Is Gabriela Mistral referring to a specific historical use of asbestos in South America?

Question

The first stanza of the second part of Gabriela Mistral's poem Dos himnos contains the following lines (emphasis mine):

¡Cordillera de los Andes,
Madre yacente y Madre que anda,
que de niños nos enloquece
y hace morir cuando nos falta;
que en los metales y el amianto
nos aupaste las entrañas;

Translation:

Andes Mountains!
Mother lying down and Mother walking,
who drives us mad as children
and makes us die when we are gone;
who in metals and asbestos
raised our insides;

I was rather surprised by the term "asbestos", which is now generally known to be carcinogenic. In the same stanza, Mistral also mentions the mythological Mama Ocllo and Manco Cápac, and other references to pre-Columbian culture can be found in other parts of the poem. I wonder whether this implies that asbestos had a specific use in any of those cultures.

The Wikipedia article about asbestos mentions references to asbestos going as far back as Pliny the Elder (although it had been used much longer) but none from South America. In 2017, Brazil was the fourth-biggest producer of asbestos, so the absence of historical references in the article's earlier section can't be explained by the unavailability of asbestos in South America.

In fact, those lines about metals and asbestos can be interpreted as a reference to mining. That seems to be what Ursula K. Le Guin wanted to express in her translation, even though the historical time frame remains undefined:

who yields us your very bowels
in metal and asbestos:
(…)

(Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin. University of New Mexico Press, 2003, page 177.)

Am I right in suspecting a specific historical reference? If yes, does it have anything to do with the use of asbestos in the pre-Columbian era? Or with "modern" mining?

Answer 1

The first translation provided is not very effective. I find that Le Guin's translation is much closer to the sense of the original, which I would render rather freely as "who lifts up their entrails as an offering to us". So Mistral is personifying the Andes as offering up their mineral wealth to the inhabitants of South America.

In the line "of metals and asbestos" the "metals" part is clear: the Andes are rich in copper, silver, zinc, and gold, and many other ores. Why, however, would Mistral reference "asbestos"? While asbestos has been mined in the Andes, in Argentina and Bolivia, it seems that Chile itself, Mistral's homeland, barely developed a domestic asbestos mining industry. Instead the country became a major importer of asbestos, producing asbestos-reinforced building tiles and concrete. The process began in 1935 with the establishment of the Pizarreño plant. Although this name is now synonymous with the environmental disaster that it produced, at the time asbestos was seen as a wonder material, and its use was wildly popular. The use of their products was so widespread that even today roofing materials (originally produced with asbestos) are still known as "pizarreños" in Chile.

Possibly this is what Mistral had in mind: asbestos as a modern wonder-material. With Tala being published in 1938, this is just about compatible with the beginning of the Chilean asbestos-processing industry in 1935. To reinforce this interpretation, in her poem Noche de metales Mistral mentions "iron, copper, silver, radium" as being metals present in the Andes. Clearly there are no lodes of radium in the Andes (or anywhere else for that matter), and so this just seems to be the appropriation of a cool-sounding modern term. I believe that there is a similar rationale for the use of asbestos in Dos Himnos