Border Environments 2020 Conference – September-November

Taking the Anthropocene Beyond the Earth: on La Compañía, by Verónica Gerber Bicecci – Matías B. Oviedo

Taking the Anthropocene Beyond the Earth: on La Compañía, by Verónica Gerber Bicecci

Verónica Gerber Bicecci’s La Compañía (2019) is an unusual book in two parts: the first

is a graphic novel that rewrites Amparo Dávila’s short story “El huésped” against a background of

photographs of the former mines around Nuevo Mercurio in Zacatecas, Mexico. We will focus

here on the second part: a series of 100 fragments from a variety of sources collected by the author

that tell the story of the emergence, peak, and aftermath of the extraction of mercury in the area.

The text shows an acute environmental awareness and a significant part of it focuses on the health

and ecological consequences of both the mining industry and the subsequent repurposing of the

abandoned mines into toxic waste dumping grounds. The most original aspect about the

environmental awareness that can be found in La Compañía is that which is less obviously so. I

say this without intention of dismissing the urgent health concerns for the living beings in and

around the Nuevo Mercurio mining system, this is not the issue I would like to raise here, for

Gerber’s book does so more effectively than I ever could. What interests me here is how the text

points to redefining what we understand as “environment.” As Olson & Messerie have point out,

the discourse around the Anthropocene presses downward and “its cosmos is terrestrial” (35).

As we know, extractivism is how the Anthropocene makes itself present in Latin America

(De la Cadena and Blaser), a practice that in Nuevo Mercurio adopts the form of an enclave

economy that renders the local population expendable. From Gerber’s most recent work (Otro

día…(poemas sintéticos) [2017], La máquina distópica [2018], La Compañía [2019], and En el

ojo de Bambi [2020]), one can gather that she is interested in exploring matters of scale both in

space and in time. It is the former that this paper is occupied with; where I propose to think about

Nuevo Mercurio as an interplanetary borderland, as a place that makes it evident that we need to

think about the Anthropocene beyond the Earth, and the Earth in its interactions with

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Taking the Anthropocene Beyond the Earth: on La Compañía, by Verónica Gerber Bicecci – Matías B. Oviedo

extraterrestrial forces. As such, I hold that La Compañía points to the need for rethinking what

boundaries and environments are, and how we define them.

The launch of Sputnik into outer space in October of 1957 opened a two-way channel of

interaction between our planet and outer space. Ever since, a steady growth in space activity has

meant that there are currently nearly 20,000 artificial objects orbiting our planet (Orbital Debris

Quarterly). After space exploration, the idea of the Earth as an enclosed environment no longer

became viable (if it ever was). Considering only over 2,000 of those objects are active satellites,

the rest is space junk that occasionally reenters the atmosphere. This has led some scholars to talk

about a new geological layer circling our planet (Parikka), while others have argued that outer

space deserves attention as a natural force in human history (Rand). In addition to this, there is a

prevalent understanding of the Anthropocene that is “overdetermined by anthropic relations with

inner environment and underdetermined by anthropic relations with outer environment” (Olson &

Messerie 29). Considering these points, I will argue that the Anthropocene should not be

understood in isolation from outer space, not only because “[t]he Sun, Moon, and electromagnetic

environment shape and drive the climate of the Earth” (Gorman 90), but because of the human

ecological footprint on them. As Clark (2005) argues, terrestrial and extraterrestrial processes are

inevitably intertwined, and this is something that Gerber’s work grapples with.

While examining the immediate environmental effects of the mining industry and its

aftermaths, La Compañía traces the recent and deep history of meteorite impacts in the Nuevo

Mercurio area. The first instance of this is an inclusion of a map of the state of Zacatecas indicating

the location of the impacts. The map shows that the higher concentration of these is in the northeast

of the state, where Nuevo Mercurio is located.

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Taking the Anthropocene Beyond the Earth: on La Compañía, by Verónica Gerber Bicecci – Matías B. Oviedo

Images in the book are often coupled with text on the opposite page, and such is the case

of the map, which is preceded by a passage from a conversation between the author and Bernardo

del Hoyo, a chronicler and meteorite collector, where he underlines that Nuevo Mercurio is

emplaced on a meteoric impact, and the extracted mercury is of meteoric origin. His testimony

links the recent history of resource extraction with the deep time of cosmic activity that shaped our

planet.

There are two other mentions of meteorite impact in the book. The second one pertains to

the last impact the region has seen:

Fall: 15th December 1978.

Early in the evening, a bolide visible over a radius of at least 200 km exploded with
thunderous detonations over north-central Mexico, scattering meteorites over an
elliptical area more than 10 km in length just north of the village of Nuevo Mercurio
(140).
The layout of the passage reminds of a journal entry, carefully recording time, place, and nature

of the events. Its tone differs significantly from the testimony of a former miner, who describes

the moment of entry and impact in a later fragment: “Como que se quemaba arriba, había una

bolota de lumbre. Sí, en el cielo. Fue todavía temprano. De repente como que explotó. Se oyó.

