Masculinity’s (mis)fortune: Historicizing affect as extractivist infrastructure in Bolivian sodalite mining

How is alienability produced as a mode of relation? Is capital a (racialized) affect? This article examines clashing expectations about minerals, specifically sodalite, at the Cerro Sapo mine in Ayopaya Bolivia. It describes how Cerro Sapo’s current owner, a white Kenyan, engaged in narrative and bodily practices that sought to detach him from earlier labor histories and Indigenous demands for redistributive aid. Through a life history approach, the analysis centers one figure to provide insight into what capitalism looks like on the ground. This case sharpens scholarly understanding of the affective workings of extraction, highlighting the need to historicize feelings of trust and accountability by dis-aggregating the figure of “the mine” and “the firm.” By illuminating Cerro Sapo’s continuities with, and revisions to, colonial structures of racial violence and exchange, the article aims to advance studies of racial capitalism and add a new layer to public debates about colonial debts and reparations for slavery.


INTRODUCTION
Yellow-green mountains rose above us, thick clouds clinging to their peaks.Below, our truck sped along the Sacambaya valley's steep river ravine.One morning in April 2011, I travelled to the Cerro Sapo mine to meet its owner, a White Kenyan man named Rich.Martin, a mestizo mine owner in his 40s offered me a ride as he was heading there anyway to purchase a generator from Rich.Rich greeted us in the gravel parking lot.A slender, tall man in late 60s with a light complexion, a greying moustache, few teeth, and dark circles under his eyes, his voice was high-pitched and shaky, and his face quivered when he spoke.He had spent much of his childhood at his father's asbestos mine, and these days the daily handling of sodalite (a semi-radioactive gem) and a growing proclivity for drink seemed to have worn his body down.
The sodalite mine Cerro Sapo sits just off the main road dividing the two Bolivian states of Cochabamba and La Paz.A natural tectosilicate mineral with mild radioactive properties, the semiprecious gem sodalite has been mined in central Bolivia since the pre-Incan era (Schultz et al., 2004).I first learned about the mine while carrying out fieldwork in Ayopaya in 2011.One day I caught a ride in a municipal vehicle used to visit remote villages, when the driver-a Quechua man in his 40s employed in the mayor's office-pointed out the mine to me.Like other accounts I heard between 2010 and 2012, he cast these dense semitropical mountains as opaque sites of violence replete with secrets as well as gems, silver, and gold.Treasure chests contained stored carbon that would erupt upon exposure to oxygen, killing its would-be beneficiaries.Likewise, whenever foreigners, archaeologists, or well-heeled nationals came searching for it in four-wheel-drive SUVs or helicopters, the sky "opened up and ate" them, obscuring their view and obstructing their search with a dense, impenetrable fog.
Back at Cerro Sapo, Rich, Martin, and I headed to the quarry by foot, our bodies overshadowed by two rounded caves and beyond them, a much larger, deeper gash in the mountain.This gash was the entrance to a 40-foot cave, the outcome of Rich's efforts to extend the original "Inca mine" (Brendler, 1934).It went in about 40 yards, and inside flat shiny surfaces of blue, brown, and black stone swirled together.Using a flashlight, Martin inspected the wall before asking Rich if he had done a "mineral placement test."Rich responded no.Running his hand slowly over the rough surface, Martin explained that the White rock was "very good," indicating possible diamond formation.His optimism may seem unwarranted, except that his gold mine, inherited from his hacienda-owning grandfather, initially harvested only antimony, a grey semi-toxic heavy metal used in the production of lead pencils.With his mine under-performing, Martin implied that he and Rich could join forces and possibly make a fortune.
This article examines clashing expectations about the responsibilities of wealth, specifically sodalite, at the Cerro Sapo mine.Cerro Sapo, with its White Kenyan owner, was largely anomalous in that its current boss entered the region after the region's system of forced Indigenous (Quechua and Aymara) labor on hacienda farms ended (Figure 1).Following hacienda abolition in 1953, estate lands were largely redistributed or abandoned.However, the racial hierarchies that defined earlier servitude persist.Former master families still own farms and mines in the region, and Quechua families still labor in mines and, to a lesser degree, former haciendas.Like other rural parts of Bolivia, this region was also the target of modernizing reforms in the 1970s based on state support for the emigration of White foreigners, including from countries in Africa like Rich, in order to assimilate Indigenous peasants into markets.In what follows, I consider how Rich's efforts to capture untapped riches confronted heightened demands for aid from mineworkers and villagers, from which he sought to "escape."I describe Rich's fleeting availability to villagers and his auto-biographical emphasis on temporary residence and separation from kinship systems (Hoover, 2018).
