Article writing (550 words)
Read the article and watch the lecture first, then answer those question and write the article
Question: “In what ways is this issue specifically Peruvian, and in what ways is this part of a wider global problem? Use specific examples from Dr. Goldsteins work to make your argument.”
Prompt:
Dr. Goldstein’s research in Peru explores the dangerous conditions that impoverished people working in illegal gold mines and sex work endure. The plight of these workers highlights important connections between illegal mining, multinational corporations, environmental destruction, health, and human trafficking. The Peruvian government is complicit in the mining and local police threaten to ‘exterminate’ these impoverished people if they are identified in speaking out against the mining corporations.
Article ( What’s in a name: http://somatosphere.net/2015/whats-in-a-name.html/ )
lecture video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOfn0jGo7DI&feature=youtu.be&list=PLQw7KTnzkpXfaHfUWcS5QWAXoH7OJXDyD )
Some possible resources:
Overfishing and modern slavery: https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/environment/overfishing-and-modern-slavery/
Interpol rescues 85 children in Sudan trafficking ring: https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/11/africa/interpol-burst-trafficking-ring-sudan/index.html
Madagascar: Next government must end human rights violations: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/11/madagascar-next-government-must-end-human-rights-violations/
This is a working draft under review please do not circulate without permission 1
The Virgin Mary, The Son of Jupiter: Mercury Rising
(Re)producing gendered-environmental racisms in a quickly heating planet
Mother and Child, Rainforest Mines, Mercury-Filled Water
(Photo shown with permission of Dado Galdieri 2011)
Mothers and Children in Madre de Dios
On a sweltering September day in 2011, I meet officer Alesandra and her infant daughter in front of
the police station. She is off-duty for a couple of hours, enjoying time with her baby daughter, asleep in the
stroller. We are in Mazuko, a growing gold mining town in Perus Amazonian region of Madre de Dios,
which translates as the Mother of God or the Virgin Mary. The regions name lends itself to notions of
female natural purity, something that conservationists harness to mobilize environmental activism and
notions of gendered responsibility and ecological kinship with the land. From where Alesandra stands,
Madre de Dios is anything but virginal. She comments that political corruption, migration, deforestation and
mercury contamination of pristine rainforest, along with a proliferating sex-industry have become the
regions defining features. Dubbed El Dorado for its gold-flecked soil, artisanal miners extract the shiny
particles with liquid mercury. The ecological impact has alarmed environmental engineers and social
scientists that this will destroy the lungs of the earth and natures pharmacy the Amazon rainforest
(Bebbington 2010; Dourojeanni 2006). The environmental conservationists are not the only ones to engage
the metaphoric power of personified, gendered nature. One public official went so far as to refer to the
gold mining areas of Madre de Dios, transformed into desert by miners hands and their abundant use of
liquid mercury, as a ruined and then abandoned landscape, just like a disgraced woman.1
In 2011 and 2012, the governmental estimates put the number of gold miners in the region at
30,000 and the number of sex-workers at 5,000. In 2017, governmental officials and non-governmental
workers continue to cite these numbers, while also saying that there are likely more people, but that there
is no precise way of knowing in a rainforest region the size of Portugal, where, according to regional
authorities: donde no hay Estado (where there is no State). Despite the contaminated marks on its
reputation, Madre de Dios, nestled between Brazil and Bolivia, still boasts its reputation as La Capital de la
Biodiversidad albeit with a giant, rotting, wooden sign.
1 Personal communication, Goldstein 2017. Como una tierra arruinada, abandonada, como una mujer
deshonrada.
This is a working draft under review please do not circulate without permission 2
The Capital of Biodiversity? We call it El Dorado, or El Wild West, Alesandra had said. She
was from Cusco and the first time that she had heard of Mazuko was when she received her assignment,
learning that the town served as a trafficking hub for people, gold, mercury, cocaine and gasoline. Most of
the miners are like me, from the Andes, Alesandra explains. From Cusco, from Puno, but I see Koreans,
Chinese, even Russians at least, they dont look like the others and this is what everyone says. There are
mafias deep inside the mines. I only meet the ones who make it out and they say it is hard to escape.
Alesandra had not traveled far into the rainforest, nor had the other policemen. The force had two
motorcycles and one truck at their disposition. When the regions police pulled together for special
operations, they also had to use motorcycles to enter, as trucks could not traffic on the narrow dirt paths.
