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Disciplines: Geography
Region: Borderlands
Chapter: Hermosillo
Mining in the transboundary Sonoran Desert is one of the most important components of the socio-economic identity of the region, even explaining the origins of many human settlements in both Sonora and Arizona. Mining today is very different from that in the 19th or early 20th centuries; it depends more on specialized knowledge and technological capacities than on physical effort, which in part has facilitated participation of women in the sector. This is critical for rural households that lack access to resources to pursue an agrarian livelihood, and has the potential to alter gendered power relationships, as well as social and economic organization within households and communities. Mining today also responds to a global market for materials that is volatile and dynamic, fostering more significant changes in the landscape and intense resource extraction that could also impact rural gendered livelihoods. This project applies a double exposure framework combined with feminist political ecology to answer the question of what the nature and scope of gendered impacts of mining are in socio-ecological dimensions across different levels of organization (household, community, and watershed). In this initial stage we aim to understand these dynamics in a region of Northern Mexico, which will feed a broader transboundary project on mining, gender, and global change in both Arizona and Sonora. Our findings will inform local practices and policymaking to enhance rural communities’ resilience to multi-scalar socio-ecological changes.
