Elizabeth Emma Ferry traces the movement of minerals as they circulate from Mexican mines to markets, museums, and private collections on both sides of the US-Mexico border. She describes how and why these byproducts of ore mining come to be valued by people in various walks of life as scientific specimens, religious offerings, works of art, and luxury collectibles. The story of mineral exploration and trade defines a variegated transnational space, shedding new light on the complex relationship between these two countries and on the process of making value itself.
Elizabeth Emma Ferry traces the movement of minerals as they circulate from Mexican mines to markets, museums, and private collections on both sides of the US-Mexico border. She describes how and why these byproducts of ore mining come to be valued by people in various walks of life as scientific specimens, religious offerings, works of art, and luxury collectibles. The story of mineral exploration and trade defines a variegated transnational space, shedding new light on the complex relationship between these two countries and on the process of making value itself.
Minerals, Collecting, and Value across the US-Mexico Border
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Overview
Elizabeth Emma Ferry traces the movement of minerals as they circulate from Mexican mines to markets, museums, and private collections on both sides of the US-Mexico border. She describes how and why these byproducts of ore mining come to be valued by people in various walks of life as scientific specimens, religious offerings, works of art, and luxury collectibles. The story of mineral exploration and trade defines a variegated transnational space, shedding new light on the complex relationship between these two countries and on the process of making value itself.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253009487 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Series: | Tracking Globalization |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 242 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Elizabeth Emma Ferry is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University. She is author of Not Ours Alone: Patrimony, Value, and Collectivity in Contemporary Mexico and editor (with Mandana Limbert) of Timely Assets: The Politics of Resources and their Temporalities.
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Minerals, Collecting, and Value across the U.S.-Mexico Border
By Elizabeth Emma Ferry
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2013 Elizabeth Emma FerryAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-00948-7
CHAPTER 1
Histories, Mineralogies, Economies
Mexican mineral specimens are surrounded by webs of transactions in which the minerals, museums and other institutions, and U.S. and Mexican miners, dealers, collectors, curators, and scientists all participate. It is impossible to draw clear boundaries between Mexican mineral collecting and mineralogy and the mineral collecting and mineralogy that goes on in other places. Likewise, the boundaries may become blurred among mineralogy and geology, meteoritics (the study of meteors), and paleontology; among collecting minerals, gems, or fossils; or between those who collect ore minerals (those associated with economic ore deposits and extracted as a by-product of ore mining) or gem minerals. For me, this has made the question of what to study and where to stop especially difficult.
What can we learn from limiting the object of study, for analytic purposes, to minerals as agents for making value in and between the United States and Mexico? The transactions surrounding Mexican minerals do specific kinds of work in the world: Through the process by which multiple forms of value are created, minerals help to make other things, such as scientific knowledge, collections, places, and marketplaces. And they make, to some degree, the people and places that participate in science, transnational space, and a stratified mineral economy.
Such a dispersed and weblike object of study has made necessary a particular research strategy, one that is more and more common in anthropology: multisited ethnography. Mineral specimens move, and their value is often determined in multiple places. I have conducted ethnographic and archival research in three countries and many cities, in archives, and on the Internet. At the same time, my methods have been fairly traditional: participant observation, interviewing, and archival research. In this chapter, I describe my four most important field sites—three of these are towns, and many of the activities within them are related to mining and mineral specimens. The fourth site is an institution, and most of my research into it has been archival. Given the role of mineral museums—and the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution, in particular—in making Mexican minerals valuable, I have chosen to treat it as a field site analogous to the other three.
I hope that an understanding of these four sites will do two things: (1) provide the reader with information necessary to understand the chapters that follow, (2) give a sense of some of the specific local experiences in Mexico and the United States in which the valuing of minerals is grounded.
Guanajuato
The city of Guanajuato is the capital of Guanajuato state, located in the center-west region of Mexico (figure 1.1). The city is the seat of the municipio of Guanajuato, which reported a population of 153,364 in the census of 2005 (this includes a number of communities outside the city). Guanajuato is one of the few state capitals in Mexico that is not also the largest and most influential city in the state (nearby León had a population of 1,278,087 in 2005).