Mazuko is a gateway, she had said, everything that is going into the rainforest passes through
here. In 2017, Mazuko has changed. It is now both a gateway and a check point. After a massive mining
strike in March of 2012, U.S officials brought resources and personnel to build security infrastructure to
survey traffic from the Andes to the Amazon on the Interoceanic Road, the only paved thoroughfare from
the mountains to the jungle in the region. The roadside town plays a crucial role in Perus extractive
politics, in part because of its geography along the relatively new Interoceanic Road, which runs, in its
entirety, sheer across Brazil and Peru. Odebrecht, the Brazilian construction company now under
investigation for corruption, along with three former Peruvian presidents (Alejandro Toledo, Alan Garcia,
and Ollanta Humala) finished paving the final section from the Andes to the Amazon in 2011. Despite
Alesandras commitment to her job, the move from the Andes to the Amazon had not been an easy one. She
was the only female police officer in an eleven-man police force. The policemen, she explained, were
having trouble communicating with sex-trafficked women and children. They needed a womans touch
or a mothers touch. Her attention drifted to her baby, little Sarita, who had started to cry in her sleep.
Lets walk a bit. She moved the stroller back and forth as there wasnt much room to walk between the
hustle of the gold-changers, so we stood in front of Oro Fino, which guaranteed solidarity, purity and
power for Peru.
These are not simply shops where one can exchange currency, but also where blowtorches do an
alchemists work. Artisanal gold mining in the region utilizes liquid mercury to amalgamate with gold dust
in the soil. The gold-changers transform the mercury-gold alloy by burning off the base metal. I held my
breath. Alesandra paused to watch the flames of the blowtorches and the men bent over the shallow plates,
often without goggles or respiratory protection.
This is a working draft under review please do not circulate without permission 3
The mercury vapor is incredibly toxic, particularly for young children and fetuses, damaging brain
growth, kidney, and liver function (Diringer 2014; Fernandez 2011; UNEP 2013). In 2010, researchers
from Stanfords Carnegie Amazon Mercury Ecosystem Project (CAMEP) found the mercury levels outside
of the cambios de oro to be ten times greater than the UN-mandated safety levels (Benko 2010; Fernandez
2010). I asked Alesandra what she thought about the dangers of heavy metal toxicity. She shrugged. We
have human trafficking children, teenagers, women, we have fatalities in the mines and traffic accidents
on the road. Is mercury really that dangerous?2 Her question was, and is, a good one. Liquid mercury is
beautiful to look at, seemingly harmless to touch, and its vapor is as invisible as it is odorless at least, to
the human senses. The suspicion that mercury might not really be all that toxic is one shared by many
miners and even some government inhabitants, regardless of how migratory. Or perhaps it is because they
are so migratory. Public health officials, lawyers, and environmentalists, those who consider Madre de Dios
to be home or home to much of the planets biodiversity, blame the transient (mostly Andean)
population for poisoning the Pachamama of Madre de Dios.
Ideas about home, the socially contaminated and contaminating category of the migrant, along
with notions of human and nonhuman female purity form the foundation of this article on the contaminating
effects of mercury and the reproduction of environmental racisms. While gold miners in Madre de Dios
tend not consider themselves to be indigenous, according to the State, they are. The Incan lineage of
indigeneity is a lucrative one. The UNESCO-designated tourist sites like that of Machu Picchu benefit from
this nostalgic framing of the Incan legacy, living in current day Quechua and Aymara communities that
honor the Pachamama. The State and the Peruvian press have engaged in smear campaign: painting the
Andean migrants as dirty, uneducated, and potentially former Shining Path members, which is to say:
criminal. They are fallen indians, rather than honoring their Pachamama, they are, instead, raping her.
They are a kind of matter out of place (Douglas 1966) they belong in the mountains where they came
from, not in the jungle where the idealized Amazonian indio lives (Cusurichi Palacios 2003; Garca
Altamirano 2003).
In examining the global multivalences and ramifications of mercury in the air, water and soil, I
engage notions of the Pachamama and gendered nature with the Greek term oikos or our eco
bringing critical race theory and indigenous studies to bear on (eco)feminist scholarship. Oikos, which
translates into myriad related definitions: dwelling, household, home, or family, lends itself to think
through the eco in ecologies and economies to consider the roles that that gender and sexuality play in
changing forms of kinship, citizenship, and (environmental) politics beyond and within the concept of the
2 Tenemos trata de personas nios, adolescentes, mujeres, tenemos fallecidos en las minas, de moto por
la carretera, que tn peligroso es el mercurio?
