Resilience in the Shadow of the Mountain: Andeans Responding to Colonial Mercury Mining

Mercury mining in Huancavelica, Peru has long held a place in the colonial historiography as one of the most extreme examples of the cruelty of extractive regimes. Reliant on mercury to maintain silver production at the famed mines of Potosí, the colonial regime drew from Andean precedents to build a rotational labor draft, the mita, that forced Indigenous communities to send laborers to mine and refine the liquid metal in dangerous and toxic conditions. Faced with these challenges, Andean individuals and communities near the mines confronted the challenges posed by the emerging colonial extractive regime in various ways, including by creating bonds through marriage with Spanish miners, claiming the right to exploit Andean mita labor for their own mining ventures, and leveraging their history of service to the Crown to claim exemption from forced labor. Rather than framing these actions as either resistance or accommodation, this paper considers the various tactics employed by Andeans through the lens of resilience, recognizing the inevitability of change that the colonial encounter produced, the power differential and exploitation inherent in the colonial mining regime, and the ability of Andean actors to respond to and alter the conditions under which they engaged the emerging colonial state. Ultimately, this paper argues that the actions of Andean individuals and communities defined resilience in practice, not as a resistance to changes imposed by colonial extraction, but as attempts to influence that process despite the power differences between them and the emerging colonial regime.