This case raises broader questions about the ways that masculinity figures into processes of extraction and how it interacts with the use of sentiments as a part of extractive infrastructures and economies (Bosworth, 2022;Zhang, 2023).Renewed attention to affect usefully clarifies the ways that sentiments can operate to both bind people to exploitative systems but also as an anticolonial social relation that cuts through institutionalized forms of technical alienation-what I here refer to as a naturalized idea of minerals' detachment from place and people (Bosworth, 2022).My account builds from this work to highlight the racialized workings of affect in a scene of settler-Indigenous resource relations.In her analysis of "Whiteness as property," Cheryl Harris (1993) attended to the racialized constitution of property.Such privileges are both racialized and gendered.Following Weismantel (2001, 170), in the Andes colonial predation is built upon gendered and raced practices of violating (pishtar) rather than intrinsic subjective qualities or identity.In Rich's case, he sought to distance himself from an older model of colonial predation.Instead, he drew from a language of masculinist, self-made fortune in ways that shored up racial privileges-allowing him to contravene in redistributive practices common to the region.Despite this, Rich depended on family ties to obtain the mine and remained vulnerable to the demands for aid frequently made of White and mestizo bosses in the region.
Ayopaya, the region where Cerro Sapo sits and where I've carried out research since 2011, is a region defined by dramatic racialized disparities that are often synthesized in the figure of mineral wealth.Not only have Quechua residents and migrant mine laborers found state promises of Indigenous and peasant uplift through agrarian reform elusive (Winchell, 2020), but many laborers have faced dramatic poverty related to the reorganization of mining in the late 1980s and the continued affront to labor rights and protections since.In 1947, as labor militias and peasant unionists approached, many hacienda masters departed quickly on mule or horseback.They hid gold and silver in kitchen cupboards, grain pots, and flour tins, or buried it in the grey sands of the winding Sacambaya River.But the wealth did not merely dissolve into subterranean oblivion.Today, mestizo mine-owners there are primarily the kin of these late hacienda masters.Some Quechua residents unduly benefited from alliances with violent mestizos, further nourishing visions of mineral wealth as a risky enterprise (Nash, 1993;Weismantel, 2001).Here, as Cohen  F I G U R E  Entrance to Cerro Sapo mine, operated by Jesuits during the Spanish colonial period (Image from Ahlfeld & Wegner, 1931: 292).
(2014, 260) notes, "resource extraction is built on dangerous desires-gold fuels capitalist fantasies of lofty profits and economic development." The Cerro Sapo mine raises questions about the challenges facing expectations of detachment, what Melamed (2015) terms extractivism as a "racialized technology of antirelationality."In the Andes, mining has relied on the "traffic in women" both as a political economy of sex/gender and as the gendering of nature as female, as a resource to be exploited (Goldstein, 2022, 256;Rubin, 1975).During earlier fieldwork with former hacienda servants, they recounted that the most brutal overlords did not live at the residence but rather in the cities of Cochabamba, La Paz, and Oruro, instead relying on violent middle-managers to mete out violence (Winchell, 2022).Archival records at the Institúto Nacional de la Reforma Agraria in Cochabamba likewise reveal that reformers differentiated haciendas facing redistribution from "middle-size properties" depending on whether owners carried out manual labor (ibid).However cruel resident landlords were, workers perceived that the most violent hacendados were those who fostered spatial distance from the farm, from labor, and from (the demands of) laborers.Mestizo profit-seeking has been built upon a possessive traffic through, rather than belonging and accountability to, places and Indigenous (mainly-Quechua) residents.
My analysis of sodalite mining relations in Ayopaya draws from ethnographic and archival research carried out in Bolivia between March 2011 and March 2012. 1 Methodologically, I center one biographical story. 2 Doing so can add much-needed texture to scholarly understandings of a class of foreign industry or mine owners who often appear as monolithic "institutions" or "firms."Following Yanagisako (2002), I seek to disaggregate the figure of "the mine" or "mining company" to understand the slippages between what counts as formal economic activity and its relational underbelly (Appel, 2019;Mitchell, 2002).By looking at how Rich has navigated his sodalite business, his (downplayed) dependence on family connections and in particular his father, and his efforts to avoid the demands of residents and workers, I highlight how sentiments guide mining activities in this region.If sentiments can operate as an "affective infrastructure" for mining and extractivism at large (Bosworth, 2022;Zhang, 2023), the Cerro Sapo case shows how such sentiments are calibrated by demands for accountability that emerge out of tenacious histories of labor violence.Here, sentiments are features of affective infrastructure that constitute what Bosworth (2022, 55) calls an "inbetween zone" that mediates relations and directs "systems and subjects along certain pathways potentially aligned with or in opposition to the conditions of capitalist political economy."Sentiments index "capacities to affect and be affected" across bodies, histories, and scales (Bosworth, 2022, 56 citing Spinoza, 1985, 493); such capacities and not the technological alone necessarily constitute infrastructures but also extractive processes.