This is a working draft under review please do not circulate without permission 4
human. Concentrating on mercury in its conceptual and actual form, I trace levels of contamination in the
human bodies that labor in rainforest gold mines, the impact on maternal-fetal health, and mercurys role in
theories of (social) contamination that (re)produce different kinds of environments and environmental
racisms. I ask how the concept of home in the eco structures ideas about who and what bodies carry a
toxic body burden (Agard-Jones forthcoming; Dillon 2015; Graeter 2015; Lamoreaux 2016; Shapiro
2015), and what the collapse of womens bodies with the built landscape means for designating
responsibility in human and environmental health.
From claims about environmental disaster and irreparably accelerating climate change, natures
pharmacy and the worlds lungs that is, the Amazon rainforest represents a kind of hot spot. Or,
the Amazon as a physical and idealized space represents a truth spot, as Jason Pribilsky notes; a terrain
upon which anthropologists have posited and refuted claims about what really constitutes human nature
(2013) usually through the bodies and bodily practices of indigenous peoples. Some regions of the world
lend themselves to specific kinds of analysis (Strathern 1990) and in this frontier Amazon region different
kinds of analyzing and imaginings about (human) nature (Raffles 2002; Sahlins 2013, 2005) emerge. In
Madre de Dios, diagnoses as well as prognoses about climate health are quite literally built on the levels of
mercury rising in the thermometer of a quickly heating planet. Mercurys effects on climate change and
on fetal-maternal health have become the focus of both international and national agendas, linking
environmental contamination with human medical conditions (Diringer 2014; Fernandez 2013, UNEP
2013; Pan 2014). Through the figures of the mother-and-child and of natures body – gendered female,
public health officials and environmental scientists, call for eliminating the mercurial body burden placed
on human and nonhuman bodies, for a less toxic future.
Alesandra shrugs off my concern at the invisible threat of mercury vapor but kindly offers to find a
place to sit further away from the gold-changers. We settle into green plastic chair to talk, waiting for
Angela, the psychologist employed by a local Catholic missionary couple, Oscar and Ana Guadelupe, who
run a refuge for women and children as well as a legal defense council. The Guadelupes chose the name
Huarayo for their organization, which is an interesting choice as the term has undergone a revolution of
meanings, as Peruvian scholar Mara C. Chavarra notes. It initially represented a general insult to
Amazonian Indians, but with a particular ethnic affiliation to the Ese Eja. Now Huarayo refers to anyone
born in Madre de Dios. Huarayos are tied to their land. If you are born in a place, it is always home.
Place-based notions of identity are strong for Alesandra and other government officials who expressed
concerns that people were going to be reproducing children far from home, and this, not as much as the
mercury, can cause damage. Are you feeling homesick? Alesandra asks in greeting as Angela arrives. I am
too, she says, answering her own question. Angela does miss home, but people tend to see her more as a
Huarayo. They can tell from her features that she is not from Cusco, but Amazonian. They are right, but
she is not from this part of the rainforest. Both women miss home, which is made both harder and easier
working with the mothers and children who arrive at their doorsteps. Angela receives whomever the police
bring to her children taken in police raids from the mines, women who report domestic abuse and need a
safe place to stay or to leave their children.
Alesandra asks Angela if she knows anything about the mercury poison. Angela nods her head. She
has been eating extra cilantro because she read it that can help with ridding the body of mercury. Alesandra
looks stricken. She does not like cilantro. She wonders aloud why the doctors at the clinic arent doing
more to tell people about the dangers of the gold-changers. But then, she acknowledges, theres too much
happening already. With increasing car accidents on the road, the small clinic seems to be running in crisis
mode every time I am there. I have spoken with the doctors, one of whom had to excuse himself mid-
interview to deliver a child, but they find that their patients are not receptive to listening about the effects
of the mercury. But as newborns and young children begin demonstrate the effects of heavy metal
contamination, it proves an awful case in point.
This is a working draft under review please do not circulate without permission 5
Through the entwined relationships between human and earth beings (de la Cadena 2015),
Alesandras relationship with the gold miners, and the children she received from the gold mines, I follow
mercurys sometimes silvery, sometimes invisible trail. I analyze the heavy metals cosmological and earthly
effects and bodily affects in three movements, arguing that mercury has a multivalence a quality of having
multiple values, meanings, and affinities. While itself a polluting substance, thinking with and through
mercurys metaphoric as well as physiological abilities can offer possibilities to mitigate its toxic effects.
