This story is brought to you by lithium.
No, really.
To read it, you have to be online somehow — on a smartphone or a laptop, which likely relies on a lithium-ion battery.
The soft, lightweight, metal is used in all sorts of devices, from vape pens to electric toothbrushes and vehicles. Its presence is ubiquitous, yet simultaneously invisible, most of the time.
A researcher coming to Illinois Wesleyan University next month hopes to make visible what large scale extraction operations — like lithium mining — cost some Latin American communities.
Barbara Galindo is currently an ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow in Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity at the Institute for Research in the Humanities via the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Illinois Wesleyan will host Galindo as a Scholar in Residence from Feb. 7-10. Galindo will deliver a community lecture, introduce a documentary film screening and lead a master class for students while at IWU.
Galindo told WGLT in an interview that her interest in studying mining operations in Latin America came while she lived in the Peruvian Amazon. Initially drawn to the area through her master's studies in Peruvian literature, Galindo said it was impossible not to notice the effects of large-scale extraction on indigenous communities nearby.
"I was very overwhelmed with the deforestation, the destruction of the oil companies in the Amazon and I wanted to learn how that started," Galindo said. "I decided when I started my Ph.D. that I would study mining as a cultural and historical matrix of extractivism in Latin America."
As a term, extractivism encompasses industries beyond mining: The term itself applies to the removal of natural resources from an area primarily for export and processing — the removal of natural resources from one area for profit elsewhere. This includes oil and mineral mining, but can apply to forestry and agriculture as well.
"We know that in countries like Argentina, what stays in the country (financially) is less than 3% of what is extracted," Galindo said. "It is completely colonial."
Galindo said she chose to zero-in her research to lithium mining in part because it was the extractive operation with which she is most familiar. Currently, she's analyzing films — environmental justice documentaries as well as pro-mining, institutional movies — for a forthcoming book analyzing film representations of mining in South America.
"It's a medium that allows for strong, effective involvement with these issues and is a sometimes multisensorial experience, also," Galindo said.
At Illinois Wesleyan, Galindo will introduce the 2005 film The Devil's Miner, which follows a pair of 12- and 14-year-old boys as they work in a Bolivian silver mine. Galindo said the film was chosen because it illustrates the contemporary labor issues that surround mining and the juxtaposition of economic demand and indigenous religious practices.
"It's a different logic. And this is why I think that the preservation of indigenous spirituality is huge: It's a way to also resist against the market logic and the extraction logic," Galindo said.
The consequences of large-scale mining and other extractive operations displace people in multiple ways. While wealth and resources leave regions, pollution and natural destruction remain in the communities where extraction occurs.
"I think the pollution side of it is the worst, because it has long-term effects. It kills slowly — people, animals, of course, the waters," Galindo said. "Besides the big destruction that we see — an open pit mine, for instance, is something very ugly — pollution is the worst."
Galindo said extractivism, its consequences and resistance to it, will remain increasingly relevant as demand for resources in Latin America grows. The growth is fueled, in part, by the clean energy industry, which Galindo said will also likely lead to increased lithium mining.
"It's a hot topic because of the energy transition. We have the Lithium Triangle in Argentina, Bolivia and Chile where we have communities that resist against lithium extraction and we have an expansion of lithium extraction operations in Brazil... and I believe in Mexico too," she said. "So we will see an expansion of lithium mining operations on the continent."
Galindo said she hopes her research — and her time at Illinois Wesleyan — help illuminate the conditions and the people that are most affected by a global industry that has left many dispossessed of their homes, environments and traditions.
"I hope my research makes visible the people that are the communities that are affected by this mining operations — that we can listen to the way people frame their own problems," she said. "They are knowledgeable about the places where they live, and their own notions of nature."
That she'll be speaking in a region that is home to Illinois' only electric vehicle manufacturing plant — which produces vehicles that need lithium batteries — isn't lost on her, Galindo said.
"I think that for the community, it will be great to know from what places these minerals are being extracted, how Latin American communities are framing these issues and how they are struggling against the extraction of these strategic minerals," she said.
