In this essay, I examine the visual iconography produced by three different but overlapping anti-mining collectivities. The images and symbols produced between 2008 and 2018 comprise a visual discourse that challenges some aspect of mining activity in the county of Cuenca, Ecuador. A term originally developed by Deborah Poole, visual discourses are concerned with intersections of representation, power, and knowledge, which “constitute means of intervening in the world”—that is, they orient toward specific ways of viewing and acting in the world.1 In Ecuador, visual discourses are artifacts and agents in assembling collectivities against various forms of dispossession. A raised fist and Canadian dragon, the Andean chakana, and the image of pristine páramos offer an opening to analyze the composition of the heterogeneous collectivities, their political discourses, and actions.2 They are simultaneously cultural objects produced by activists and an actor that helped constitute collective action related to gold...

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