The Atacama Mining Desert as a Landscape of Enrichment, Migration, and Geopolitics
The Atacama Desert in Chile is a store of mineral resources that has been emptied over centuries-long booms of silver, saltpeter and copper mining and which, for decades now, is being emptied ever more rapidly. At the same time, it is a perpetually growing archive of societal pasts. Its extreme dryness and salty soil conditions ensure the preservation of objects and bodies. Histories, often phantasmal, build up in the desert too. “Atacama Desert, you have accumulated saltpeter mines and have kept their walls and iron / Here both everything and nothing under the sun remained / Despite all the light / everything is cold like an ice floe.” These lyrics come from “Canto a las Salitreras,” a long poem about the Atacama Desert as a store of raw materials. Why these deserted saltpeter mines?
The German chemical industry’s synthesis of ammonium nitrate at the beginning of the twentieth century destroyed the Chilean nitrate industry by the mid-1950s. As a consequence, the ruins of some 170 saltpeter mines remain scattered across the landscape. This ghostly presence of past life fits with the Fata Morgana mirages often thematized in Atacama sources and stories, and it fits with the forgotten or covert histories of national and international political persecution in the desert. The history of the Atacama Desert is filled with such entangled phenomena.
The dual framing of the Atacama Desert as a store of raw materials and as an archive makes it possible for us to reconstruct societal actions in extreme environments. Joining science and technology studies to social history, this project explores the geological, political, and geopolitical knowledge of people who lived in the Atacama Desert—people who migrated there and joined the indigenous labor force en masse, making a living in an unlivable region, and engaging in politics there too.
The research project is supported by existing studies in Chilean history. On the one hand, it profits from the flourishing anthropological microstudies on mining communities, among others, in northern Chile. On the other, it draws on their macrohistorical counterparts, that is, on geopolitical and international relations studies centered on raw materials. The project’s results will be presented in essays.
