When
Where
Center for Latin American Studies, Spring 2022 virtual 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 p.m. (unless otherwise specified).
"Likantatay: Portable Landscape of an Urban Indigenous Community in the Chilean Andes"
Friday, March 25, 1-2pm
with Anita Carrasco (Luther College)
Join via Zoom: https://arizona.zoom.us/j/84776888432
Anita Carrasco is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Luther College, Iowa. Her book, Embracing the Anaconda, published by Lexington-Rowman & Littlefield, offers a clearly written and personal ethnography about people, mining, and water in the high desert of northern Chile. Carrasco is a Chilean anthropologist whose father was a mining geologist and who spent part of her childhood in a Chilean mining town. Her research about the world-famous Chuquicamata copper mine and city of Calama focuses on communities of indigenous people called Atacameños, who had to adapt their agricultural and pastoral ways of life and uses of water to the impacts of large-scale industrial mining development from the early 1900s. In her talk, she will discuss the first chapter in her book about the unique community of Likantatay. Not wanting to abandon their connection with water and land, Likantatay began as a squatter settlement in the poverty belt of Calama mining town. Initially, community members had little choice but to “steal” sewage water from the public pipeline to irrigate their crops and reproduce the traditional village but in an urban space. Their story represents an important chapter about resistance to mining-induced territorial displacements in the region.