Minerals, Collecting, and Value across the US-Mexico Border

4. Mineral Collections and Their Minerals: Building Up U.S.-Mexican Transnational Spaces

4 Mineral collections—intentionally assembled groups of minerals held out of economic exchange and manifesting exemplarity, aesthetics, or some other value—are sites where interactions and transactions between Mexico and the United States are especially densely clustered. Furthermore, the intentional character of collections brings a self-conscious quality to these interactions and transactions. This is particularly true of “Mexican mineral collections,” that is, those that purposefully focus on minerals originally found in Mexico, either freestanding or as parts of larger collections . Collections are expressions in miniature of particular visions of the United States and Mexico that are brought into being through the interactions and transactions of the people and objects that make it up. Viewing collections in these terms is potentially fruitful for two reasons . First, the objects in these collections are chunks of Mexico, and extracting them in a form that can be sent to other places necessarily involves mining, territorial claims, and other engagements with Mexico as material space. Second, the mines and mining corporations, scientific institutions, marketplaces, and collectors’ networks within which minerals from Mexico circulate are mostly populated by those from Mexico and the United States and operate mostly within Mexican and U.S. social space. Collections of Mexican minerals act as a meeting place for these material-social relations, these things and people, and a stage for the production of U.S.-Mexican transnational space. The capacity of collections to express U.S.-Mexican space in this way emerges both intentionally, through the explicit and implicit claims to value made by collectors and curators, and unintentionally, as the tidemarks of economic, political, and institutional arrangements that bring minerals into collections. Most scholarship on U.S.-Mexican transnational space has focused on the activities of recent, often relatively poor migrants, and their everyday Mineral Collections and Their Minerals: Building Up U.S.-Mexican Transnational Spaces Minerals, Collecting, and Value across the U.S.-Mexico Border 114 domestic, working, and affective practices. It does not typically focus on transactions between Mexicans and Anglos from other social strata or from other areas of life (such as scientific research or collecting). Many of these works have great force and insight, and the transnational lived space they describe reflects many people’s experience. However, viewed as a whole, this body of work tends to prioritize lived space built up over time through the activities of working-class and peasant migrants, imaging it as the definitive U.S.-Mexican transnational space. This discussion aims at a more plural understanding, and the three collections described here can be seen as the ground on which three different versions of transnational space have emerged. However, to see how and why collections might be seen this way, we need to know about what collections are and how they work. “The Collection Is the Thing” Collections—groups of objects intentionally gathered together, arranged, and displayed according to some nonutilitarian logic or logics—emerged in Early Modern Europe and were closely tied to the rise of science as a set of techniques for apprehending the world (Daston and Park 1998; Findlen 1995; Pomian 1996) and to imperial encounters (Mitchell 1991; Thomas 1994). In the emergence of the two North American nations that form the subject of this book, both scientific and imperial expansion became a central concern of elites. It is therefore not surprising to find lively traditions of mineral collecting in both Mexico and the United States. A primary effect of collections is the assertion of value. How do they assert the value or values that they do? They do so by imposing new forms of order and understanding on disparate things, drawing together objects from diverse contexts into a system of classification and in doing so creating a new context that takes precedence over the objects’ origins, though they may draw on those origins as one of their criteria of inclusion. So, for instance, a collection of ethnographic objects may select objects on the basis of their originally intended uses (as weapons or clothing, for instance ), but upon entrance into the collection, these objects are no longer meant to be wielded or worn. The defining values for mineral collections have shifted over time, from curiosity to exemplarity to pristineness. Collections also create value by themselves becoming valuable objects, corporate beings made up of, but transcending, their constituent parts. In part this happens through the function of collections as enclosures that Mineral Collections and...