On January 16, 2021, we traveled to Salaverna, Mexico, to walk on the rubbles of progress left by North American mining companies. Salaverna is part of the municipality of Mazapil. It has been popular since 2009 mainly because Peñasquito Newmont, formerly GoldCorp, one of the largest mines in Latin America, was built there and because in 2016, Salaverna began to disappear after the operations of the company Ocampo Mining, formerly known as Frisco Tayahua.1
Since the Spanish invasion in 1549, this town has been attractive to foreign companies: It has large quantities of gold, silver, zinc, copper and, nowadays, lithium: the raw material for the batteries of technological devices such as cell phones and military intelligence that power the energy transition in the Global North.2
For journalist Elena Reina, the violence experienced by Mazapil communities put it on top of the nation’s most insecure places during the past two years.3 This is not only due to drug trafficking and the cartel war, as Felipe Calderón, former president of Mexico, and his successor Enrique Peña Nieto, contended but due to violent practices inherited from military interventions in Central America.4
These practices turned Salaverna into an insecure and expendable space, suitable to satisfy the demands of accelerated consumerism serviced by extraction of natural resources.5
Salaverna is located on a high plateau north of Zacatecas. The region attracts both the interests of private and state sectors due to its rich territorial surface, sparse population and distance from governmental institutions.
It is located 170 miles from the capital of Zacatecas, equivalent to traveling three hours by car on the federal highway 54, a route that leads to the north of San Luis Potosí, Coahuila, Saltillo, and Monterrey. This highway has earned the nickname of the “mineral corridor” due to its importance in extracting and exporting minerals. It’s positioned as one of the country’s most important producers of precious metals. At the same time, it has been the scene of the expansive violence that the country is experiencing and of the migratory flow of those who leave Central America and the Caribbean to get closer to the border with the United States, mounted in the train wagons from Tapachula.
Foreigners are often surprised by the two enormous operating enclaves when they enter Mazapil. One is the yellow cloud caused by rock grinding and crushing works. Like a destructive mist, it covers the few constructions that converge on a cluster of small houses in a new neighborhood.
Another is the vehicles that go around the detour towards the church, as well as those parked at the foot of the road and near the Monument to the Miner, built by the company GoldCorp as one of their first gifts for the local people.
Salaverna appears on Google Maps but it is impossible to access it by car; the only way is on foot. Although in 2021 the GPS still showed the streets and houses, in our latest territorial exploration the same year we only found rubble.
One of the many vans without a license plate that circulated in the locality blocked our entrance. A man came out of the vehicle in a hurry, stood on the road, and with signs, told us to turn around. Intrigued, Joel asked him:
“Where is Salaverna?”
The subject, annoyed, replied: “Down there: where you can see the new houses.”
“But the GPS shows me that Nueva Salaverna is there and that the route to Salaverna is through dirt roads.”
“Listen to me,” the man insisted, “if you don’t want to fall into a hole and come out dead.”
For the journalist Jesús Lemus, the territories in dispute between the legitimate local owners and the mining companies are usually guarded by what are known as “hawks.”6 They monitor the transit of people on foot or on vehicles. At first, we refused to believe the power of the informal surveillance in this extractive territory. Later, as we drove the vehicle to the plaza, we understood that this surveillance is very similar to what Lemus describes in his book “México a cielo abierto”: two trucks escorted us into what is left of the place.
Although Mazapil is one of the places with the most significant wealth of New Spain chronicles on the extraction of minerals in Mexico, the constant migratory flow has made it difficult to preserve this cultural archives. The people’s mobility is based on their mining roots: most highland communities were founded under the promise of enrichment.7
As soon as the resource was depleted, the settlers moved to a nearby site that promised prosperity. More than an emotional attachment to living in a house permanently, the roots of its inhabitants are linked to the same extractive activity. This is how the underground mines of Refugio, Providencia were founded in 1600, and later Salaverna, Terminal, Bonanza, Aranzazú. Settlements that for more than four hundred years have been populated/depopulated and their identity reduced to a ghost town. An attractive concept for foreign private capital because the owners or heirs are absent to negotiate for the acquisition of their properties.
Another factor in the disappearance of historiographical sources is that “entire archives of Zacatecas were bought at very low prices by North American universities,” as the academic Arturo Burnes writes.8
Claudia and Guillermo, two local archivists, showed up on time. They greeted us from the corner of the street. We suggested driving in a single car to the Peñasquito mine, but Claudia pointed to a group of young people who had been watching us. It was better to travel in a group, very close together, she suggested, so they would recognize us as friends of the historical archive’s workers. We don’t want to be perceived as a threat, but as friends of the people that live and respect the rules of a system that orders and monitors interactions in that area.
