UC Santa Barbara

Placing the mining-oriented model of development within a historical and colonial context, this study examines extractivism as a fundamental Peruvian statecraft. Centering the region of Espinar in the area known as the Southern Mining Corridor, this study de-economizes export-driven mining or extractivism and reads it as the state’s key subject and meaning-making technology.

As it’s central statecraft, this study understands extractivism as carrying out three key functions or technologies of power in Peru: racialization, territorialization and commodification. Engaging in a critical theorization of state discourse and meaning-making across the colonial and contemporary epoch, this study threads together the mining operations in two of the most contentious mining sites, Antapaccay and Coroccohuayco, and places them within longstanding historical processes. As such, the central thesis of this research puts forth the argument that extractivism forms the nexus point that congeals the underlying politics of race, commodities, and territory in Peru. By extension, this research disrupts the dominant framework that posits resistance as the expression of counterhegemonic contentious politics and instead claims that anti-extractivist movements in the Andes are for this reason always already contentious. In preserving their place-based cultural ways of being, anti-extractivist movement are thus inherently oppositional to the Peruvian state and its political forms and ideologies. Ultimately, this reading of anti-mining resistance as the enactment of a kind of praxis of refusal and epistemic disruption contributes to what is referred to as the ontological turn in the humanities and social sciences.

Critical discursive analysis and the reconceptualization of two key terms threads this work. The first is a counter-reading of Peru Profundo, the term referring to an imagined geography used throughout Peru’s modern historiography. This works reads the historical evocation of Peru Profundo as a self-serving discursive power informed by colonial geographies. As such, it finds a postcolonial imaginary present in the way that contemporary extractivism continues to reorder populations and motivate discourses of development. By the end of this work, Peru Profundo is redeployed as the potential hermeneutic to read autonomous formations against extractivism. The alternative politics of being described in this study ultimately reconfigure dominant contemporary models of Indigeneity in the region as inherently antithetical, and instead attempts to create a critical framework for reading the enunciation of these politics across time and places them within an Andean radical tradition.

In examining extractivism as statecraft, this study ends up building upon contemporary politics of Indigeneity, particularly as it pertains to resistance and autonomy. The study concludes in a dialogue with key thinkers in the field of critical Latin American Studies, Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar and Raúl Zibechi. Seeking to contribute to the broader redeployment of difference in Latin America, this thesis provides an important contribution to understanding Indigenous-based models of autonomy as emerging from differentiated politics. It finds itself in conversation with various paradigms that seek to read similar politics. One of them is the Guna people’s term of Abya Yala. This term has been used by Indigenous movements across the South American continent to assert differentiated ways of being that have coalesced against rapacious colonial violence. The analysis foregrounds how ontological difference informs the politics of refusal in the Andes and elsewhere. The study is ultimately about how states render certain subjects illegibly or invisible and subsequently relagate them to spaces of subjugation.