Mercury Rising and Reproducing Racisms
Sources of Mercury Pollution and Mercurys Global Moves~ from Naomi Lubick and David
Malakoffs 2013 report in Science
Mercury, Hermes, or quicksilver has seeped into the psyches of philosophers and emperors, mad-
hatters, sushi-eaters and cavity-fillers. As a mythological figure, Mercury is a trickster character, the god of
trade, speed, and communication. As a chemical element, mercury can move through the body, passing
the blood-brain barrier, swim through amniotic fluid, and change the body chemistry of all living
organisms. With global contamination levels rising, the United Nations Environment Programme convened
the 2013 Minamata Convention. The subsequent treaty aims to reduce human and environmental exposure,
by eliminating the heavy metal from pesticides, gold mining, pharmaceuticals, and factory emissions
(Malakoff and Lubick 2013; UNEP 2013). Artisanal and small-scale goldmining (ASGM) has become the
top source for anthropogenic mercury contamination, beating out fossil fuels (Diringer 2014; Malakoff and
Lubick 2013; UNEP 2013). The figure detailing mercury contamination bears further examination. The
numbers pit brown bodies laboring in the mines of Madre de Dios against the white collar corporations that
offer clean(er) mining strategies.
When I first arrived to conduct fieldwork in Madre de Dios, crossing the border from Rio Branco,
Brazil, my research focused on the conceptual traffic between nature and culture (Haraway 1989),
transits of empire (Byrd 2011), and the traffic of women (Rubin 1974), medicinal plants, and gold along the
Interoceanic Road (Goldstein 2015). Since 2009, I have lived and researched in Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia. I
had begun to travel the Interoceanic Road in 2010 from the Brazilian coast, following the Interoceanic Road
into Peru. I crossed the border into Madre de Dios in July 2011, with a Maria Emlia Coelho, Brazilian
journalist-friend who had covered the roads construction since its inception (Coelho 2009; 2010; 2011).
Together, we covered Alan Garcias inauguration of the bridge of friendship in Madre de Dios, the last
This is a working draft under review please do not circulate without permission 6
piece of the road to connect Peru with Brazil. It was one of Garcias final presidential acts. The bridge was
not finished, however, and hours after the ceremony, workers continued their work until December of that
year. At the time, I had yet to learn about the role that mercury played in socio-environmental justice and
politics. Since entering the mines with government health workers and environmental engineers, I have
seen people – particularly children with odd skin conditions, motor-coordination issues, and cognitive
disabilities. While the Peruvian doctors, health officials, and politicians that I worked with attribute these
physical conditions to mercury contamination, not all of them agree that the mercury contamination comes
from the gold mining.
In May of 2017, the regional government of Madre de Dios hosted epidemiologists and
toxicologists from Lima. They gave two days worth of presentations on mercury, lead, cadmium, and
arsenic. During a break on the first day, I spoke with the head doctor in Perus Ministry of Health working
on strategic efforts regarding heavy metals and chemical substances. We stood by the open door of the
public health classroom, munching on empanadas and downing an artificial version of chicha morada, a drink
traditionally made from purple corn. Dr. Caballero answered my questions about mercury contamination
in the region and said that the next session would be on mother-to-child transmission of heavy metal
toxicity. But he didnt think the mercury came from the gold mining. He pointed to the small fires in the
small, overgrown field strewn with trash in front of us. Smoke wafted towards us, smelling of melting
plastic. These fires the gasoline there are other ways that mercury enters the environment. He is
right, of course, but later his colleague would show a slide of a young woman, pregnant at five months,
with liquid mercury in her system. Indigenous communities tell of seeing silver globules floating down the
river, a beautiful sight if the results were not so vexing. Mercury is entering the atmosphere on many levels
in many ways, which makes targeting a single source and villain that much harder, when working within the
confines of Western etiology. The doctors and nurses attending the capacitation workshop on heavy metals
and chemical substances work directly in the mining areas or along the side of the Interoceanic Road. Their
patients are gold miners and sex-workers. Fascinated by what they were learning, the health care workers
asked questions about how to tell their patients that they had a body burden and whether there was anything
to the data on violence and heavy metals contamination. They wondered how much people would listen,
when the gold to be made in the mines made the cost of mercury poisoning seem insignificant.