The Guanajuato mining district is located in the central part of Guanajuato state. Local legend has it that silver was discovered in Guanajuato in 1548 by muleteers on their way back from Zacatecas (Marmolejo 1988 [1886]). However, the scale of exploitation was relatively small until 1768, when a great bonanza was struck at the Valenciana mine. This discovery transformed the history of the city. Since that time, the Guanajuato district has produced over one billion ounces of silver. David Brading reports that "at the close of the eighteenth century Guanajuato was the leading producer of silver in the world. Its annual output of over 5 million pesos amounted to one-sixth of all American bullion, gold and silver combined, and equaled the entire production of either viceroyalty of Buenos Aires or Peru" (1971:261). The majority of ore is found in the Veta Madre (Mother Lode), a vein system of silver-ore-bearing quartz and calcite that runs 12.9 kilometers from northwest to southeast, ranging from 18 inches to 160 feet wide (Panczner 1987:38–39).
In the second half of the eighteenth century, then, Guanajuato was the leading silver mining center in Latin America, a position it inherited from the mines of Potosí in colonial Peru (in what is now Bolivia) in the sixteenth century and from Zacatecas in the early seventeenth century (Bakewell 1984; Brading 1971). Silver made Guanajuato and the surrounding Bajío region into an engine for global markets and a bustling capitalist system in its own right (Palerm 1980; Tutino 2011). However, the industry was severely damaged in the War of Independence that began in 1810; the mines were abandoned and allowed to flood (Rankine 1992; Ward 1828:441). In 1825, the Valenciana mine was purchased by the Anglo-Mexican Mining Company, which drained the mine and instituted steam power. However, the costs of drainage and the absence of new methods for processing ore inhibited production, and the company shut down in 1848 (Rankine 1992:31). The district revived with the bonanza of the mines of nearby La Luz in the 1840s (Blanco et al. 2000:124; Jáuregui 1996) and again with the advent of cyanide processing in the first years of the twentieth century (Martin 1905; Meyer Cosío 1999; Rickard 1907). U.S. mining companies began to arrive in the last several years of the nineteenth century, and their presence increased dramatically after the arrival of electricity to Guanajuato in 1904. Between 1897 and 1913, about seventy mining companies operated in Guanajuato, the vast majority of them U.S.-owned (Meyer Cosío 1999:101).
In the 1930s, a series of strikes (part of a burgeoning national labor movement and an upsurge of resource-based nationalism) disrupted most of the mining corporations in Guanajuato. In particular, the Guanajuato Reduction and Mines Company, which had been one of the largest companies in the district since 1904, was forced to leave on account of low silver prices, declining yields, and a series of strikes. The company ceded the holdings to the workers in lieu of its debts. In June 1939, the workers, formerly organized as Section 4 of the National Miners' Union, reorganized as a producers' cooperative, the Sociedad Cooperativa Minero-Metalúrgica Santa Fe de Guanajuato (hereafter "the Santa Fe Cooperative").
The Santa Fe Cooperative operated from 1939 to 2005, when it sold most of its surface holdings to a Canadian company, Great Panther Resources (now Great Panther Silver), Limited, through a Mexican partner, El Rosario. During its rollercoaster life, the cooperative went from penury and crisis in the 1940s (when an engineer from Mexico City was brought in to run it), slow stasis in the 1950s–1970s, and a boom period in the 1980s, when the price of silver skyrocketed from US$8 to US$50 an ounce (Ferry 2005b; Jáuregui 1985).
Along with the cooperative, two other companies operated in Guanajuato: the locally owned and managed El Cubo Mining Company and the Grupo Guanajuato projects owned by Peñoles, one of Mexico's largest mining corporations. Peñoles came to the city in the 1960s and operated a number of mines through the 1990s, largely with contract labor. During the 1990s, when I was doing field research on the cooperative, silver prices were low (between US$4 and US$7 an ounce) and the future of mining appeared grim. Many men were leaving the city to work on contract for mines in the north of Mexico or to migrate to the United States.
Precious metals prices have skyrocketed over the past decade, particularly since 2005. The yearly averages for silver and gold in 2000 were US$4.95 and US$271.04, respectively; in 2005, they were US$7.32 and US$444.74, and in 2012, US$31.15 and US$1668.98.
These price rises mean that exploration for, and mining of, gold and silver have sharply risen the world over, and in Mexico in particular. In Mexico, mining has been dominated in recent years by Canadian companies. Although no complete list of Canadian mining projects currently operating in Mexico exists, there are certainly several hundred at various stages of exploration and production. Great Panther is one of dozens of "junior" mining companies operating in Mexico. Junior companies are relatively smaller than giants such as Newmont, BHP Billiton, and Gold-corp, and junior companies depend to a greater extent on investment and venture capital.
