Résumé
The Ecuadorian Amazon is caught between environmental preservation and economic development debates. Long isolated, it has been increasingly integrated into the global economy through resource extraction. Today, extractivist policies and a Constitution inspired by “Buen Vivir” generate a complex landscape where development ambitions, ecological concerns, and indigenous rights collide, reshaping everyday life and socionatural relations in contexts marked by contamination and health risks. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Napo region, we examine how riverside communities living near small – and medium-scale mining navigate and articulate these transformations. Rather than focusing on official mine workers—largely absent in this context where formal mining labor is limited—this research explores how residents’ lived experiences, as members of communities involved in and affected by mining processes, are expressed through silence, worry, adaptation, or economic pragmatism.While dominant narratives frequently frame Amazonian populations as either passive victims or heroic defenders of nature, local discourses reveal more nuanced understandings. These do not always fit expected patterns of resistance or environmental awareness, inviting us to rethink normative frameworks through which pollution and environmental degradation are typically approached - revealing how mining is simultaneously perceived as a threat and a way to make a living. Drawing on participatory methods, this contribution reflects on the politics of representation and their material effects, questioning which forms of knowledge and subjectivities are made visible or silenced. Ultimately, it calls for a more grounded understanding of mining frontiers, where uncertainty, inequality, and ambivalence disrupt dominant imaginaries of extractivism.