Attention to how a regional labor past shapes mining in Ayopaya enriches scholarly studies of accountability as an affect produced through bureaucratic norms but also by the ways communities take up and redeploy the law (Li, 2009(Li, , 2011;;Welker, 2009;Zhang, 2023).While extractivist infrastructures (such as militarized mining barracks, plantation rows of agriculture, or the homogenization of labor through slave law) are often defined by a focus on replicability over time and space (Degani, 2022;Tsing et al., 2019;Wolford, 2021Wolford, , 1628)), in this case affect as a resource central to extractivist infrastructures spills over such modular simplifications.And while the architects of accountability, much like the designers of extractivist infrastructures, may covet generalizability, their workings remain "patchy" and can foster slippages of imposed structure and existing ground (Hirsch, 2017;Li, 2013;Tsing et al., 2019).As Schuster (2021, 592) suggests, attention to such emergences or "weediness" offers a "heuristic for multiple overlapping kinds of speculation" in troubled landscapes.Cerro Sapo remained party tangled up with Indigenous claims related to Ayopaya's hacienda past, even as its owner Rich purchased the mine after hacienda abolition and despite the mine's cutting-edge equipment.This case exposes the challenges facing the conversion of inhabited landscapes into discrete minerals and resources, a resistance that, unlike Marx's "secret" at the heart of commodities, does not originate only in modular languages of global right. 3 I begin with a compressed history of Bolivia's mining sector, which reveals the centrality of economic integration to modernizing projects to assimilate Indigenous populations as citizens and (paid) workers.I then turn to Rich's profit-seeking activities at the Cerro Sapo mine, which rely upon triangulated family connections across Europe (Italy, Germany, Russia), Africa (Kenya, Zambia, South Africa), and South American Bolivia.Rich occupied an unusual place in this geo-political landscape, his foreignness proving key in his efforts to evade Quechua families' demands for land and resources.These efforts to "escape" demands for assistance from mining families and locals point to the "spatialization of White supremacy" as the drawing of boundary lines between mine and community that also "dispossess people of color of land and turn their bodies into devalued pollution sinks" (Ybarra, 2021, 39;Zhang, 2023).However, my discussion complicates more absolute understandings of dispossession, which at times treat the proponents of extraction as mere pawns of capital (Welker, 2009, 166).As we shall see, Indigenous Quechua residents also drew upon expectations of elite redistribution to challenge Rich's claims to the mine, thereby rendering this boundary aspirational at best.

MINERAL ENTANGLEMENTS AND HISTORICIZED AFFECT IN BOLIVIA
Jesuit missionaries began using Incan gold mines even before the territorial boundaries between Portuguese and Spanish colonies were established (Herzog, 2015).Before that, the Incas worked mines in Ayopaya's river valleys.At that time, gold, silver, and gems circulated as forms of divine tribute, understood as gifts from natural spirits to religious and political leaders.Minerals were also used in complex systems of gifting and counter-gifting on the part of kurakas (Indigenous lords) who used community mines as sources of tribute and of gifts of precious metal to the king (Sallnow, 1989, 225).Gems from the Cerro Sapo mine travelled in extensive precolonial trade networks, with beads circulating as far as Quito (Ecuador) and Tucuman (Argentina) (Ahlfeld & Wegner, 1931).Despite early colonial reform efforts, minga workers or kajchas (silver thieves) continued to lay claim to abandoned or leftover chunks of ore, la corpa, in the colonial era, a practice which augmented their salary in a system like mineral-based sharecropping (Absi, 2005;Barragán, 2017).
Between 1500 and 1800, the Latin American region produced approximately 150,000 tons of silver, or about 80 percent of the world's production (Barragán, 2017, 193, see also the Introduction to this special issue).In the latter half of the 16th century alone, 60 percent of this came from Potosí's mines, supported by Indigenous labor (Barragán, 2017, 194).But despite the dramatic scale and scope of Spanish and Portuguese mining, extraction was not only a colonial enterprise.Prior to Spanish conquest, Bolivia's silver, lead, and tin mines were controlled by Incan overlords, with extensive metallurgy predating Inca expansion under the Tiwanaku state (Murra, 2017, 11).Following Barragán (2017) and Absi (2005), the relation between these two mining economies was not one of a clean cut or disjuncture.Rather, colonial mining practices incorporated formal tribute categories elaborated under Incan rule (such as rotating labor service or the mit' a) and Indigenous communities also drew from longstanding economic and social forms to remake and soften the severity of new colonial labor regimes (Barragán, 2017, 194).
These gave way not to sheer proletarianization but rather to the coexistence of different labor forms, including the "combination of free and unfree labor" (Barragán, 2017;Winchell, 2020).Rather than a dual system of free (independent minga workers) and unfree (coerced mita workers), there were overlapping labor systems in which the same subject could be both self-employed (as a silver processor or thief, k' ajcha), a seasonal forced laborer (mitayo), and a paid worker (minga).Moreover, many miners retained links to their ayllu communities of origin (Barragán, 2017, 194-95, Murra, 2017;Nash, 1993).Into the present, Indigenous cooperative miners often combine occasional mining with continued agriculture, as agro-mineros (Marston, 2019: 822).This coexistence of different labor systems means that extraction remains an unsettled matter, shot through with competing ideas of in/alienability (Perreault, 2013;Postero, 2017).Here industrial mining did not bring about absolute shifts in labor, minerals, and workers into more atomized entities (de la Cadena, 2015;Li, 2013).This suggests that minerals are not neutral forms, but also can retain connotations such as of redistributive duty-what I elsewhere call "economies of obligation"-at odds with discrete ideas of capital (Ramirez, 2005;Sallnow, 1989;Winchell, 2017).This makes Bolivia a compelling site from which to rethink monolithic accounts of colonialism in relation to racialized extraction (Chao, 2022).
