Occasionally we get updates about stories we’ve done. Here’s one we thought we’d pass along. In early 2007 Homelands produced a profile of Pedro Córdoba Valdivieso, a metal worker in Peru who was suffering from …
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The Homelands Blog
The General and the Particular
One of the perpetual challenges for any journalist is to figure out when a person or fact or event is somehow representative of some larger reality, and when the personality or information or situation is …
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The Homelands Blog
Check out the WORKING Spinoffs
A quick note about some good work that has grown out of reporting for the WORKING project. Kelly McEvers has written a multipart series in Slate about her adventures finding and profiling a pirate in …
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Jonathan Miller
WORKING
Metal Worker
Jonathan Miller
WORKING
Metal Worker
Pedro Córdoba’s says his job in a giant Peruvian smelter has made him seriously ill. And he’s not going to take it lying down.
Photo by Santiago Mujica Bustamante. Almost everyone in La Oroya, Peru, depends on the giant multi-metal smelter and refinery that sprawls across the valley floor. It doesn’t just dominate the city visually, aurally, and olfactorily, but also economically, politically, and psychologically.
That makes most townspeople tolerant of conditions that elsewhere might lead to open rebellion.
Not so Pedro Córdoba Valdivieso, a mechanic who works in the smelter. He is suffering from an incurable lung disease caused by years of inhaling rock dust. And he’s determined to make the company pay.