A description of Maxima from Visiting Professor of Spanish & Portuguese Carmen Valdivia: Since 2011, Máxima Acuña de Chaupe, an Indigenous subsistence farmer and weaver from Cajamarca, Peru, has been confronting and enduring abuse by the largest gold extracting entity in the world, the Newmont Corporation headquartered in Denver, Colorado. In Máxima (2020), Peruvian director Claudia Sparrow offers a visual and narrative account of Máxima’s struggle to defend her land. While the documentary gaze is mostly concerned with the legal landscape of the territorial dispute across courts, borders and languages, it does not lose sight of Máxima’s subjectivity, presenting discrete glimpses of her kinship to the land and water bodies, as well as her relationality to other humans and other-than-humans. Sparrow’s documentary contributes to a growing body of environmental media productions visibilizing gapping power inequality: transnational corporate power in extractive sites in the Global South exerted over individuals–problematically characterized as defenders–who more than often lack complete support from their own authorities and governments. Despite this grim scenario, Máxima offers some optimism: these struggles are nothing new, so resistance is guaranteed.
(above podcast recommended by Geography Professor Xavier Caro-Harrión)