From Lota and Pilpilco, Chile to Cairo, United States: transloca positionality and the gendering of industrial heritage in the Americas

This article challenges dominant patriarchal and white supremacist narratives of deindustrialization and industrial heritage in the Américas through a transnational, intersectional lens. Focusing on Lota and Pilpilco, Biobío, Chile, and Cairo, Illinois, United States, we foreground how heritagization often centers male workers while erasing women, Indigenous, and racialized groups. Rather than a comparative study, this article is grounded in our embodied experience as Latin American immigrant scholars whose long-term research in the coal basins of southern Chile travels with us into our fieldwork in Illinois, serving as a living analytical framework that shapes how we see, feel, and interpret industrial decline. We draw on Latin American feminist perspectives to analyze how intersectionality and translocation shape industrial decay and heritage, expanding the field’s boundaries. Finally, we reflect on our positionalities as researchers moving across colonial geographies while carrying one racial and spatial formation into the logic of another, forming a transloca subjectivity that constitutes a method for understanding these places. The article advances the literature on deindustrialization and industrial heritage while contributing to feminist debates on positionality and reflexivity.