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

Conclusion

I conclude with two images of Mexican minerals: one moving through space and the other through time. Two Stories In the spring of 1998, as we were preparing to return to the United States after twenty months of fieldwork, my husband and I gave a party at our house to say good-bye to our neighbors and friends. We rented chairs and a tent, hired a band, and engaged our neighbor and friend Paco to kill a pig and make carnitas. Our guests included our neighbors in the town of Santa Rosa de Lima, miners, and other cooperative members, faculty and students from the University of Guanajuato, and a regidor (alderman). Although it is not as common for people to bring gifts to a party (such as a bottle of wine or flowers) as it is in some U.S. contexts, one cooperative member, who worked in the automotive department, brought me a small rock wrapped in tissue paper. It was a specimen of native silver growing out of a base of black acanthite (silver sulfide). The silver looked like the slightly curved bristles on a toothbrush. The specimen came from the El Cubo mine, he told me, and he wanted to give it to me to remind me of my friends in Guanajuato. I was delighted to receive this gift and carried it back to the United States with pride. For several years, the mineral played a role in my interviews with dealers and collectors; I would show it to them during the interview and it often provoked conversation. They were especially interested to hear that it came from El Cubo, which is not known for its silver and acanthite specimens. I kept it on my bureau with my jewelry, and it traveled to five different states as my husband and I chased postdoctoral fellowships and visiting professorships around the country. Eventually settling in Boston, and beginning to include museum collections in my study of minerals, value, and transnational space, I got to know Dr. Carl Francis, the curator of Harvard University’s mineral collection. I interviewed him formally several times, audited his course Conclusion Conclusion 195 on collecting and curating, and consulted him on many questions related to this project. I found his view on museum collecting both sensible and inspiring, and I noted the traces of Guanajuato in the collections with interest (see chapter 4). After thinking it over for some months, I decided to donate my specimen to the Harvard collection. I was no longer in touch with the person who had given me the stone, but I decided that by donating the piece I would be linking it to other small chunks of Guanajuato that had fetched up in the Harvard collections over the past 130 years. This seemed like something that the giver would not disapprove of. By placing the piece in the company of other Guanajuato minerals, I felt I was giving it a good home. When I showed the mineral to Carl, he said, I really like this specimen, because it tells a story. Not every specimen does tell a story. This is acanthite [pointing to the part on the bottom], a silver sulfide. Where it was the surrounding environment was so low in sulfur that it sucked the sulfur out of the specimen, leaving silver wire. This mineral actually tells at least two stories. One concerns the interaction of elements over enormously long periods of time. The mineral seems like the quintessence of unchanging matter, but it is actually a production of prior forces in an agonistic encounter now stabilized in its current form. Carl’s description calls attention to the story of the interaction of silver, sulfur, and the surrounding environment that resulted in this specimen. The other story takes place in a far shorter time frame and concerns the city of Guanajuato and its mines as a site of mining over several hundred years and as the site of anthropology fieldwork in the late twentieth century. The mineral traveled to the United States because of both the mining history and my fieldwork, and it arrived at Harvard because of other minerals that had journeyed from Guanajuato to Cambridge. The deed of gift that I signed to transfer legal ownership of the specimen records a brief version of both stories: One mineral specimen received as a gift from Miguel Arreguín in Santa Rosa, Guanajuato, Mexico, during fieldwork in June 1998. Silver wires extruding from acanthite from El Cubo mine...