Industrial Ruins

Abstract

This chapter analyzes Llallagua-Uncía’s industrial ruins, a category that includes old buildings, machinery, and waste rock left behind by twentieth-century mining practices. Drawing on walking interviews conducted with cooperative miners and other town residents, the chapter explores how people live with and interpret these industrial ruins. It argues that although the residents relate to the ruins differently depending on their own positions within the towns, their stories share a tendency to treat the ruins as monuments to the promise of temporal progress. As a result, industrial ruins—the apparently wasted remains of a previous era—continue to inspire faith in mining as key to individual and regional economic growth. Materialized in the hulls of metallic giants, mountainous slag heaps, and the sagging internal architecture of the mine itself, industrial ruins impinge on local imaginaries of the future, motivating miners underground and inflecting the politics of everyday life.