has had dramatically negative implications for residents of the valley, and their narrated
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memories of clean water, green pastures, fertile fields and abundant birdlife speak not just to past experience but to the pre-
sent and very palpable sense of loss. It is through this sense of loss, as much as the physical effects of mine-related con-
tamination, that environmental suffering is experienced. Collective memories of water, soil, pasture, fish and birds are
directly connected to contemporary experiences and understandings of injustice and, perhaps less directly, to conceptualisa-
tions of, and occasional calls for, justice.
Although residents have at times been involved with the efforts of the Oruro-based environmental group CORIDUP
(Coordinator for the Defense of the Desaguadero River and Lakes Uru Uru and Poopo), there has been no sustained social
mobilisation or large-scale collective action in response to mining contamination among community members themselves
(Perreault, 2017). Many residents of the Huanuni valley express scepticism that conditions will ever change, and have
grown cynical in the face of meetings and announcements that bring no tangible improvement in their condition. As a
result, many communities are largely de-mobilised, and residents have resigned themselves to living with contamination,
and to the hopeful waiting that comes with diminished expectations (Auyero, 2012). Many residents are also conflicted
about mining itself and its role in their lives. This was evident in a discussion I had with Do~na Lucila, in the courtyard of
her home in the community of Chuspa. Sitting on a low wooden bench in the bright sun, Do~na Lucila asserted that the
Huanuni Mining Company has never done any remediation projects in Chuspa, nor have any of the residents received com-
pensation for the damage done to their lands and water, let alone for the disruption caused to their families and way of life.
She told me she believes there was no way to remedy the problem of mining contamination. The problem is too great, she
said, and the government was powerless to act. When I asked her if there is a solution to the problem, she replied, “I don’t
believe so. It’s contaminated, contaminated. The wind continues to blow dust (from mine tailings), and the acid drainage
[copajira] continues. There’s no solution”. She then said something I had not anticipated. In spite of all the pollution and
official neglect, she said that Oruro could not survive without mining. She commented that the social welfare payments
[bonos] funded by mining royalties are important because they have improved life for many people. Do~na Lucila’s state-
ment captures a sense of resignation and contradiction that I heard many times in my conversations with people in the Hua-
nuni valley. Many residents and local activists acknowledge the daunting scale of the pollution problem, and the fact that
the local environment, and the livelihoods it once supported, have been irreparably altered. But Do~na Lucila also expressed
a sense of tension within Bolivia’s extractive economy, and the benefits – however meagre – they provide to the country’s
poor. The hegemony of the mining economy is such that even those who pay its heaviest price see little alternative but to
support it (Marston & Perreault, 2017).
What, then, is the potential of collective memory as a political resource in constructing environmentally just futures?
Though far less obvious and public than the monuments and murals discussed earlier, examples of memory in the service

F I G U R E 4 Painting hanging on the wall in the library of the environmental group CEPA, Oruro. The painting’s imagery provides a rare
critique of mining. [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]
PERREAULT | 239

of environmental justice mobilisation do exist. One such example is a large painting hanging in a library run by the envi-
ronmental group CEPA (Centre for Ecology and Andean Peoples) in Oruro (Figure 4). The painting has an expressive style
similar to the much larger public murals that celebrate the history of mining. At the centre of the painting are an indige-
nous-campesino woman and man, appearing stern and defiant. To the left is a stylised mine and processing plant spewing
polluted water, along with representations of capitalism (a $100 bill) and miners who see, speak and hear no evil. On the
right side of the painting are representations of a healthy wetland environment, with clean water, flamingos (common in
Altiplano lakes) and thick totora reeds. The painting thus visually connects mining to pollution, and juxtaposes these with a
clean and healthy Altiplano environment.
Similar notions were related by Felix Laime, one of the founders (and a former president) of the environmental justice
network CORIDUP (which in turn is supported by CEPA):

Before, we didn’t feel the degradation of the land. This situation is impoverishing the people, because it has
increased the salinity and has ‘burned’ the native pasture, so that there is a total loss of economic resources in
the communities. . . Why wait any longer (for environmental remediation)? Because now the old people are all
that remain; the new generations leave in search of other ways to make a living, because their parents’ lands
don’t produce now (because) it’s all saline. Now there is no way to make a living, so what is one to do?
(Cited in Forno & Pauwels, 2009, p. 16).

