Underground Politics: Gold Mining and State-Making in Colombia. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press (2025).

In the Chocó rainforests of Colombia, placer mining has been booming and busting for centuries in lockstep with the ebbs and flows of global speculative regimes. In recent decades, as gold prices skyrocketed, booms were particularly dramatic. Settlers brought excavators and dredges that uprooted the forest landscapes of local Afro-Colombian communities. Lively rivers turned into dregs as miners suffocated them with tailings and mercury. Woods transformed into moonscapes as chainsaws ripped through the understory and excavators devoured the crops and gold that sustained local communities. Meanwhile, gold-fevered paramilitaries and guerrillas exerted violence over village life, openly or subtly.

All this turned Chocó into a national or even a global prism through which concerned outsiders encountered Anthropocenic destruction. Politicians, reporters, scholars, and activists were deeply troubled by the fate of the forest, and national lawmakers declared Chocó’s Atrato River a legal subject in need of environmental protection. Their critiques shared the observation that the state, the law, and social order were all spectacularly absent in mining zones.

Underground Politics traces the material, symbolic, and sensory dimensions of the complex relationship between outlawed gold mining and state governance. In the book, I examine the forms of sociopolitical organization that make a gold economy possible at a moment when central government officials increasingly characterize it as socially and environmentally disorganized. I unearth nuggets of mining life through ethnographic stories emerging from fifteen months of fieldwork in Chocó, including participant observation in small-scale mining sites. Through these stories, I tease out the organizational practices by which heterogenous communities make a gold frontier seem licit and mundane despite official discourses that cast the frontier as illegal and destructive.

As Underground Politics shows, destruction was hardly the dominant lens through which many people in Chocó viewed the gold rush. Certainly, they did not take lightly the slow dying of their forests, nor the violent armed groups capitalizing on this. They did insist, though, that economic hardship did not make for easy refusals of extraction. They emphasized they were cobbling together mining livelihoods in a place with few alternatives; sentiments that were turbocharged by a long history of bureaucratic neglect of local economic life—reaching back as far as the enslavement of their gold-panning ancestors. No doubt, excavators created all the problems listed above. But for residents of Chocó’s mining regions, they also created work, land rents, deep pockets that trickled down cash into village stores, and—among those with the deepest pockets—incentives to follow the settlers’ example and buy second-hand excavators on the cheap.

Residents directed their ire more toward the law-enforcement personnel that was bombing mining machinery, than toward the deforestation that the state explosives were supposed to prevent. Many people in Chocó deemed gold socially productive and historically meaningful, as opposed to illegal, even if it was forged from digging techniques they recognized as ecologically flawed. They saw themselves as purposely abandoned by the government. They experienced police and army attacks on excavator mines as attacks on their own households, the futures of which were staked on those of the mines.

Despite these widely shared concerns of abandonment, sharp boundaries between “the state” and “local communities” were not always easy to draw. Underground Politics highlights the central role of state power in energizing local mining organization, unsettling common accounts in which the vitality of prohibited mines feeds off the presumed weakness of the state. Miners and their surrounding communities entangled state structures and ideas in their everyday practices, insofar as they repurposed laws, institutions, and formal vernaculars to further their agendas. The result was an alternative form of state presence that, although opposing formal regulatory authority, also laid the symbolic and physical foundations for certain bureaucratic interventions.

Thus, even though most mining in Chocó was officially outlawed business, it didn’t necessarily feel that way amid the everydayness of the pits. Local bureaucrats found resourceful ways to convert clandestine gold into a productive resource for daily regulatory tasks. For their part, Afro-descendant community leaders cited multicultural jurisdiction while claiming their lawful right to govern and tax mines that were sitting ducks for the explosives of state troops. And the owners of these mines, in turn, collected state documents and planted trees to enact a quasi-legal identity that, they hoped, would render them less susceptible to unwanted police and army visits. In following the lives of these protagonists, Underground Politics explores forms of extractive organization that, whether licit or illicit, helped coproduce state power.

Jesse Jonkman is assistant professor of International Development Studies with a disciplinary background in political and environmental anthropology. His research interests lie at the intersection of resource extraction, state-making, ecology, and infrastructure. In 2021, he completed his PhD (cum laude) in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam with a dissertation that focused on the sociopolitical life of small-scale gold mining in Colombia. The dissertation won the J.C. Ruigrok Award of the Royal Dutch Society of Sciences and Humanities and the FSW Dissertation Prize of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.