Field trip to an Arizona copper mine on January 29, 2020 as part of international seminar ‘Resource Extraction: Impacts, Resistance and Conflict Resolution’

As part of the international seminar from January 27-29,‘Resource Extraction: Impacts, Resistance and Conflict Resolution’, sponsored and organized by staff from the Udall Center of the University of Arizona; the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), iGlobes and LabExDRIIHM, a field trip was organized to the ASARCO Mission Mine and Discovery Center in Sahuarita, Arizona.Udall Center staff Dr. Stephanie Buechler and Molli Bryson joined seminar participants including Dr. America Lutz-Ley, COLSON professor and former graduate student and post doc with the Udall Center and with Arid Lands program at the University of Arizona as well as French colleagues and Edith Kauffer from CIESAS in Chiapas, Mexico.

The open-pit mine is 1,400 feet deep and stretches two miles from north to south.The ASARCO mine (primarily copper is extracted there) is owned by Grupo Mexico, the same owner as a mine studied by Lutz-Ley and Buechler in Sonora, Mexico (for their forthcoming 2020 journal article: Mining and Women in Northwest Mexico: A Feminist Political Ecology Approach to Impacts on Rural Livelihoods. Human Geography, special issue “Gendered everyday resistance to the extractive industry.”).

The group learned about the different processes involved in copper mining and where the copper and other ore extracted is sent afterwards for smelting Hayden, Arizona).