Idealised representations of past landscapes uncontaminated by mining activity are common in Bolivia. Far from mere nos-
talgia for a past long since vanished, these representations must be understood in the context of present social relations and
possibilities for alternative futures. That is, idealised individual memories and visual images can serve as a basis for collec-
tive political action and claims for environmental justice, of the sort undertaken by CEPA and CORIDUP. There is no
direct or necessary relationship between memory and justice, however. Rather, this relationship is contingent and open-
ended, and rooted in personal, situated and embodied experience. It is, in the words of Stuart Hall (1997), a “politics with-
out guarantees”. Indeed, extreme water and soil contamination in Bolivian mining zones has not led to sustained, wide-
spread collective action, for a variety of reasons (not least of which is the miners’ reputation for violence; see Marston &
Perreault, 2017). To be sure, there have been occasional marches and protests, but these efforts have met with limited suc-
cess and residents of rural communities, like Do~ na Lucila, acknowledge that they will never again experience the clean
waters and productive fields they remember from the past.

5 | CONCLUSION
Individual memories, such as those recounted above, are also collective memories in the sense of Halbwachs (1992), who
argued that once narrated, such memories are filtered through cognitive frames informed by present, collectively shared
experience: memories in the group, as opposed to memories of the group (Wertsch, 2009). Though individual in character,
such memories are fundamentally social to the degree that our understandings of the past are filtered through a conceptual
lens shaped by current experiences. Landscapes and the natural environment provide a powerful and emotion-laden medium
for collective experience (e.g., Naguib, 2009; Sultana, 2011). As French (2012, p. 342) states, “the landscape comes to
index the past for those who inhabit it in the present”. This indexing operates in both directions, with present experience
shaping our understanding of the past even as past experiences give meaning to the present (Legg, 2007).
In this paper I have considered the role memory plays in narrating the transformation of landscapes and environments.
In particular, I have examined the way residents of Bolivia’s Huanuni river valley recount memories of flowing waters and
lush, fertile fields uncontaminated by mining waste. Such memories stand in stark contrast to the contemporary reality of
acute water pollution and the toxic sediments and barren landscapes to which it has led. These personal memories also con-
trast with the official and very public memorialisation of mining. Whereas murals and monuments found in cities through-
out the Altiplano represent miners and mining at the centre of the national story, the personal narratives recounted here
represent counter memories that disrupt the “mnemonic hegemony” of official histories (Molden, 2016).
Understandings of water contamination reflect the emotional, experiential and embodied nature of water. In arid and
impoverished regions such as the central Altiplano, people experience water not only through its presence but also, and per-
haps especially, through its absence. The drying of wells and rivers or their severe contamination by mining waste, mark a
landscape of scarcity, want and deprivation for residents of the Huanuni valley. In this context, memory narratives of fertile
landscapes, lush fields and crystalline waters provide a conceptual framework through which people make sense of their
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| PERREAULT

lives, and tell us as much about contemporary lived experience of environmental suffering as about past realities. Whether
such memory narratives form a conceptual basis for collective action aimed at achieving more environmentally just futures,
however, remains an open question.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I owe sincere thanks to Gilberto Pauwels and the personnel of CEPA and CORIDUP for their support of this research.
Thanks also to Keith Richards and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript,
and to audience members in Chapel Hill, Cali, San Pedro de Atacama, Wageningen, Norwich and Boston, whose comments
sharpened my thinking. Most of all, I thank Roman Mamani and Gregoria Chachaki for their warmth and patience. The
usual disclaimers apply.

ENDNOTES
1
Residents of the Huanuni valley are bilingual Quechua- and Spanish-speaking smallholder farmers who typically identify as campesino (peasant)
in terms of socioeconomic class, and originario (“original inhabitant”, similar to “First Nations” in Canada) with regard to their ethnicity. Many
residents are members of the departmental peasant union, and community leaders are designated autoridades originarios (original authorities).
Residents do not refer to themselves as ind
ıgena or indigenous, however, since in Bolivia these terms are typically reserved for lowland (Ama-
zonian and Chaco) peoples. Nevertheless, in this paper I have chosen to use the term “indigenous-campesino” to capture the complex ethnic
and class identity of Andean peoples. I use “indigenous” rather than “original” because of the former’s common usage in the Anglophone aca-
demic literature.
2
The honorifics “Don” (for men) and “Do~ na” (for women) are used for respected elders.
3
The Huanuni river flows into Lake Uru Uru, an artificial lake formed by the creation in the 1950s of a levee on the Desaguadero river,
upstream from shallow and saline Lake Poop o. Lake Poop o itself disappeared in 2015, a result of prolonged drought and increasing regional
temperatures (both likely associated with climate change), in combination with water diversions for mining and irrigation (Casey, 2016; Farth-
ing, 2017; Whitt, 2017). During interviews in 2016, some residents of the Huanuni valley expressed awareness of and concern over Lake
Poopo’s disappearance. Because of their distance from the lake, however, it did not factor into their narratives of environmental change in the
Huanuni valley, and is therefore not considered in my analysis.

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How to cite this article: Perreault T. Mining, meaning and memory in the Andes. Geogr J. 2018;184:229–241.
https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12239