International press coverage on the gold minings dual contaminations the mercurial devastation
in the rainforest and the sex-trafficking has been rising in the past few years. The pressure on the Peruvian
government to intervene in the entwined human-environmental health issues came to a head on May 23,
2016, when Perus Minister of the Environment declared a State of Emergency in Madre de Dios. The
government authorities cited alarmingly high levels of the heavy metal found in hair, urine, and blood
samples through three independently conducted studies by researchers from Stanfords Carnegie Amazon
Mercury Ecosystem Project (CAMEP), Centro de Innovacin Cientfica Amaznico (CINCIA), and Duke
Universitys Global Health Institute. Roughly 40% of the population (48,000) people had reported
symptoms of mercury poisoning. The estimated amount of liquid mercury dumped into the environment
from illegal artisanal mining in Madre de Dios hovers around an annual 30-40 tons (ACA 2013; Benavides
2015; La Rpublica 2015; Prensa Andina 2015; Watsa 2015) and guesstimates of 400 tons of mercury
during the boom years of 2001 2013 (Reao 2016) to some 650 tons between 1997 and 2015 (Benavides
2015) up to 721 tons by 2010 (Prensa Andina 2015). As Peruvian journalist Guillermo Reao asked,
writing about the State of Emergency, when compared with the 82 tons of mercury that leaked into Japans
Minamata Bay, Where does our country place in the rankings of catastrophes of this type if we consider
This is a working draft under review please do not circulate without permission 7
that it is understood that the Japanese case is the Chernobyl of mercury contamination?3 It is a good if not
also fascinating question of comparing disasters, contaminations, and motivations across time and space.
Francisco Romn Daobeyta, a conservation biologist working on mercury contamination in Madre
de Dios since 2012, finds himself, his wife and children with above-normal mercury toxicity levels in 2016
(Reao 2016). My friend and collaborator, Julio Arajo Flores and his family, seem to have escaped that
fate. We met in 2011, when Julio was working on his doctoral research. He is a biologist, with a specialty
in aquatic creatures, though he is equally disposed to testing soils and animals on land. His doctoral research
brought him to Madre de Dios in the mid-2000s, before mercury had become a problem. Back in 2011, the
push to understand the levels of mercury toxicity was still in its inchoate form, but Luis Fernndez of the
Carnegie Institute had begun to suspect that river fish, particularly carnivorous ones, likely carried mercury
from the mining areas downand in some casesupstream (Pan 2015; Swenson 2011). He hired Arajo
to study the levels of mercury toxicity in the fish as the bioaccumulation from fish to human passes easily
through the digestive system (Diringer 2014).
When we sit down to a meal of river fish in May 2017, Julio explains that he, his wife Gina and two
daughters regularly eat river fish any of the ones that do not have high mercury levels. Yet Gina, when she
was pregnant had stayed away from anything that came out of the water. But now, the problem is also in
the soil. Papayas, these are all over now, mostly going to Lima. But they absorb the river water used to
irrigate, and all this has mercury in it too. The papayas, along with cacao are part of a joint governmental
and nongovernmental effort to promote agriculture in the region, as an option to gold mining. Gina, who is
from Lima, never imagined that her main concern in the rainforest would be heavy metal contamination.
Its everywhere! If its in the water, it is in the soil. Or if it is in the soil, it is in the water. Which means
anything grown in the region is likely contaminated. While fruits and vegetables were previously
disregarded as major players in the toxicity game, there is a growing trend in toxicology demonstrates that
they can become saturated sources if the soil and water contains high levels of heavy metals (Massaquoi et al.
2015; Sharma et al. 2016). The conceptions of a pure mother nature in the rainforest were ones that Gina
carried with her and ones that she wishes to maintain. She works with reforestation and environmental
education efforts, having seen the effects of heavy metal contamination in Lima.
Lima as well as the surrounding copper mines in the Andes have a longstanding reputation for lead
toxicity, along with carrying racialized valence for the communities affected (Graeter 2015; Li 2015). The
social contamination that can predate, precipitate and then perpetuate the physiological contamination will
come under more analysis in the next section, in examining particulate and (in)articulate bodies in the
system.
For many people, Madre de Dios summons up images of large rivers that make serpentines through
lush green rainforest. Mercury was not something that had ever crossed my radar, Gina sighs. But, I
suppose, like everyone else, we are benefitting from the gold mining because of all the studies on mercury.
This kind of comment was also echoed by NGO workers committed to (or contracted) to combat human
trafficking. They noted that their livelihoods also depend on the existence of the gold mining in the region.
