Mexico Stories: Part II

5.

 

The sun was born of a dry landscape. Today, perhaps because the Wirikuta reserve in San Luis de Potosi is its birthplace, the sun illuminates Wirikuta’s matte hillsides with the most tender glow and sets upon the desert floor in a most slow surrender. 

Wirikuta’s nooks and crannies and shrub-covered undulations give refuge to towns – they are carved into hillsides, or superimposed upon them, or else houses appear like scattered matchsticks without ever gathering into something that could be called ‘town.’ Underneath the carpet of the ground is another city, that of old mine shafts and galleries big as ballrooms carved into the rock below: silver. 

There are churches above and below the low shrubbery, and both catered to the miner. In the one above, the floors are made of what looks like the sidewalls of cedar chests; the patron saint is San Francis de Assisi. The one below is dark, the little altar illuminated only when headlamps fall upon the stone in spots. Doesn’t that make prayer somehow more personal? 

 

In an abandoned mine site below Real de Catorce, the altar was the only thing with any visible upkeep. The wooden portals and massive stone walls of the wearing buildings were not attended to. Water flowed out of the mine mouth; we ventured into its velvet throat to cool off from the heat, then napped on logs. The resident cat led us to a man that used to mine here. I mined all over, he told us, but came back here, because this is where I am from. Cats leave home to die, men come home. 

Meet don Pablo

don Pablo looking at mineral with Pablito in the background.

Don Pablo, about 300-pounds heavy just up top with short skinny legs and tiny feet, seemed grotesque at first. When I met him he was sitting, his little legs splayed open to leave room for his three-tiered belly, and chewing coca. Leaves stuck to his lips and green saliva flew out whenever he opened his mouth to let out an enthusiastic chortle.

"Come," he said.

I followed him into the tunnel. He lumbered along unhurriedly and then turned off sharply and began to climb. His giant behind loomed as I followed him up a narrow and steep rabbit hole that squeezed around him as if he was carving it as he went. It ended in a wooden slatted door. Everything beyond the door seemed like a kingdom of sorts: dank, narrow corridors that opened up into high chambers, recently opened, small nooks with arched entryways, serpentine passages between levels and amongst galleries, glittering veins snaking through dull grey rock, piles of angled debris blocking passage, heaps of mineral awaiting transport, glittering with silver in the absolute darkness every time my circle of blue light landed on them.

Don Pablo led me through his Coliseum, as he called it, and pointed out all of the new veins; veins waiting to be opened and taken, veins of chocolate, and la negra, veins of pure silver that are handled manually and sold separately in small sacks, veins of complejo - silver and zinc - that are often signaled by the presence of pyrite. Some appear as thin rivulets meeting into wider streams in the damp rock, others like oxidized banners unfurling widely on the roofs of don Pablo's galleries. He throws a small bottle-cap-full of 96% booze on a new vein, to bless it, and admires it with a sort of ache in his voice, "Pucha, que linda es la plata." With him I stand and admire the brilliance of the vein, like the wing of a bird caught still by a gray mass. I think, for the first time, I understand the greed of a prospector, the avaricious eye that sparks at the glint of mineral and that which it promises. Pucha, que linda es la plata. And que fea, too.
Orphaned at age 10, don Pablo began working in the mines with an uncle the same year. Now 50, he has ten kids of his own, the "black sheep" of which, Pablito, 16, works alongside him.

don Pablo, left, and Pablito.

Yesterday, don Pablo went to the doctor.

"You're healthy," the doctor told him.

"Pucha," says done Pablo, "at this rate I'll never retire."

The sector he currently works was worked by COMIBOL, the Bolivian Mining Corporation, when the mines were nationalized, between 1952 and the 1980s. "People told me there's nothing left here," he says, "but I know there is." He perforates to the east and west with Chinese-made pneumatic drills, looking for the veins that run north-south. As we're standing on the top level of his cave, admiring veins, explosions start to go off, like heavy objects falling far away. He counts 16 detonations and then it goes quiet again.

