During the 1940s, the mine at Rio Turbio, Argentina was established for the extraction of coal. Tatiana Mazú González’s Shady River (2020) directs its attention to the town that shares its name with the Patagonian mine in order to interrogate the gendered division of labor that persists in the regime of coal extraction. Beyond the question of labor alone, the affective language of Shady River lays bare the ecological, biological, and subjective forces at work in the problem of social reproduction on a global scale. In discussions on the problem of social reproduction, feminist scholars have shown that the work involved in life-sustaining practices reveals a gendered division of labor and a complex interdependence among human beings and nature. The problem of social reproduction emerges from Shady River with as much precision and force as a vivid philosophical discussion. 

With few exceptions, discussions of social reproduction originally emerged in European and Anglo-American feminist circles in order to address the role of women’s labor understood as integral to the conditions for the reproduction of life and capitalism. Figuring in a long genealogy of approaches to reproduction, feminists analyzing reproductive labor have challenged the idea that the reproduction of life depends solely on the consumption of necessary goods and services. Later discussions on reproduction insist that the work which allows life to be reproduced should be complemented by the institutional dimensions of social reproduction as well as its racialization, and global determinations.  

Beyond what was perhaps the Fordist ideal presupposed by some early debates on reproduction, Shady River boldly confronts the distinct problems of reproductive labor in the Patagonian mines. The film speaks to a context in which production and reproduction unfold in the complex wake of colonial legacies. Located in the southernmost corner of the Andes, the town of Shady River is one of many settlements built exclusively around and in the service of mining initiatives prevalent throughout Latin America. 

In the mine, a predominantly male workforce performs precarious labor. Initially situated within what a participant in the film describes as a “town of men,” women come to be seen as inhabiting a paradoxical role. Between the mine and the town, women are at the center of a superstition that attributes bad luck to their presence in the underground workspaces. Women are blamed for the accidents in the mine due to their transgression into this male-dominated area. The myth suggests that labor cannot remain harmonious whenever women enter the masculine space of “productive” activities, and is akin to the potential disasters that sailors imagined as a result of the presence of women on board the seafaring vessels of the nineteenth century. 

The complex position of women between production and reproduction in the mine is further set into relief after a fire that causes the death of fourteen miners in 2004. It was women, as the film details, who led efforts to hold the mining company legally accountable, while also bringing to light years of mismanagement and state negligence. Their activism sought to obtain justice and support the families affected by the fire. As one activist puts it, “society realizes that women were not here only to cook.” 

Analyses of reproductive labor question the barriers between what is considered productive and unproductive work. This distinction has been historically reinforced by the uncritical assumption of the “private” and detached character of the domestic sphere with respect to society as a whole. The central role of women in unrecognized life-sustaining activities is classically portrayed in Helena Solberg’s The Double Day (1976), which illuminates the uneven conditions and the double-burden of the work of Latin American women during the second half of the twentieth century. Solberg’s documentary might appeal to critics interested in the political activity of subjects performing feminized, reproductive work in peripheral cities and rural areas. 

However, unlike The Double Day—but also unlike many contemporary portraits of feminized work throughout Latin America—Shady River presents a more expansive account of social reproduction. Mazú’s film not only reveals that processes of reproduction entail the work that is invested in renewing future generations. Beyond this, a preoccupation with landscape and environmental conditions, particularly as they relate to the experience of time and to temporality beyond the parameters of human beings, reframes reproduction as a historical process involving the metabolic relationship between human beings and the natural world. Shady River positions what feminists identify as “life-sustaining practices” within the broader process of production and reproduction of human life and its complex mediations by natural conditions.

What does it mean to view reproduction through a geographically situated and naturalized historical lens? Shady River moves in the direction of more robustly posing this question, offering glimpses of elements of this social process that rarely if ever enter into visibility; the pervasive soot from the mine, the water pipes essential to the depuration of coal and its transformation into electricity, and even the mist blanketing the town during the austral winter. 

Mining has never occurred outside the metabolic relationship between nature and its history.  Shady River confronts the problem of reproduction through the spatiality and the temporality of the mine and its ever-deepening excavation of the earth. Long, patient intervals reveal layers of geological stratification and their anthropogenic disruption through extractivism. On Shady River’s poster, a piece of charcoal is split between visible and subterranean fragments. Millions of years before human beings inhabited South America at the end of the Pleistocene, the Andes contained coal, gold, silver, copper, bronze, and lithium. The mountains hold a wealth of fossilized energy whose formation-time far exceeds even the existence of homo sapiens on Earth. In the Andes, indigenous peoples have developed sophisticated forms of metallurgy and metalworking before European colonization. But the heavy toll wrought on the ecosystem due to mining dates to the colonial order and was accelerated in the last centuries. The extractivist regimes undertaken since this time have unsurprisingly done very little to sustain the life and the flourishing of local communities. 

Shady River constructs the question of reproduction through the material practices of its inhabitants, whose forms of life are constituted by a long-term interaction with coal. Making use of archival footage, geological maps, and message records, Mazú methodically documents a mining town and its inhabitants, tracking the way in which a town emerges from a mine. Reproduction then presents the problem of how our existence and activity unfold as natural beings, engaged in a practical, sensuous activity with the world. In other words, the film brings us closer to the experience of the inhabitants of a town for whom the mine is not merely the background of their stories, but is inextricably woven into their very history and forms of life. Contemporary philosophy seeks to reconnect with the voices and experiences of those inhabiting the former colonial world. In this effort, an analysis of the global participants in processes of reproduction grasps this reality in its material and social complexity.  Film, as a medium for sense-experience, not only explores questions but also contests the very terms in which we understand a philosophical problem. The polysemic character of “reproduction,” moreover, invites the question of how to articulate life-sustaining practices with the metabolic interaction between humans and nature, as well as the specificities of these questions within heterogeneous global contexts. Shady River advances cinematographic language as more than just a tool for philosophical critique. It expansively redefines the question of reproduction through images and the sensuous material of experience. The demarcation of the new terms of this problem calls in turn for a renewed inquiry that navigates the new terrain opened by Shady River.

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