In Latin America, scholars have highlighted the ethical connotations of mining activities related to pre-and early colonial circulations of gems, metals, and ore but also efforts to revive and maintain continuities with those forms (Absi, 2005;Barragán, 2017;Ferry, 2002Ferry, , 2005;;Francescone, 2015;Harris, 1995;Marston, 2019Marston, , 2019b)).Ferry (2002, 331), building from fieldwork with miners at the Santa Fe cooperative in Mexico, examined how people negotiate shifting regimes of value.Competing forms of value, including a relative emphasis on alienability or inalienability, here belong to "a historical process rather than [a] fixed scheme of incompatible categories" (Ferry, 2002, 333;Harris, 1995, 234-39).For cooperative miners silver arises both as "inalienable patrimony" to be passed down from father to son, and as a commodity that can be exchanged or sold (Ferry, 2002, 339).This points to ways of reconstituting minerals in ''order to fleetingly resolve the issue of the tension between inalienability and commodification (Ferry, 2002, 346).In/alienability is not an intrinsic quality of things or a reified cultural paradigm, but an outcome of ongoing ethical deliberations and claims (Ferry, 2002, 351;Winchell, 2022, 238).
As elsewhere (Auyero, 2001;Ferraro, 2004;Li, 2015;Wolford, 2021), in Ayopaya Quechua residents often sought out mining bosses for financial support including infrastructural projects (water, electrification, and transport) and as religious sponsors (Winchell, 2017(Winchell, , 2022)).While condemning the greed and avarice of White and mestizo 4 bosses, villagers also implied that wealth could be redemptive where elites honored the duties stemming from a privileged position in a racial hierarchy (Leinaweaver, 2008;Weismantel, 2001).Cruel, greedy landlords (whose kin own many small-scale mines today) were perceived as the most extreme figures of predation and greed.Just as owners are the kin of landlords, many Indigenous miners-male and mainly in their teens and early twenties-are the grandchildren of hacienda workers (Winchell, 2022).Into the present, mine-owners' failed accountability to these workers has fueled lawsuits and armed opposition, roadblocks, and attempted lynchings.In fact, Cerro Sapo's owner survived an attempted lynching.
Bosses-however cruel or evil-were also at-times companions, sponsors, godparents, and even kin.Following Leinaweaver (2008), care practices are here slippery and double-edged, folded into existing structures of violence and hierarchy.These forms of hierarchy are at once sexed and raced: racial oppression has been gendered and, as elsewhere, shored up through the implementation of the family as a boundary-making institutions that separates the private from the public (Scott, 2017;Weismantel, 2001).Such intersecting systems of gender and race insubordination condition mining activities, mining arising as a site of feminized precarity but also of gendered self-making (Cohen, 2014;Ferry, 2011;Li & Paredes Peñafiel, 2019, 222;Marston, 2021;Rolston, 2014).
These slippages complicate portraits of resource extraction as a colonial invention (Taussig, 1980), or a force expanding into passive landscapes (Bebbington & Bury, 2013;cf. Marston, 2021).In the Andes as in other colonies, economic assimilation into "global" (early colonial) markets constituted a key dimension of the civilizational promise of European imperialism (Pagden, 1995, 20).Into the 20th century, state support for resource mining on the part of White settlers belonged to government efforts to modernize agriculture by converting Indigenous peasants into industrial workers.Under General Banzer 5 (1971)(1972)(1973)(1974)(1975)(1976)(1977)(1978), and with financial assistance from the United States and Germany, Bolivia's government encouraged White immigration from Namibia, Zimbabwe Rhodesia, and South Africa to develop "unsettled" agricultural lands. 6Settlers-like Rich-were made owners of agrarian estates near "non-integrated" Indigenous populations, who were to find paid work on these farms.This would secure rural communities' absorption within monetized, contract-based markets, and, where people resisted, they faced brutal labor suppression (Nash, 1993, xi).
Assimilationist economic policies have been challenged by Indigenous and peasant movements in Bolivia, yet mining is also appropriated and reconfigured as an Indigenous activity (Francescone, 2015;Hirsch, 2017;Marston, 2019).Mining cooperatives are crucial political instruments in Indigenous movements for resources, land, and labor. 7For instance, in March 2014, Bolivia's Deputy Chamber approved a new mining law, the Proyecto de Ley Minera, already modified by the Deputies to prevent cooperatives from signing contracts of association with private companies (Article 151).The National Federation of Mining Cooperatives of Bolivia (FENCOMIN) demanded that the law be revoked and restored to the original version which had permitted such contracts with private companies.Two months later, after nation-wide blockages organized by FENCOMIN, a revised Mining and Metallurgy Law #535 was signed, forbidding cooperatives to sign contracts with private companies, national or foreign, but allowing them to form "mixed companies with the State via Comibol" (Francescone, 2015, 746).The media presented cooperative miners as "mini-capitalists" and "traitors" who sought self-benefit through associations with private capital (Francescone, 2015, 746;Marston, 2019).This overlooks how cooperative miners make up a "precarious and humiliated," largely Indigenous (Quechua and Aymara) labor force that has expanded dramatically since 2000 (Francescone, 2015, 749).
