Documentary Mines
Nicolás Campisi
Abstract
In Valeria Luiselli's "Agua negra (Fragmento del ensayo sonoro Echoes from the Borderlands)", a chorus of women's voices traces parallels between the history of copper mining and the violence against the female body through the invention of the intrauterine contraceptive device, or IUD. The family of women is led by a mother who tells the story of her visit to a copper mine in Bisbee, Arizona, and her subsequent realization that the IUD that she harbors inside of her body has turned her into "una mina excavada, empinada, erosionada en espirales" (Luiselli 2020: 135). The mother is frequently interrupted by "Hermana 1", who puts together a genealogy of the IUD that reveals its entanglement with the enslavement of women, anti-Semitism, and the dispossession of communal territories, and "Sobrina 1" who declares that "La minera es una forma de acumulacin, para algunos, y de despojo, para todos los dems" (Luiselli 2020: 131). Other voices include that of "Sobrina 2" who recalls US interventionism in the coup against Salvador Allende following the nationalization of Chile's copper mines, the voice of Northern Cheyenne activist Tia Oros Peters, and the collective voice of a "Coro" that denounces the actions of the "seores" who enlarge their bank accounts on the back of women's labor. The choral voices of Luiselli's "Agua negra" set up a space for reclaiming a body and a territory in which to exist, as well as the interdependence of one with the other at a time when nature and culture are being conjured as separate entities by large-scale extractive enterprises.