Hundreds of children are growing up with dangerous levels of heavy metals in their blood in the city of Cerro de Pasco, the highest city in the world and one of the oldest mining towns in Peru’s central Andes. This project explores what childhood is like in a place built around a centuries-old open-pit mine that has polluted the land and water and gradually swallowed up urban areas. The government has done little to address clusters of cancer and other diseases related to mining that have emerged in Cerro de Pasco, forcing families to live side by side with pollution.