While historically a colonial archetype of imperial violence, in Bolivia mining is imbued with anti-colonial sentiment and political force.Many Bolivian Indigenous-majority political and labor organizations (like FENCOMIN) have not sought to do away with mining activities but rather to reconfigure rural mining economies to afford workers greater control over the terms of labor and pay.This insight helps specify the stakes of rural disputes about gold, silver, and sodalite mining in Ayopaya, a place transformed by earlier state programs of settler modernization under Banzer.In Ayopaya sodalite has long circulated in vast networks of political and religious gifting in the pre-and Incan eras (Ahlfeld & Wegner, 1931).While Cerro Sapo has pre-Incan origins (Petrov, 2009), today its sodalite is bought and sold in global trade networks.One online mineral website pictures a sodalite bead, listed for 375 USD (Figure 2): "hand-carved and smoothed over 600 years ago by the great Inca civilization, this sodalite bead was used to unite logic with intuition". 8This highlights how sodalite's value is not based only on distance from place and history but rather draws from racialized geographies while absenting the people who inhabit and have struggled for such territories (see Summers, 2019).
In Ayopaya efforts to detach extractivism from regional histories of labor violence such as Rich's were hard to uphold given obvious continuities binding haciendas and mines (Winchell 2017(Winchell , 2022)).Mine relations in this region, as with neighboring Potosí, are marked by an "extended feeling of uneasiness, accumulated across generations" and related to a sense of the "perpetual state of periphery" (Oporto, 2015cited by Francescone, 2015, 754;Winchell, 2020Winchell, , 2023)).Such "extended feeling" highlights the need to historicize affect as an extractivist infrastructure.In the face of feelings not only of unease but also resentment and impatience (ibid), villagers and workers have demanded that Rich honor features of older aid patterns between Quechua villagers and mestizo bosses.Here, as in Peru, the "activation of memories and stories in a moment of disruption […] challenges the mining company's version of events" (Parades Peñafiel & Li, 2019, 314).Rich refuted these attachments-sodalite's ties to inhabited landscapes and enduring histories of Indigenous marginality and underpaid labor-even as his profits depended upon them.

MASCULINITY AND THE INSTABILITIES OF DISCRETE CAPITAL
Rich's mine faced extreme opposition from Indigenous neighbors over the years, including an ongoing dispute about Rich's long-term plans to construct an airstrip.Elsewhere in the region, community opposition to private mine-owners hinged also on gender violence, a concern shared by many communities living near mining infrastructures (Cohen, 2014;Goldstein, 2022).In Ayopaya, unlike Amazonian frontier spaces, mines brought predacious men who threatened existing norms of gender propriety.For instance, in 2012 local community concerns escalated concerning the alleged rape of an elderly woman at a nearby mine.This led to an armed stand-off in which Quechua peasant unionists 9 blocked roads, preventing the mine-owner and mine workers to pass (Winchell, 2022).The accused died from injuries incurred during a physical confrontation with the victim's son.Such cases cemented local views of mines as dangerous places that were especially risky for women.
While it was true that mines brought urban men with exploitative orientations to local women, this portrait overlooks women's centrality to mine-work not simply as potential sexual victims but also as workers, including providers of companionship and affection.Larger mines in Potosí have women miners (Barragán Romano, 2017), but even mines where women do not work as miners rely heavily on female labor as maids, wives, or live-in girlfriends, which easily slip into licit and illicit sexual and affective economies (Appel, 2019).In such "frontier" spaces, as Cohen (2014, 261-62) discusses, "women-non White, mobile, working in a predominantly masculine domain, [become] part of an extractive infrastructure, their bodies enabling the circulation of money and gold."Women "provide sexual calm and leisurely distraction to an unsettled (i.e., outside of family life and not attached to the land) and potentially violent workforce" (262).Expanding Cohen's (2014, 262) attention to the historical construction of female sexuality and how it shaped women miners' access to mines and control over labor, here I consider how Rich fostered a sort of detached asexuality by which he sought to distinguish himself from the bad old days of hacienda and mine violators.
Unlike mines such as the one in neighboring Kuti, Rich's operation was marked by the dramatic absence of women, not only as domestic maids, sex-workers, or partners but also as family members and wives.When we spoke, Rich made no mention either of partners or female kin, noting only that his father had bequeathed him the quarry and that his father had owned extractive companies in South Africa and then Zambia.He was also careful to avoid any reference to his or my gender; our conversations notably did not include stereotyped cliches or jokes about my femininity, my marital status, or my desire-jokes to which I had become inured during research.In his office adjacent to the sodalite processing plant, Rich described how he came to work here.He began at the place of his birth, Kenya, in 1957.After 15 years, he explained, "we left because the government nationalized all of the companies.My father had a pen factory.We left for South Africa, where I lived from 1972 to 1991.From there I came to Bolivia.We had a mine that he sold at that time.My father said, 'It's time to move on.'Nelson Mandela had just come out of jail, and so [my father] came to Bolivia and fell in love with it and built the company."Love here is a sentiment expressed for the nations where self-making and fortune can flourish unencumbered.
