Mining in the Sierra Madre Comes Back with a Vengeance
The mining boom is also rumbling through other northern states
whose most dominant geographic feature are the two Sierra Madre mountain ranges –Occidental in
the west and Oriental in the east - that run north-south through
north-central Mexico. These include the border state of Coahuila and the
northern arid states of Durango and Zacatecas, among others.
Sonora leads Mexico in the number of mining permits and
production. Reflecting the national trend, Canadian firms dominate the foreign
mining sector, while the Mexico-based Grupo México is by the largest producer –
mainly because of its copper and molybdenum mines and processing plants in the
northern municipios of Cananea and Nacozari.[1]
Aerial view of Buenavista Copper Mine in Cananea /Servicio Geológico Mexicano
From the beginning of post-Colombian history, mining has vied with
agriculture has Sonora’s top wealth-producing industry. The political and
economic elite of Sonora made their homes in the southeastern town of Álamos,
the northernmost of the Spanish empire’s silver towns in Latin America.
The ostentatious wealth and political power of Álamos would,
however, not been possible without the bounty of the indigenous agricultural
communities of the Sonora, Mayo, and Yaqui River basins that hugged the Sierra
Madre Occidental to the north and those of the Yaqui and Mayo deltas to the
northwest and west.
Unlike the Spanish conquistadores, colonizers, and mining ventures,
the Jesuit missionaries sought out the indigenous communities of Sonora because
of their farming traditions and their belief that the Jesuits could improve
their living conditions through improved farming techniques. The mining centers
of Nueva Vizcaya (northern territory that encompassed Sonora) and the Jesuit
missions (and the associated indigenous communities) experienced a
complementary yet conflictive relationship.
Ruins of Jesuit mission in Cucurpe to the east of Magdalena / Photo by Tom Barry
Complementary because the silver and gold mines depended on forced
indigenous labor and on the food produced by the native communities.
Conflictive because of Jesuit and indigenous resistance to the demands, taxes,
and repression of the mining-based power centered in Álamos. As the political
and economic power of the Jesuit missions grew – based largely on the
agricultural wealth of their missions among indigenous communities – tensions
mounted, leading to expulsion of the order in 1767 and the takeover by the more
politically and economically compliant Franciscans of the Jesuit missions.
In 1993, before the current mining boom took hold of Sonora,
historian and geographer Robert C. West observed: “In eastern Sonora the
ephemerality of the colonial mining centers in the mountains contrasts strongly
with the permanence of the mission villages in the adjacent
river valleys.[2]
Over the past two decades, however, the new mining industry’s
monstrous excavations and mountains of tailings, along with the associated
environmental contamination and water consumption, have become the eastern
Sonora’s most striking and alarming features of the landscape of this region
known as La Serrana – the highlands in marked contrast to the Sonoran Desert
and coastal plains.
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