Poisoned Frontier: The Crisis of Mining and Pollution in the US-Mexico Borderlands

Mexico is rich in minerals and currently produces most of the world’s silver and colossal quantities of copper and gold. However, it has not been Mexican-based companies spearheading the most extractive and profit-driven operations there, but rather foreign mining companies based in Canada, the U.S., and China. Yet again, the presence of foreign mining companies in Mexico is nothing new, especially in the northern region. Since 1908, eighty percent of mining operations in Mexico were controlled by U.S. and European capital. Although mining was an activity taken on by Indigenous peoples before Spanish colonialism, the establishment and introduction of technologically advanced mining companies such as the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) created a particular crisis of extraction, dehumanization, and poisoning along the border.

This presentation discusses the environmental crisis of the mining industry from the deep expansion of U.S. mining operations in Mexico from the 1890s, to the first U.S.-Mexico binational health association in the 1940s. The presentation examines how the transnational operations of ASARCO fundamentally shifted the mining industry in Mexico but at the cost of disproportionate contamination of the earth and poisoning of humans in the state of Chihuahua.

Using archival material and epidemiological data collected by public health agencies in Mexico and the U.S., I argue that despite the profits and improved relations between both countries, binational efforts to regulate and mitigate the negative effects of mining resulted in an indiscriminate disregard for human life in Mexico.