It seemed Rich's father pursued business ventures in countries whose political regimes would facilitate the gains of White foreigners.Such knowledge travelled rather by word of mouth among family friends.As Rich explained, "My father had a black granite mine in Africa, and he was talking to a Chilean geologist in Italy when he was visiting family and the man told him about this old Inca mine.I lived here four years and then left and went to Zambia.I was working in emerald mining there."Why did he come back, I wondered?"I came back because my father was sick and then died.I had to take over or else sell."He continued, now implying the success of the business since that time: "We export sodalite to Italy, the US.It's used in Germany a lot, also China, and Saudi Arabia."Gems leave, but machinery arrives, imported from Italy and Sweden.His was the "first mine of this type" as he used "diamond wire to cut away the mountain," while others still used "old techniques, blasting everything away" with dynamite.The mine's reliance on mostly-machine labor allowed him to operate with a severely limited labor force of five people, all of them male.
Despite its design, the mine's location is in a former hacienda province inhabited predominately by Quechua and Aymara agriculturalists, and his own pale, lean frame, marked Rich as a White newcomer, and unwelcome at that.Chain smoking at his sodalite desk in the office near the quarry's processing plant, Rich recalled an earlier conflict, "I remember coming from Cochabamba in the early years, and I had a car accident in Charahuayto.This young man on a motorcycle was hurt, and we had to drive him all the way to Cochabamba to the hospital there.And when I came through again, the whole pueblo was there waiting.They stopped me.They wanted to lynch me.But then two people recognized me and saved my life."Rich imagined himself as exemplarily mobile, attached to landscapes only insofar that they might yield profits, yet it was "recognition" by two villagers that saved him from an attempted lynching.
After this, a second dispute arose concerning Rich's plans to construct a landing strip to facilitate mineral transport as he holds a pilot license.I explained to Rich that I' d heard about local opposition to the airstrip related to residents' worries that he would take away all the mineral wealth.He responded wryly, "I take the riches away by truck all the same."The unfinished air strip is now a sandy gnash on the top of the nearby mountain, not far from the enclosure used to torture villagers under Banzer.At that time, the military helicopters had hovered ominously above.Our conversation was interrupted when Martin came in to make coffee.Rich shared the story with him.As he repeated, "I extract the riches in trucks anyway," they laughed heartily.Martin explained, "In these parts, things get very distorted."Distortion here was used to connote Indigenous opposition to settler designs for unobstructed extraction.
Tracing Rich's position allows us to identify how precise actors reproduce and benefit from systems of racial capital, in this way contravening in the disaggregation of blame and guilt by distributed ideas of harm (cf.Graeter, 2020, 27).This contributes to understanding what Welker (2009, 143) calls the "moral commitments of 'political Others' who violently defend capital" as a key part of how "global capitalism is constituted and sustained."Rich's positioning points to a liminal settler subject whose own body and person carried traces of a childhood spent at unregulated mines and who identified as a mobile settler following pathways of potential profit.Yet despite this proclaimed independence, Rich knew people at the local government and was seen by villagers through the figure of a generic mestizo patron.He claimed he' d even been asked to run for mayor.Moreover, he recounted: "The last time that Evo came, did you see, I was there talking to him, giving him a present.The mayor was drunk, and Evo was angry with him as he forgot to send the trucks to pick people up and so there was no one there.So, I gave him a gift."This gift was a sodalite figure from the quarry.Martin asked whether Rich came to town for high school graduation ceremonies, boasting that he had sponsored two graduates.Rich shook his head, "No.I escape when they want something." Rich necessarily had to negotiate widespread expectations that fair-skinned newcomers act as godparents and sponsors for Indigenous Quechua families (Winchell, 2022).Despite Martin's family's position as former hacienda owners, he was sought after as a godfather to Quechua worker families.Other mestizo mine-owners also acted as sponsors for q' oas or animal sacrifices at their mines.Likely to appease heightened union mobilizing against the mine, Martin's neighbor René (also a mestizo mining boss) had sponsored a q' oa.This involved the slaughter and offering of a bull to El Tio, a figure associated with the devil and felt to harbor the capacity to release or withhold mineral from the mountain (Figure 3).Martin, however, found such practices repugnant, noting that "Peasants need science, not superstition!"In the face of widespread practices of mestizo aid and sponsorship, Rich's effort to "escape" is noteworthy.He was however still hooked into rural political hierarchies.Mining ventures involve "strange bedfellows," unexpected alliances that complicate deterministic paradigms of "neoliberal natures" (De Freitas et al., 2015, 242).
