ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Metal Materialisms: A Transnational Perspective on Vanadium, Consumption, and Material Culture

• In Event: The Environmental Lives of Things: Science and Technology, Environmental History, and Material Culture

English Abstract

After the 1906 purchase of Mina Ragra in Peru, the Vanadium Corporation of America (VCA) owned over 80% of the vanadium lodes around the world and supported the creation of consumer products that drove demand for its metal. While the majority of vanadium went to supplementing carbon steel as an alloy, the VCA made an effort to create new markets and to diversify. From domestic kitchenware to vehicles, the company spawned a range of products to introduce the metal to different sectors of the economy. This research traces vanadium materials from their extraction in the Andes Mountains to their transformation in the United States in the early decades of the twentieth century to argue how materials were marketed and how these materials affected environments in the Americas. Using marketing materials, images, and company documents, I delve into the environmental consequences of these products while also following the “vanadium trail” to the sales of these products. In particular, I emphasize the partnership of Henry Ford and the VCA to highlight the building of corporate myth and culture around specific materials. This research includes marginalized voices, both human and non-human, whose exploitation imbues vanadium consumer products with colonialism, including dispossession, environmental calamity, and racism. In sum, vanadium mining and its role in consumer culture serves as an early twentieth-century parallel to how contemporary society drives environmental degradation through marketing and demand.

Author

• Rocío Gomez, Virginia Commonwealth University