Mining the Virgin Mountain

Abstract This article examines how the earth has been personified as female in colonial, extractivist contexts, focusing on the Andean mining city of Potosí, the wresting of whose silver was pivotal for the emergence of global capitalism. Specifically, it attends to La Virgen del Cerro (The Virgin of the Mountain), a painting by an unknown artist working in the eighteenth-century Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru. It depicts the mineshaft-riven mountain above Potosí as the Virgin Mary, her hands and head superimposed onto its slopes. Whereas Carolyn Merchant has argued that feminizing apprehensions of nature constrain resource extraction, La Virgen del Cerro sanctified colonial silver mining. By transposing Mary’s “postpartum virginity” onto the Andean environment, the picture melds two usually distinct colonial tropes: nature as an alluring virgin and a nurturing mother. The earth becomes an inviting female body, gestating resources for imperial consumption. Reflecting on the globe depicted in the foreground, the article argues that this maternal earth is incubating global capitalism itself, whose emergence the painting envisions as nothing less than a holy birth.