"What if one doesn't go off?" I ask him.

"You come back in 24 hours."

"And?"

He sort of half-shrugs and leads me to another vein. "What I need is peons," he says. "There's too much work." He needs money for explosives, too, so he can release the veins he keeps showing me.

When we're sitting, resting, he says: "What I really wanted to do was be a veterinarian."

Help Fund Potosi, Bolivia Miners: 5 Centuries Deep

Below is an excerpt from a longer proposal I wrote for the same project, Potosi, Bolivia Miners: 5 Centuries Deep, which I recently posted on KickStarter. I'm trying to raise funds to get this project going, so if you know anyone who may be interested, with some change to spare, spread the word! thanks!

Here is a photo with a miner, taken by my friend Josie, in 2005:


In 2006, I turned in my undergraduate Environmental Science thesis predicting certain doom for the communities that live around the Cerro Rico mine in Potosi, Bolivia. One of my sources predicted that the mine, functioning continuously since 1542, will finally be depleted in 10 years. Though this is true only in part – new technology will permit profitable reworking of tailings as well as exploitation of previously untouched deposits – the conical mine with its manual, anthill-like activity of miners will surely grow quieter as less mineral is left to drag out with the crude methods currently used. Potosi, once the richest city in the world, will have to either embrace the tourism that is already exploding in the city or work out a solution with the international companies vying to mine there and once again, take Potosi’s riches abroad.

The mine’s influence over the years – the tangible riches it produced, the intangible glory it brought to Spain – is mostly gone. And the destitute miners who go into the Cerro Rico mine now, fathers, sons and brothers in a long line of men, may be the generation that will see the mine breathe its last. I want to photograph this particular generation of Cerro Rico miners, possibly the final.

I want the documentation of the miners and the mining community to be threefold – 1.) documentary-style photography of the men in the mines and of the community in general, 2.) formal, black and white portraits, and 3.) to establish a camera distribution so community members can take photos of each other/themselves. The first, I think, is important to show that this place exists, that it exists in this way in the 21st century, and to reveal what happens there, the texture of the place and the people. The second is to give a formality and gravity to the series of images: to take time with a subject, to photograph them head on, to immortalize in the most classic way. The third, which will be the most challenging I believe, is to empower the community to present themselves to the world on their terms – terms to be explored and negotiated with the participating members.

I have been to the Cerro Rico mine twice, both times with Wilfredo Bracamonte, an ex-miner who now gives tours to tourists of the mines. In a recent correspondence he said that he would help me to establish contact with some miners to start off the project, though one mining co-op, the Korimayu, has already extended such an invitation to me. Further, the city is replete with tour guides, many of them ex-miners that I believe I will ask for further assistance once on the ground in Bolivia. Additional routes to explore would be the miners’ market, mining union halls, the mineral processing factories, and to introduce myself to the women who work on the outskirts gleaning bits of mineral by artisanal mining and processing.

I have two personal goals with this project; 1. to document this community and to let them document themselves and 2. to grow as a photographer. The target is to have an exhibit towards the end of the project where both my photos and those taken by community members are displayed for locals and tourists to see in Potosi. I hope to able to incorporate older photos, to be solicited from families or bought in local antique shops, to present a portrait of the city in a historical context, drawing a line between the past and the present and commenting on both the richness of the history and the reality of the present.

I want the project to be ethnographic in methodology, though not strictly academic in scope. Rather, I am interested in reinforcing community and fostering understanding through photography, as well as producing a solid body of photo work. I think this is a particularly relevant time to venture to do this – as mineral reserves in the Cerro Rico wind down and foreign investors start to set up processing centers and operations in and around the mountain to wean profits from poorer ore, the Potosi community will no doubt undergo changes. Martin and Spence (1988), in an essay about photography as therapy, write, “By recording such events [them]selves, particularly by those people who are powerless and marginalized by the dominant stories in circulation a new form of social autobiographical documentation can be put together.”