Partly by virtue of being foreign, Rich imagined he could exist outside such exchange configurations.Narrating his own life through fleeting stays, countries arose primarily as sites for business ventures, nothing more.In this regard, dwindling profits at the mine and broader political challenges to foreign mine ownership worried him.Legislative norms introduced by the MAS party in 2011, and passed in 2014, provided avenues for "nationalizing" mines, requiring private mines owned by foreigners be converted into collectives co-owned by local workers.Rich remarked on booming foreign interest in Bolivian gemstones and precious metals but complained that Morales's socialist platform had "scared investors" away.Such legal challenges to "free trade" posed risks to Rich's business, founded as it was on an effort to avoid countries marked by friction from resistant laborers and labor-sympathetic governments (Appel, 2019, 4).
This anxiety showed.According to those who knew him in Ayopaya, he spent evenings drinking alone.On our drive back to Independencia from Rich's quarry, Martin noted wistfully, "Mining has its social cost.It makes you sick.You become an alcoholic or an anti-social."He paused, as if emphasizing the benefits of this stance."But with Rich there aren't problems.He simply stays in his house and doesn't scream at people, like René does."The first time Martin came to Rich's mine, Rich had cautioned him against mining: "You will be rich, but don't expect to have someone to wake up next to every morning."Martin's own growing taste for drink was a public secret.A woman who sold him his alcohol remarked to me that he used to drink one bottle of liquor a week, but now it is three, "He's not well."These assessments recall Quechua relational ideals that stigmatize the orphan or the discrete subject (waqcha) as figures of ultimate abjection and moral failure (Leinaweaver, 2008).
Hence while Rich painted himself as a modern success story, the international entrepreneur who brings modernization to the Bolivian backwaters, for some Quechua locals he embodied the risks of capital as unencumbered extraction, the mining life that makes you sick and ends in a lonely death.Here as elsewhere singledom continued to carry stigma, likely related both to the predominance of Roman Catholicism as well as Bolivian state policies that reserved land rights for married men, in this way yoking "settled, family life" to "the morality of law-abiding and productive citizens" (Cohen, 2014, 267).Given this arc of heterosexuality's centrality to production, it was striking that none of the mine-owners (all male) I met in Ayopaya were in conjugal partnerships.This suggests a revision to Cohen's argument, situated in Columbia, that the elite "investment in whitening" occurs "through adherence to patriarchal and heteronormative conjugal relations" (ibid).More broadly, it implies that in this region the stigmatized departure from conjugal norms is more of a risk for women.
Rich's "modern" industrial equipment and labor routines, as well as his solitary travel across continents and from city to countryside, point to a form of self-crafting based on detachment.Rich normalized a set of masculinized virtues and vices (detachment, self-reliance, alcoholism) that elided the relational underpinnings of profit-the fact that he and his father had sought out national settings that were conducive to White profiteering and mineral extraction and export.As he narrated a childhood overseas driven by profits, Rich evaded the question of how his own White (Italian-descendent) Kenyan family benefitted from systems of racial capital, and why Nelson Mandela's release from prison required they abandon their South African business.This elision was achieved also by erasing women-female kin, women workers, maids, partners, and sex workers-to affirm mines as discrete places determined by men's naturalized desires for profit.Embodying such atomized masculinity in his very person, Rich contested Indigenous demands for accountability within inherited redistributive systems.
As government proposals to limit private ownership of mines increased in the years 2010-2012, Quechua residents in this region took up legal action as well as direct action against foreign-and mestizo-owned mines (Winchell, 2022).Their aim was to "collectivize" such mines, or in other cases co-ownership by peasant unions and mestizo owners.As a sodalite quarry rather than a gold or silver mine, Rich was spared much of these attacks.Nonetheless, his mine had had faced opposition (described above).And so, the peasant union pressed sympathetic officials of the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo) municipal government to block the project.Such possibilities for union input on municipal projects were a new thing, however.Wilder continued, noting how Manfred Reyes Villa, the previous governor of Cochabamba (2006-2008, re-elected in 2021), "escaped with all the money from the bridge in Sacambaya."According to locals, Manfred pocketed funds earmarked for constructing a bridge across the Sacambaya River (Figure 4).In 2011, only the posts of the bridge stood eerily in the river, an infrastructural artifact of escaped moneys.
Changes like these since 2005 made men like Rich and Martin nervous.Mestizo and White men in the region had been lynched or faced attempted lynchings in broad daylight (Winchell, 2022).Now, Martin always carried a rifle.Rich, however, seemed to believe that his foreign-ness could insulate him from harm, at least until the attempted lynching.Perhaps aware of longstanding opposition to Martin's gold mine, Rich was hesitant about collaborating.Avoiding a firm verbal commitment, during their conversation about pursuing gold extraction at Cerro Sapo he repeated to Martin several times, "This is a big investment."Stepping away from the quarry, Rich and Martin joined me at the edge of a steep overhang, the watery gurgle of cascades above.Martin commented that the sheen in the cave was likely just pyrite or fool's gold anyway.Undeterred, he offered to conduct a mineral placement test.This would require a sample of stone.A 4 or 5-m-long cut from deeper within the cave wall would do the trick.Rich acquiesced, and they arranged to meet in 3 weeks.Martin, a licensed environmental engineer, planned to test the sample for gold and diamond content at his home, in his late grandfather's workshop in the former hacienda estate (Figure 5).
