When Carmen Ahumada first looked on the copper mining city of Calama, she wanted to die. It was 1958, long after Germany’s World War I-era invention of artificial saltpeter—the main ingredient in bombs—brought Chile’s glory days as a world...
Something in a locomotive, that black-clad traffic’s rush, something in the silver-tinted background: always that tally of progress & catastrophe, engines wrecked
In the first shafts of light to pierce the jungle canopy, the tin porters danced. They swayed and sashayed to the languorous rhythms coming from a radio that someone, in the night, had thought to stash under a bag of beans. The rest, an...
Because we are still recovering from the most spectacular breakdown of corporate capitalism since the Great Depression, any study of that system’s rise to economic preeminence in America is inherently timely. What transformed our country...
Buck season opened—still does—on the Monday after Thanksgiving. In Bakerton it is a holiday of sorts. School was closed for the day, and I reported to Keener’s at 4 a.m. to serve eggs and sausages and countless cups of coffee to men in...
The miners take turns chopping the coalface. All around us a jury-rigged jumble of tree trunks is wedged against the tunnel’s ceiling, our only protection from being crushed by the five hundred meters of rock between here and the floor of...
I tag in. I am a number now. The worn, round metal tag hangs on a nail next to the level I will be working today. My number is my birth year—1968. If I don’t come up from the mine, they know where to start looking for me.
