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

5. Making Places in Space: Miners and Collectors in Guanajuato and Tucson

5 Figure 5.1, a map featured in a report titled Potencial Minero de Guanajuato (Franco 1997) shows Guanajuato’s centrality in Mexico, in particular the fact that over 60 percent of the country’s population lives within a 350-kilometer radius (thus implying the density of infrastructure and services). The radiating circles on the map give an image of the mines and city of Guanajuato as a central origin point, with its subsoil resources expanding centrifugally to the rest of the country, and by extension, the world. This image and the sensibility behind it contrast with many other views of the movement of mineral resources from mines to market, both for “regular people” and for social scientists. Within such views, for instance , mined ores such as silver, gold, or copper are quintessential raw materials, extracted from the “ends of the earth” and brought to the centers of global finance in New York and London. Likewise, mineral specimens are produced in geographically distant places and brought to Tucson, Munich, Denver, and other mineral marketplaces. In fact, even when minerals come from near these marketplaces, they are often treated as pristine emissaries of the margins of the cultural world. People also move from all over to a central meeting point at these mineral shows. Tucson, in particular, is called the “Mecca for mineral collectors,” emphasizing its role as a pilgrimage site and meeting place for the faithful all over the planet.1 If we compare uses of minerals in Guanajuato with uses in Tucson, we find competing, though not totally separate, sets of value-making actions that propose alternative ways of thinking about how places are arranged and connected in space. In Guanajuato, actors use minerals to generate an expanding social world, beginning with the miner and his immediate household and spreading outward. In Tucson and other sites where minMaking Places in Space: Miners and Collectors in Guanajuato and Tucson Minerals, Collecting, and Value across the U.S.-Mexico Border 138 eral collectors come together, such as the Denver-Golden-Boulder area, collectors see themselves as gathering in minerals, not only from far-flung places, but also from the margins of the social world. The multiple ways in which consumers remake minerals as pristine help to create an idea of central cultural space surrounded by peripheral natural margins and of minerals as moving from these margins inward. A close attention to these practices suggests that the creation of value is fundamental to the creation of social and material space. Of course, these views of U.S.-Mexican space and the locations of Guanajuato and Tucson within it are not produced anew when people value minerals. Value-making occurs in a landscape stabilized through prior value-making. However, the role of value-making in making “places in space” tends to be invisible because—if value-making succeeds—the places, and the spaces in which Figure 5.1. “By virtue of its geographical location, the state of Guanajuato permits access to more than 60% of the national population, within a radius of 350 kilometers.” Franco Ibarra, Jesús, Potencial Minero de Guanajuato, Dirección de Fomento Minero, Secretaria de Desarrollo Económico Sustentable del Estado de Guanajuato, 1997. Reprinted with permission. Making Places in Space 139 they are arranged, seem like a priori entities. By focusing on value-making as generative, we can see more clearly the unstable, multiple, and emergent characters of places in space, as well as the presence of alternative accounts put forward by those with less access to resources or power. The making of places in space is a kind of “project” similar to, though not quite the same as, the “scale-making projects” Anna Tsing describes in her essay “The Global Situation.” For Tsing, scale-making projects are “relatively coherent bundles of ideas and practices” that engage “cultural claims about locality, regionality and globality, about stasis and circulation ” (Tsing 2001:487). Tsing developed this concept in an essay calling for a critical view on the uses of globalization as a particular scale-making project, one that, like modernization itself, had become so successful that its status as one kind of project among others was no longer clearly visible. In doing so, she helped show that ideas and practices about space and scale are never unmediated, but always based on inclusions and exclusions , highlighting some things while obscuring others. The term project may suggest an intentional or...