From Zambia's emerald mines to a Kenyan asbestos mine, Rich narrated a life in search of unobstructed lines of profit, fleeting stays in countries free of political turmoil or racialized affronts to he and his father's persons and business.Capitalist speculation here rested on alliances in which individual men secured profits by drawing upon and then erasing their dependence on Indigenous and feminized forms of labor and knowledge (Elena García, 2021;Schuster, 2015).But Rich's avoidance of relations with Ayopayan villagers and workers went against existing economies of obligation (Winchell, 2017) in the region.In Ayopaya, sodalite continued to act as an auspicious gift to allies and as a marker of racial privilege.In the 1950s, union leaders who worked with mestizo landlords were gifted an impressive pair of sodalite benches as a reward for their "resolving" of land disputes.Likewise, Martin's estate (a former hacienda) in neighboring Sarahuayto also held a sodalite table.Despite Rich's careful avoidance, he, his mine, and the mineral sodalite were imbricated in such hierarchies and histories.Not only was he called upon to participate in long-run mestizo-Indigenous political alliances, but his mine's fortune relied on family ties, repressive governments, and racialized structures of labor belied by the portrait of a lonely alcoholic.

CONCLUDING REMARKS
The Cerro Sapo sodalite mine points to disagreements about the responsibilities of wealth in central Bolivia.Extending Hannah Appel's (2019) attention to the spatial orientations of distance in contemporary oil production in Guinea and recent approaches to "affective infrastructure" (Bosworth, 2022;Zhang, 2023), I have traced the relational and biographical production of distance as a material and relational disposition.Rich cast himself as an entrepreneur with no romantic or family ties, except to his father from whom he inherited the mine.Doing so served to normalize his own disposition toward Indigenous neighbors and laborers, one premised on efforts to "escape" requests for support.This highlights how the isolating of the sites of extractivism takes work.The barrack, the labor camp, the "firm": these are not a priori cut off from local circuits of exchange but must be made so as an achievement of relation, or in this case, of its celebrated denial (cast by Rich in a language of "escape").In pathologizing that esteemed isolation, Quechua residents contested liberal fantasies of markets unhinged from earlier labor violence and accompanying obligations, human and otherwise.
The racialized and gendered workings of mineral wealth in Ayopaya complicate familiar arguments that pit Indigenous peoples against extraction.Rather than cast Indigenous workers as inherently opposed to mining or extractivism, I have asked what distinguishes sanctioned from transgressive mining relations, and how minerals' detachment from place (what we could call alienability as a value) is both naturalized and contested.Doing so allows insight into how "capitalism plays out on the ground" (Welker, 2009, 168) through capture and conversion as well as its unsteady coexistence with "divergent life projects" (Bear et al., 2015).This approach counters "the universalization of the geos" as inert matter, challenging the ideas of racialized passivity on which capitalism has depended (Tironi cited in Oguz, 2020;Winchell, 2022).Rich's biographical itinerary and its importance for his orientation to Quechua neighbors instead illuminate the unsteady processes by which ideals of settler detachment and resource detachment are naturalized, shoring up White superiority based on the disavowal of Quechua redistributive demands.Where minerals, commodities, or capital appear intrinsically detached, this is an outcome of ongoing efforts to disentangle people and things from history and place (Hoover, 2018;Winchell, 2023), in this case, the drawing of boundary lines between the economic and the relational through a language of masculinist fortune.
Rich's case should caution scholars against overstating the inexorability of capitalist ontologies, including of commodities, extraction, and even corporate accountability (Chao, 2022;Marston, 2021).If extractivism depends not only on material but also affective infrastructures (Winchell, 2017;Zhang, 2023), mine owners like Rich must produce not just profit but also sentiments of obligation, answerability, and historical accountability.Rather than being mandated from above, say through corporate accountability law, at Cerro Sapo such affects hinged on Rich's adherence to a set of relational demands that had grown out of Quechua negotiations of earlier hacienda subjection.More broadly, this case offers insight into mining industries' continuities with, and revisions to, colonial structures of violence and exchange.Re-attuning our analyses to the instabilities facing commodification requires more precise accounts of extraction in which its activities are situated in particular places and times.We can thereby appreciate how extractivist practices rarely achieve an absolute break-that fetish of modularity and simplificationfrom the lands, bodies, people, nonhumans, and claims that co-inhabit those places.The force of such accrued affects in Ayopaya expose capitalism's double-edged entanglements with its would-be outside.Such continuities of sentiment hold the possibility to perpetuate, but also to disrupt, enduring structures of racial violence.

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I G U R E  Incan sodalite bead for sale on Sands of Time website (https://sandsoftimedc.com/products/s1904). Used with permission.

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I G U R E  Q' oa offering for El Tio, Kuti mine, Ayopaya, 2012 (photo by Author).

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I G U R E  Abandoned bridge posts dot the Sacambaya River, Ayopaya 2011 (photo by Author).

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I G U R E  Home laboratory for conducting mineral tests, Ayopaya, 2011 (photo by Author).