Empezaron a verse luces por todos lados” (143). The miner also describes how the impact attracted

interest from the scientific community and how the locals were prevented from visiting the sites

of interest: “Primero no querían que agarráramos ni una piedra ni nada. Hasta que ellos terminaran

de estudiarla” (143).

After the discovery of mercury deposits in the 1930s and the beginning of its exploitation

in the following decade, Nuevo Mercurio became “the most productive mercury district in Mexico,

and one of the most productive in the Western Hemisphere” (105). During World War II “Mercury

was one of the seven original metals designated as strategic” (119), and “virtually all of Mexico’s

mercury output [was] exported.” (ibid.). Tied to international demand, its price sank after the war

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Taking the Anthropocene Beyond the Earth: on La Compañía, by Verónica Gerber Bicecci – Matías B. Oviedo

and again in 1962. Nuevo Mercurio finds itself at a nodal point where transnational actors and

interests come directly in play and define key aspects of its (under)development over time. The

locals never see any benefits from the abundance except for a handful of landowners and

government officials: all the industry brings to the region is fleeting employment, uneven

development, and the long-lasting health problems that are a consequence of both the mercury

itself and the toxic waste that replaces it once it has been extracted. Given that the mercury found

in the area is of meteoric origin, one could say that the outermost exterior (the extraterrestrial) is a

constitutive mineral part of the local environment, showing that the alien and the local are already

intertwined.

If the debates around the Anthropocene have brought about discussions around the

boundaries between the human and nonhuman, nature and culture, the humanities and sciences,

among others, those separating the terrestrial from the extraterrestrial have not been among them.

The Earth seems to be the firm and unquestionable grounding of the Anthropocene, a concept that

is being deployed “in ways that privilege downward, inward, and spherically enclosed terra- and

anthropocentric understandings of what counts as environment” (Olson and Messerie 29). I

contend here that Gerber’s project destabilizes this by turning her point of view outward, and she

does so in a twofold manner: outside of the planet and outside the modern subject. I say this

because of how the narrative is laid out, which takes the concept of “polyphony” (Bakhtin) to a

whole different level. She incorporates a plurality of voices and fades her own away, thereby

adopting a role that is closer to that of a curator than that of an author. In an almost ethnographic

exercise, she listens to the protagonists and it is these other voices that tell the story; Gerber’s

intervention is repurposed to her research and to creating a path for the reader to follow. In the first

part of the book, her role is similarly diverted from an author to that of a rewriter. In so doing, she

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Taking the Anthropocene Beyond the Earth: on La Compañía, by Verónica Gerber Bicecci – Matías B. Oviedo

does not appropriate the others’ voices but gives them a new context and legibility. By having her

own voice disappear into the background, a form of plural authorship emerges that decenters the

modern subject as a subject of authority, replacing it with a method that allows the emergence of

the common.

One can read Gerber’s work as part of a larger “planetary turn” in contemporary Latin

American that signals to a combination of recuperating atavistic and novel forms of engaging outer

space and its outer environment as a crucial part of the cosmos. I am thinking here of examples

like Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010) and Nona Fernández’s Voyager (2020),

which grapple with entanglements of deep time, personal and collective memory, and space

research. Through Gerber’s work, the planetary scale encounters outer space, blurring the

distinction between inner and outer environment. If read as a narrative of the end of the world,

Gerber’s end of the world marks the beginning of the planetary.

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Taking the Anthropocene Beyond the Earth: on La Compañía, by Verónica Gerber Bicecci – Matías B. Oviedo

Works cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Clark, Nigel. “Ex-Orbitant Globality.” Theory, Culture & Society, vol. 22, no. 5, Oct. 2005, pp.

165–85.

Gerber Bicecci, Verónica. La Compañía. Almadía, 2019.

Gorman, Alice Claire. “The Anthropocene in the Solar System.” Journal of Contemporary

Archaeology, vol. 1, no. 1, Aug. 2014, pp. 87–91.

Olson, Valerie, and Lisa Messeri. “Beyond the Anthropocene: Un-Earthing an Epoch.”

Environment and Society, vol. 6, no. 1, Jan. 2015, pp. 28–47.

Orbital Debris Quarterly, vol. 24, no. 1, Feb. 2020.

Rand, Lisa Ruth. “Falling Cosmos: Nuclear Reentry and the Environmental History of Earth

Orbit.” Environmental History, vol. 24, no. 1, Jan. 2019, pp. 78–103.

Parikka, Jussi. A Geology of Media. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.