Since 2005, Great Panther has restructured the workforce, only about 20 percent of whom are former cooperative members (according to sources within the company). The company has also brought many workers in from outside Guanajuato. It has rebuilt many parts of the central plants and recapitalized the mines. The company website reports that the Guanajuato mine complex milled 144,000 metric tons of ore and produced 1,019,856 ounces of Ag (silver) and 6,619 ounces of Au (gold) in 2010 (Great Panther Silver Ltd. n.d.).
Guanajuato is one of two sites wholly owned by Great Panther (though, in keeping with Mexican law, the rights to exploit subsoil resources are not owned outright but are leased from the federal government). In the past few years, the company has also carried out exploration in Chihuahua, Chihuahua; Mapimí, Durango; San Antonio, Chihuahua; and the Sierra de Santa Rosa, Guanajuato.
Great Panther has been criticized in Guanajuato for refusing to pay out the yearly 10 percent profit shares required by Mexican law for illegal dumping of mine tailings into a local reservoir and for poor safety conditions. In this respect, it has not received as much criticism as AuRico (formerly Gammon Gold), which operated the El Cubo mine until 2012. El Cubo was on strike for nine months in 2009–2010 to protest ten-hour workdays and the failure to pay profit shares (the company claimed a lack of profit at the El Cubo mine).
Minerals of Guanajuato
In the words of a group of mineralogists, specialists in the Guanajuato district:
The mines of the Guanajuato district in Mexico are well known to collectors for producing fabulous specimens of silver sulfides and sulfosalts, calcite and amethyst. The district has been in nearly continuous production since its discovery in 1548, and has had a total silver production in excess of 40,000 metric tons. The district is dominated by three major northwest-trending vein systems: the La Luz (the western side of the district), the Veta Grande (home to the Rayas, Valenciana and Cata mines) and the Veta Sierra (the eastern extent of the district, and home to the Peregrina and Santa Catarina mines).... The ore is in quartz/calcite veins controlled by northwest-trending faults, and in large stockworks.... The veins are rich in a suite of sulfides that include pyrite, sphalerite, tetrahedrite, arsenopyrite and cinnabar in addition to the silver mineralization. (Francis et al. 1999)
In lay terms, this means that as miners drill and blast for silver and gold ore, they dislodge quartz, calcite, and other gangue minerals (i.e., non-economic minerals that surround ore minerals in the veins) as well as silver-bearing minerals such as acanthite, pyrargyrite, polybasite, stephanite, and others (some of which are very rare). Miners (especially drillers) can then gather up the loose minerals or work them free with a crowbar. Miners then keep them for their own uses, give them away, or sell them, usually first to others who work in or near the mine who have dedicated themselves to building commercial networks.
The cheaper minerals, especially white quartz, amethyst, calcite, and pyrite, are sold to tourists on the grounds of the mines, at the swanky Hotel Santa Cecilia, and near the Mercado Hidalgo in the city center. These are usually sold on an occasional basis and do not form part of long-term commercial relationships between buyers and sellers (though some calcites and quartzes can also sell for higher prices to more discriminating buyers). They may cost anywhere from 20 to 200 pesos (US$1.80 to US$18.00, approximately) per specimen, and they are usually intended to be used as souvenirs or decorative objects.
The silver minerals tend to bring higher prices. These are usually not sold publicly, but through personal trade networks, often with the financial backing of dealers from the United States. In contrast to the cheaper gangue minerals, sales are usually part of business arrangements that may last for months or years. Minerals have been sold in Guanajuato since at least the late nineteenth century. The mineral collector Ponciano Aguilar recorded prices of minerals from the San Carlos mine beginning in the 1880s. Because he was the mine superintendent, it seems logical to suppose that he bought these minerals from the miners. However, the popularity of minerals as tourist souvenirs dates from the development of Guanajuato as a tourist destination in the years up to and following World War II. A merchant known as Santitos set up a stand near the Plaza San Roque in the 1930s; he is reported to have been the first to sell minerals in a regular way. During the 1960s–1980s, many merchants sold minerals (and other tourist goods) near the bus station on the Avenida Juárez. When the bus station was moved to the outskirts of town in the early 1990s, this trade began to die down.
However, over the second half of the twentieth century, as in other Mexican mining localities, a small but enduring network of mineral dealers and suppliers developed. George Griffiths of Gómez Palacio traveled periodically to Guanajuato with his wife, as did some other North American dealers. In the 1990s, Christopher Tredwell, a British auto executive living in the city of Irapuato, not far from Guanajuato, obtained permission to enter the cooperative mines and self-collect, as well as to purchase specimens from miners. His collection was eventually sold to the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the University of Arizona Mineral Museum.
