Indigenous Cultural Activism against Lithium Mining in the Andes

media release: Please join UW Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies Program. The events are free and open to the public.

Room 206 Ingraham Hall - 1155 Observatory Drive, Madison, WI 53706. Register for Zoom option.

Presented by Dr. Barbara Galindo, ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow in Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity at the Institute for Research in the Humanities (IRH) at UW-Madison.

About the presentation:  The Andean salt flats of Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia are emerging as new mining sites in the race for the energy transition. Many salt flats are located in the Puna de Atacama, a desert region bordering all three countries. This region has been targeted by transnational corporations competing for lithium, one of the strategic minerals needed for electric storage batteries, which promise a hydrocarbon-free future. In this presentation, I will examine different modes of cultural activism employed by the Kolla and Atacama Indigenous communities of northern Argentina to resist lithium mining. I will focus on the Kachi Yupi community consultation protocol (Tracks in the Salt, 2015), as well as on the use of collaborative video and film as tools that seek to make visible the “ecosocial torture” that results mainly from the water footprint of lithium extraction techniques. Additionally, by emphasizing Indigenous ethical cosmologies in which the salt flat is an ancestral mother that cannot be desecrated and destroyed, these cultural artifacts challenge official discourses that promote large-scale lithium mining as green extractivism.

About the presenter: Barbara Galindo (she/her/hers) holds a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Currently, she is working as an ACLS Emerging Voices Postdoctoral Fellow in Race, Ethnicity, and Indigeneity at the Institute for Research in the Humanities (IRH) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Barbara specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Latin American cultural production, with an emphasis on the Andean and Amazonian regions. Her interdisciplinary training and previous experience working closely with Kichwa-Lamista Indigenous peoples and Andean female anti-mining activists in Peru have inspired her work. Her forthcoming monograph, tentatively titled “Tortured Zones, Orphanized Lives: Collaborative Filmmaking, Indigeneity, and Mining Dispossession in South America,” discusses how Indigenous and non-Indigenous artivists use collaborative film to decolonize and reframe large-scale mining as a severe violation of ecosocial human rights.