The Company

Based on a trip to the now abandoned Mexican mercury mining town of San Felipe Nuevo Mercurio, The Company explores the development of mercury mining as a technology and its present environmental consequences, both predictable and unforeseen, in what Cristina Rivera Garza terms “an exemplary disappropriative work.” In a book that subverts both textual and graphic expectations, part a involves a rewriting of Amparo Dávila’s “The Houseguest,” changing specific aspects of the text: verb tenses are transposed to the future; the houseguest becomes the menacing presence of The Company; and the domestic helper who suffers the intimidation of The Company along with her unnamed female employer is the machine. In part b, scientific reports dating from the 1950s to the present day, conversations with experts and miners, and excerpts from the story of “Long, Tall José” construct a history of mercury mining in the area and the subsequent environmental contamination. In both sections, text is accompanied by images that range from Gerber Bicecci’s intervened photographs of the ghost town and the surrounding area to technical diagrams and reinterpreted maps, plus pictograms from Manuel Felguérez’s La máquina estética (1975).As Rivera Garza says in her epilogue, “Gerber Bicecci moves us toward the past and the future, without for an instant forgetting the present we share . . . Nothing is at peace here, everything is at stake.”