We headed to a rough road bound for San Juan de los Cedros. Heavy machinery circulates there: mining dump trucks, trailers, more trucks without license plates. On the left side of the highway, copper colored hills stand out, mounds of rocks with no economic value for mining tailings also known as “tepetateras”. They have been uprooted from the earth to distort the original landscape, separated from the remains that will go to the sulfide flotation plant, and deposited on mountains that form a wall that divides the town from the mining complex.
Since we tracked the Zacatecas mines on Google Maps, Peñasquito Newmont was the one that caught our interest. In a figurative way, it is a huge canvas made up of a box of gray and turquoise colors in the lower left corner and the two conical-shaped holes with an elliptical profile on the surface.
Seen from the GPS, they seem more like an abstract painting by Manuel Felguérez than a stain indexing environmental degradation. Those holes, more than 2 thousand feet deep, are like God’s fingers buried in hundreds of acres, where mountain cattle could live before, where magueys, nopaleras, and pines were erected, and bushes grew.
“Why do you live in Mazapil?”- We asked Claudia and Guillermo the day we contacted them, which only happened when the phone signal allowed it (there’s usually none for weeks or even months). They told us that the conditions in which they found the Francisco de Urdiñola archive forced them to stay longer with their own resources and to later apply for a scholarship from the National Fund for Culture and the Arts. If there was no intervention, between the humidity and the archives, more than four hundred years of history of this highland would be lost.
For decades, the land value in Mazapil has been influenced by mining companies and public servants. The archivists assert that changing this requires the retrieval of memories and passing them on to those who have relinquished or sold their properties. They also emphasize that recovering and sharing this information with the new generations will aid in fostering a genuine understanding of the land’s true value.
Their project has been a relentless battle. The biggest enemy of history is the Chronicler himself: “At the beginning it was a stubborn fight from Don Pedro”, that’s how Guillermo calls him. “He believed that his function was to favor mining companies and the mayor Gregorio Macías Zúñiga. He denied them access to the documents when they asked him to help rescue the museum’s archives and hire paleographers to make copies and catalog them for academic consultation.
For archivists the role of a chronicler is fundamental. His task is to preserve, protect and disseminate the history of towns and municipalities. However, “the activities that Don Pedro is known for are promoting the good works of the mining company to the community,” explained Claudia.
In front of a rocky terrain, where a barbed wire separated us from the enormous Peñasquito mining complex, Guillermo told us that it is better to climb on the roof of the vehicles to have a better view. I planted my foot firmly on the fender, climbed onto the truck box, on the roof. Once standing up, I raised my face and looked at where the craters were. My face contorted in disbelief: where are the mountains that we saw on Google Earth?, Where is the winding path, covered with pine trees, that you can discover with your steps? Joel also climbed on the roof once it was free. In his eyes I saw Vallejo’s Black Heralds.9
The Peñasquito mining complex is huge, disgustingly big. Literary language falls short when trying to depict the geographical, environmental and social disaster that it is causing. ‘There are blows in life, so powerful . . . I don’t know! Blows as from God’s hatred/They are few; but they are . . . They open dark furrows’, we remember the words of César Vallejo.
Open pit mega-mining is more profitable than underground. It completely crushes the hills, the mountains, the valleys. The spaces where life existed are reduced to enormous concavities of hundreds of acres, because the explorations conducted by engineers announced the findings of large amounts of minerals that can be used in the grinding and leaching processes.
This geography of disaster is similar to the spaces devastated by high-tech weapon wars. In 2020, the novelist Cristina Rivera Garza introduced in her book The Autobiography of Cotton10 the word “terricide”, a term that Stuart Elden uses in Progressive Geographies to refer to the annihilation of the earth.11 Wars against nature always take place away from public scrutiny. They are silent, slow, they do not appear in the newspapers but they arise in the tectonic layers of the earth.12
At the entrance of Las Majadas we found Roberto de la Rosa. Claudia had already arranged an interview with him. The man is around seventy years old, thin, with features marked by the sun and hard as the rocks of the highland. That afternoon he was wearing blue working clothes, a straw hat, and a red bandana around his neck. Without wasting time, he told us to follow him. He took us along the main path of Salaverna. On the pavement we saw marks from the caterpillars of the backhoes, like the writing of the disaster on the ground. The markings ended in a red building where people used to wait for the bus to other towns. There were roof sheets, adobes and rocks covered by dry grass on the sides. We walked with caution because the grass hid the huge mining holes that were opened when Ocampo Mining, a company with Mexican capital, used explosives to throw people out of their homes.
Don Roberto told us about the latest perforations created by the most recent detonations and about the diesel vents that the engineers have installed all over the hill, until he stopped and pointed to a house that still had rooms. The dirt road to get to it had ditches. We walked cautiously to enter the patio.
Don Roberto walked to the main entrance, a metal door. He looked trough the windows, took a step back, and explained that he hadn’t been there since the house began to collapse due to the detonations.
“Do you still have things here, Don Beto?” asked Guillermo
“Only a big part of my life, boy,” replied the farmer.