As a prominent silver locality, Guanajuato attracts the attention of silver collectors, who are a faithful group, on the whole. These collectors may seek either native silver (in its elemental form) or compounds that include silver (e.g., pyrargyrite, stephanite). Because they come from a "classic" locality, Guanajuato specimens continue to have an appeal. Specimens from there typically cost in the hundreds rather than the thousands of dollars depending on a host of characteristics, such as species, form, size, and so on. Just to give some exemplary prices for Guanajuato minerals, in February 2011, one could find for sale at various dealers' websites a calcite and pyrargyrite specimen (8.5×6×2.5 centimeter) for US$750, an amethyst and calcite specimen (6.8×4.7×3.1 centimeter) for US$50, a thumbnail stephanite piece (10 mm long) for US$500 and an acanthite specimen (of unspecified size) for US$1,250. (One can see here that the amethyst piece is much cheaper than the specimens with silver minerals—as would be true for stephanite and amethyst from anywhere else as well.)
Tucson, Arizona
The new visitor to Tucson notices first its topography (figure 1.2). The city is flat in the center, with rows and columns of streets with stucco houses, low to the ground, and fronted by grass or cactus gardens. The richer part of town is to the north of the city in the foothills. Driving north on one of the avenues such as Swan or Craycroft, one passes many winding roads that snake further into the hills, often with a sign at the entrance discouraging those who do not live there or know anyone who does. These roads meander like rivers to low ranch-style houses sprinkled through the hills, punctuated by neighborhood watch association signs. Many have gardens with cacti and bougainvillea. There are a few scrub trees but little real shade, unless you happen to be a lizard.
Many of the interviews I had with collectors and dealers in Tucson took place in these neighborhoods, in the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains. For one interview, I drove into a neighborhood whose streets were all named after missions founded by the Jesuit priest Father Eusebio Kino in the seventeenth century: Tubutama, Caborca, Busanic, Sonoyta, Imuris, Cocóspera. Of the nine missions that Kino founded, two are in Arizona (San Xavier del Bac and Tucumarori) and the others are all in the state of Sonora, Mexico. The mapping of both Arizonan and Sonoran place-names to an Arizona neighborhood exemplifies one aspect of the twinned, but also intensely unequal, relationship between Arizona and Sonora.
The current state of Arizona occupies the northern part of the territory known in the colonial period as la Pimería Alta (Upper Pima region), which was taken over by the Spanish in the middle of the sixteenth century. Father Kino, who established missions in the Gila River Valley in the late seventeenth century, noted the presence of mineral resources in the area (Raymer 1935:123), and there were small-scale mines in the early nineteenth century, but mining exploration only began in earnest in the middle of the nineteenth century, during the California Gold Rush and just after the United States gained a vast swath of land in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Minerals, Collecting, and Value across the U.S.-Mexico Border by Elizabeth Emma Ferry. Copyright © 2013 Elizabeth Emma Ferry. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Making Value and U.S.-Mexican Space
1. Histories, Mineralogies, Economies
2. Shifting Stones: Mineralogy and Mineral Collecting in Mexico and the United States
3. Making Scientific Value
4. Mineral Collections and Their Minerals: Building Up U.S.-Mexican Transnational Spaces
5. Making Places in Space: Miners and Collectors in Guanajuato and Tucson
6. Mineral Marketplaces, Arbitrage, and the Production of Difference
Conclusion
Appendix: Sources and Methods
Notes
References
Index
What People are Saying About This
An exciting new contribution to sociocultural anthropology, one that is strongly ethnographic and richly analyzed . . . . Will make a major and important contribution to the literature on how value is created.
What makes things valuable? In this imaginative study of mineral mining and collecting, Elizabeth Ferry takes us from an incidental economy in central Mexico to the high reaches of scientific and aesthetic collecting in the United States. In the first, minerals are ancillary finds in the search for ores; in the second, minerals are expensive markers of taste and erudition. In the first, a miner brings minerals to his doctor's secretary to "smooth the way," or he places them on an altar to the saints. In the second, a dealer makes his minerals "pristine" by erasing all traces of their procurement and photographing them as if floating on air. Between the two, value is remade in the production and performance of difference. There is something to learn here for all students and scholars of value, commodities, and the traffic across nations.
An outstanding ethnographic account of the extraction and international circulation of mineral specimens that is sure to be of interest to a broad readership.