UC Santa Cruz

Abstract: Open Pit; A Story about Morococha and Extractivism in the Américas

The Open Pit; A Story About Morococha and Extractivism in the Américas, is a response to the invitation set forth by literary and environmental scholar Rob Nixon in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, for writers to imagine new ways “to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects” . It is framed by environmental historian and historical geographer James Moore’s paradigm of a world ecology that considers human activity as part of the web of life itself, as a “flow within flows,” in the form of a bilingual (English/Spanish) cross-genre literature project that weaves together elements of documentary poetry, memoir, and field research. This “weaving” attempts to represent humanity’s inter-connectedness with the rest of nature and embody the chaotic complexity of the subject matter at hand. The Open Pit puts Indigenous Knowledges and worldviews in conversation with the work of scholars such as Moore and Nixon, in order to imagine the ways in which the literary arts can comment and expand upon this understanding of human activity as part of the web of life. The project explores the role of extraction under the current capitalist accumulation model, through the specific story of the town of Morococha, located in the central Peruvian Andes, and the ways in which extraction permeates most aspects of human activity in the Americas, as in the rest of the world. The project is conceived as an assemblage of collective enunciations and woven through a letter to my six-year-old son, in an attempt not only to connect the world of mining and extraction to everyday life in the industrialized north, but also to my own personal history growing up in Lima, Perú, and my current experiences as a graduate student in the humanities and as a co-parent living in California.