Alluvial gold exploitation along the Quito River: Dredgers and the operations of racial capitalism through social reproduction

Abstract

The Quito River in northwestern Colombia, home to Black Communities’ collective territories, faces severe degradation due to alluvial gold mining. For decades, migrant laborers using large dredgers entered into agreements with local Afro-Chocoan families and community councils in riverside towns to extract gold. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews, this article examines how these arrangements devastated subsistence croplands, modernized local homes, and intensified residents’ reliance on cash. Applying Marxist feminist perspectives on the indirect exploitation of reproductive labor, the article highlights the link between global capital accumulation and the structural oppression of Black populations. I argue that the mechanization of alluvial gold mining involves land, labor, and credit arrangements that couple labor subsumption with social reproductive crises, recursively depriving Black riverside communities of the limited gains from extraction. Through my interlocutors’ life stories, I demonstrate that percentage-based gold compensation and cash payments function as variable capital, which disciplines riverside communities and allows gold traders to appropriate the unpaid reproductive work of Black women. The study contributes to the literature on racial capitalism and social reproduction by revealing the hidden sources of surplus labor exploited and appropriated through the mechanization of alluvial gold extraction and the devaluation of Afro-diasporic lands.