The economic benefits that NGO workers and environmental scientists gain from working in the region
represent the kinds of toxic markets so-called because of their volatility that both legitimate and
aggravate efforts to place monetary value on clean air, water, and land. Gina had also worked with Save the
Children and a local missionary organization called Huarayo (which is the local name of an Amazonian
ethnic group) to document and alleviate the trauma from sex-trafficking in women and children. It was too
heavy. I cant keep doing it. It infects (contamina) my dreams. This is what Gina has said to me, over and
over again, throughout the years. She oscillates between frustration and hope when engaging with me on
3Qu lugar debera ocupar nuestro pas en el ranking de las catstrofes de este tipo si consideramos que
para los entendidos el caso japons es el Chernobil de la contaminacin mercurial?
This is a working draft under review please do not circulate without permission 8
my work with sex-trafficked women. The day-to-day, and often night-to-night interactions with people
who really do not want to be involved in the sex-trade can take its toll. I know mercury is poison, but I
feel like I can control it, Gina says. The women the girls I just cant. Please just stick with this
[mercury] topic. Gina had always worried about becoming too involved in supportive those who
experience sexual trauma. She didnt have the training or the mentality for it, she said. When the work
started to infect her dreams, her ability to care for her own children plunged. She began to have anxiety
attacks and lost her happiness, as she put it.
For Alesandra, there was no choice in whether or not to involve herself. This was her job, even if
she had to make some of it up as she went. Luckily, she had Angela. It was to Angela that Alesandra would
bring any of the women or children taken on police raids from the mines. Angela came from another part of
the Amazon. While she slipped into to prostibars to do her own research and blended in as a body, she
didnt speak Quechua or Aymara. This marked her as being from elsewhere. But Alesandra did speak
Quechua. So unlike the other male police officers that would deposit their charges with Angela and then
leave, Alesandra would stay to help translate. Sometimes, she would bring along her infant daughter. Like
Gina, Alesandras concerns were also that she would not be fully able to parent well because of the many
hours that she worked, but her comfort with the miners, as a fellow andina, constituted different grounds
for interactions. She also found that taking her daughter with her into the police station meant that women
brought in for processing often responded differently to her, more willing to share their stories and a baby
often softened the attitude of male miners enough such that what might have been a tense interaction,
became a conversation.
The shared Quechua fluency and a Cuzquea identity made Alesandra feel as though people greeted
her like a long lost family-member. They are so happy to hear me great them with the Trs Principios or
address them in Quechua. The Three Principles are the moral code of conduct and greeting: Ama Sua,
Ama Lulla, Ama Quella that translate to: Dont Lie, Dont Cheat, Dont Steal. These become the pride and
basis from which Peru would be rebuilt after the Fujimori years (Cabrero 2006).4 There is a shared
understanding of the world, of how to approach it, and a sense of decency that slips into a moral definition
of race (de la Cadena 2010) that, along colonial lines of plunder, asserts itself as a governing ethic for why
the Andean colonos or colonists as thus more deserving of Amazonian land because the indios of the forest
are wild, just like the land. We are a good people, Alesandra would say. Her words prompted me to think
of Cuzquea scholar Marisol de la Cadenas framing of gente decente (decent people). De la Cadena
examines the moral definitions of race that include education and family ties. As the conduit of education
and morality, the biological family was a central component of decency (de la Cadena 2000: 47). She
invokes an elite Cuzqueo saying that resonates beyond the city, that people gain education and morality in
the cradle. The circulation of the sayings about who are decent people falls along colonial lines of who
counts as a person. Family ties as well as education are important, but such decency begins with the
mothers body and what kind of enculturated decency or lack thereof that she is passing on to her child.
These sedimented concerns about cultural decency are what trouble Alesandra and the other police officers
the most. They are far outnumbered by miners, asked to do an impossible job of maintaining peace order,
which to them, means keeping the cultural order of people. The passing of mercury through the earths
atmosphere, soil, and waterways from gestating mother to fetus does show on the radar, to refer back
to Ginas words, but quicksilvers trace settles onto an already-deeply racialized landscape.
4 As this article is in the process of publication, the rise of Fujimorismo with Alberto Fujimoris daughter, Keiko, at the helm is
further toxifying Peruvian politics. This raises a host of relevant ironies with respect to father Fujimoris forced sterilizations of
indigenous women, his daughters political persona as an embodied reproduction of her fathers policies, and her staunch support
of unfettered natural resource extraction and
