After the Tailings Spill: Geographies of Uncertainty, Embodied Sense-Making and Partial Knowledge

Contamination through long-term exposures and more discrete events such as reactor explosions and chemical and waste spills are widely noted concerns of the extractive industries and those who live near them. Yet contamination from mining waste, or tailings, is understudied in geographic and social sciences. This article addresses this gap by exploring the aftermath of a tailings accident in Oaxaca, Mexico. I explore how residents made sense of the incident and potential contamination where scientific testing was compromised and opaque, and authorities denied contamination occurred. Paying attention to the way residents interpreted efforts to test for contamination and the way they thought about and approached water, I find that uncertain scientific results are mediated through partial and embodied knowledges, and that these understandings can alter relationships to water and place. These altered relationships themselves constitute impacts that merit recognition and response. This article contributes to geographic work on uncertainty, embodied knowledge, and contamination, and is an empirical contribution to social science scholarship of mining tailings. Ultimately, it argues that potential environmental harm must be attended to through multiple forms of evidence, including community observations and embodied experiences, even when formal scientific evidence is compromised.