Mining space and industrial heritage in Mexico: the mineral from Tlalpujahua [Michoacán state]

Abstract

This paper deals with the historical dimension of the economic and social space of Tlalpujahua and El Oro Mining District from the perspective of the Industrial Heritage. The exploration and exploitation in search for precious minerals along the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries articulated a culture of wage labour and facilitated the circulation of new knowledge, technical expertise and an impressive technological innovation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With the depletion of gold and silver in the mid-twentieth century, the socio-technical framework disappears but not the memory and industrial vestiges which represents long-term historical processes, and as a social laboratory allows to recognize and analyze the changes in the social relations of different human groups, different nationality and social status — workers, technicians, engineers, businessmen, traders, etc. —, who moved to the minerals in the quest to materialise their own life expectancy. The study and appreciation of the historical and cultural experience ensures the memory of the industrial heritage of Mexicans.