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

2. Shifting Stones: Mineralogy and Mineral Collecting in Mexico and the United States

2 Value—the process of rating things as meaningfully different—only works as a generative, dynamic force because it is embedded within a similar process at a different categorical scale, where people judge the criteria by which objects should be judged to differ in significant ways—such as privileging rarity as a valuable quality for minerals. Change at this level— making difference meaningful—happens more slowly and is harder to see, but it is nevertheless an indispensable aspect of value-making. Two major shifts can be identified in the valuing of minerals in Mexico and the United States that shed light on this second level, in which the kinds of difference that make a difference are stabilized and destabilized. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the perceived center of mineralogical expertise shifted from Mexico to the United States, a shift that was somewhat but not entirely rebalanced in the twentieth century. In the past thirty years, a second shift has occurred with the rise in popularity of so-called aesthetic minerals in the United States and Europe (and to a lesser extent, Mexico). This trend has successfully installed aesthetics as a primary valued quality for minerals, based on a comparison between minerals and fine art. Mineralogy—Mexico and the United States The word mineral, imported from the Celtic, entered Latin in the twelfth century and was used to designate metallic ores, in contrast to lapis, which referred to rocks and silicates. The first use of the word mineralogy came in 1690, in Robert Boyle’s essay “A Previous Hydrostatical Way of Estimating Ores.” Extended forays into the scientific examination of the physical, chemical, and crystallographic properties of inorganic matter did not happen until the late eighteenth century, with the work of Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier and his students in chemistry and René Just Haüy in crysShifting Stones: Mineralogy and Mineral Collecting in Mexico and the United States Shifting Stones 57 tallography (Greene and Burke 1978:5). In the last two decades of the century, the study of minerals located itself in the state-sponsored schools of mines that had been established over the previous century in Europe. These included the Mining Academy at Selmecbánya in the kingdom of Hungary and the Bergakademie at Freiberg in Saxony, where Abraham Gottlob Werner served on the faculty from 1775 until 1817. Werner’s two main claims to fame are his establishment of the world’s first system of mineral classification (based on the external physical characteristics of minerals) and his position as a leading proponent of Neptunism—the theory that the major planetary building block basalt had formed out of a planetary ocean saturated with minerals (Greene and Burke 1978:6).1 In their comprehensive article on early mineralogy in the United States, John C. Greene and John G. Burke write that: The influence of these schools [the mining schools of continental Europe] on the development of mineralogical science can scarcely be exaggerated. Their success is demonstrated by the rapid rise in the production of minerals in Europe in the nineteenth century and by the exploitation of the mineral resources of European colonial empires around the globe. Their combined practical and theoretical curricula produced graduates who made important contributions both to mining technology and metallurgical practices and to the sciences of geology , mineralogy, and crystallography. (1978:7) The Science of Minerals in Nineteenth-Century United States and Mexico This model of a state-sponsored school of mines was continued in New Spain (colonial Mexico and Guatemala) with the founding of the Real Seminario de Minería in Mexico City on January 1, 1792 (Uribe Salas and Cortés Zavala 2006:493–494). The school, the first of its kind in the New World, was founded as part of the Spanish crown’s efforts to revitalize and modernize mining in its colonial possessions, especially in New Spain. The Real Seminario’s first director, Fausto de Elyuhar (discoverer, along with his brother Juan José, of the element tungsten), had studied at the Mining Academy at Selmecbánya. He recognized that the mining industry suffered from a lack of knowledge of the geology and mineralogy of the region as well as a paucity of technological expertise (Uribe Salas and Cortés Zavala 2006:494). The Real Seminario, which became the Colegio de Minería upon Mexico’s independence from Spain, trained generations Minerals, Collecting, and Value across the U.S.-Mexico...