When
Where
Center for Latin American Studies, Spring 2024 Charlas con Café – a weekly space to hear lectures from a wide variety of experts and discuss topics relevant to the Latin American region, Fridays from 1-2 pm (unless otherwise specified). Coffee & snacks starting at 12:30pm!
"Your book is like a sword I can use to defend myself when I sit across the table from the mining companies and negotiate.” These were the words utilized by an indigenous woman to describe what my book Embracing the Anaconda meant to her. As a leader of the Atacameño-Lickanantay Peoples whose water resources have been extracted for over a century by mining companies in northern Chile, the book she said, “was proof that this history happened to us, and we didn’t make it up.” During my 2023-24 sabbatical leave, I had the privilege to travel to Chile and participate in a book tour of the Spanish edition of my work entitled, El Abrazo de la Anaconda. In this talk, I will address the impacts my research has had according to some of the indigenous community members that came to listen to my presentations in Calama and Likantatay. The Atacameño-Lickanantay communities continue to fight for their rights and recognition ever since I met them more than twenty years ago. Today they find themselves involved in the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for the expansion of the Distrito Ministro Hales (DMH) mining project that will operate in the heart of Calama mining town. The book El Abrazo de la Anaconda inscribed in writing the oral history of the relationships between the mining company and indigenous peoples of the Atacama desert, offering them an important tool to defend themselves in the midst of DMHs imminent expansion.
Presenter: Dr. Anita Carrasco, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Luther College.
Anita Carrasco is an environmental anthropologist and Professor of Anthropology at Luther College, USA. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology with a concentration in applied anthropology from the University of Arizona in 2011. For almost two decades, her research has focused on community relations with the mining industry and the significance of indigenous and industrial water rights in this relationship in the Atacama Desert of Chile. Her ethnography, Embracing the Anaconda: A Chronicle of Atacameño Life and Mining in the Andes, was published in 2020 by Lexington Books, Rowman & Littlefield. In 2024, the academic publisher Pehuén released a second edition of the Spanish version of her book under the title, El Abrazo de la Anaconda. Crónica de la vida Atacameña, Minería, y Agua en los Andes. The publication of Carrasco's book received funding from the Center for Intercultural and Indigenous Research (CIIR), a respected research center seeking to provide Chile with high-level studies of problems of intercultural relations, with an interdisciplinary, holistic perspective, supporting dialogue and respect for cultural diversity.