Royal Roads and Entangled Webs: Mining Metals and Making Value in El Cubo, Guanajuato, Mexico

摘要

In this article I study recent struggles in the gold mining town of El Cubo, Guanajuato, Mexico, over what should happen to mining profits. Rather than framing these primarily or only in terms of a chain from production to consumption and periphery to metropole, I explore them as points of intersection, divergent paths, or entangled webs. This knottier perspective, allied to a more expansive theorization of value-making as "the politics of making meaningful difference and making differences meaningful" (as I said in 2013), allows us to see these contests in a new light, as attempts to revalue places close to the mines and people with long-standing connections to those places. By doing this we can recognize the capacities of miners and others in mining communities to create and contest value in the intersections of entangled webs, rather than seeing them only as those left behind in the transfer of value along a commodity chain.