While Joel was looking at the door, I took some pictures. I was interested in capturing the atmosphere of destruction around the houses, the adobes and cement, as well as the cracked floors. Anyone could say that we were on top of a bombarded city.
Suddenly the farmer startled us: he kicked the door energetically, the hard sole of his boots collided with the metal; he tried to force the lock.
“I hadn’t been here since the night of the big bang”, he breathed in and kicked again, “when I passed by, I’d turn around and continue my way. I have a little piece of land down there; I built another house with some of the debris left,” he told us.
Don Roberto forces the lock after three kicks. Coldness, a smell of oblivion, escaped from the inside and slapped us. As soon as we entered, we discovered a painting of The Last Supper on the wall in front of us,, next to it a crack ran across the kitchen ceiling, the piece of furniture that could be seen behind the broken window was a crockery unit filled with smashed glassware, plastic containers and pewter pots. The stones detached from the dining room wall were on the floor, that wall had an opening of more than a foot, revealing the rocks and the adobes of the construction like a resistant spine.
We heard weird footsteps, they were Don Roberto’s boots walking to the kitchen, a small room where there still is a wood stove on the sooty wall and a table where they prepared food, on another wall there was a calendar with the date of December 2016, the month in which they fled to the streets to escape death inside their homes.
On the floor there were saucepans, a television antenna next to an even bigger crack that, like a snake, slithered to the floor of another room, a bedroom where there was still a bed with blankets, a nightstand and clothes.
They thought it was an earthquake and they ran to the kitchen. When they thought it was over, the earthquakes emerged again from the ground. Cracks appeared on the floor, ceiling and walls, as if reminding the residents that they’d made a bad decision by not exchanging, during the negotiations with the representatives of the mining company Frisco Tayahua, their lands for a house on commodatum in Nueva Salaverna.
What would we do if we lose, overnight, the house where we work, the house that we have built with the effort of years? What does it mean to lose your home?
“A house”, says Antonia Melo, “is like planting a tree”: what one does is to put down roots that sink to the heart of the earth.13 What can you do when those roots do not have the strength to resist the blade of the excavators that demolish everything? What can you do with the ruined pieces?
As we walked downhill, and got around the clefts in the road, we stopped. It was difficult to imagine what used to be there, where we were stepping on at that moment. If we hadn’t met Don Roberto, we wouldn’t have understood that in front of us the mounds of stone, wood, metal arches, and tree branches were the remains of the school and the church. From that point, wherever one looked, all that remained of Salaverna was a broken shadow on the ground in the form of rubble.
How do we know if an area degraded by mining is also a place transformed into a total disaster? How to get the living roots of its past out of the rubble to root them in the present? Can stories be built from rubble? Can you plant trees from stories, build houses, schools, a church? And from those constructions built with words, can you bring back the vanished population so Salaverna can re-emerge?
: :
Endnotes
- Grecia Eugenia Sánchez, “El proceso de acumulación por despojo minero en Salaverna Mazapil”, MSc diss., Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, 2017.
- Alfredo Valadez, Minería, Cinco siglos de saqueo (Zacatecas: Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas y La Jornada, 2013), 247.
- Elena Reina, “Zacatecas, la tierra donde casi nadie se siente a salvo,” El País, Abril 19, 2022, https://elpais.com/mexico/2022-04-19/zacatecas-la-tierra-donde-casi-nadie-se-siente-a-salvo.html.
- Dawn Paley, Drug War Capitalism (EUA: AK Press, 2014), 288.
- Gastón R. Gordillo, Rumble, The Afterlife of Destruction (USA: Duke University Press, 2014), 330.
- Jesús Lemus, México a cielo abierto (Ciudad de México: Penguin Random House, 2018), 360.
- Sergio Uribe, “Salaverna (Mexico): a Conflict Between Territorial Spoil and Mining Root in Population,” Revista Iberoamericana de Viticultura Agroindustria y Ruralidad, vol. 3, núm. 10, (Enero 2017): 92-109.
- Arturo Burnes, La minería en la historia de la economía de Zacatecas(1546-1876) (Zacatecas: El arco y la Lira,1984), 2015-19.
- César Vallejo, The black heralds and other poems, trans. Valentino Gianuzzi & Michael Smith (United Kingdom: Shearsman Books Ltd , 2007), 33-23.
- Cristina Rivera, Autobiografía del algodón (Ciudad de México: Penguin Random House, 2020), 316-281.
- Stuart Elden, “Terricide, Progressive geographies” (blog), Mayo 1, 2013, https://progressivegeographies.com/
- Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 368.
- Eliane Brum, “El día que expulsaron a la casa de casa”, El País, Septiembre 15, 2015, https://elpais.com/internacional/2015/09/15/actualidad/1442323716_734126.html
Flor Cervantes
Joel Flores