By Jorge Recharte, 1993.

Chapter 5 - Footnotes

¹A cesto of coca weighs twenty pounds. The coca output of Cuyo Cuyo peasants was modest, compared with the 12,000 cestos produced by Sandia District in 1904 (Tejada [1904] 1907: 70), even considering the changes in regional coca acreage that may have occurred in the forty years between these two observations.

²Two separate sources put the population of the district in 1864 at 1,500 people (Basadre [1860] 1892; Raimondi [1864] 1911). The total value of the coca harvest for Cuyo Cuyo District was 5,040 soles or 3.36 soles per capita. In 1864, a sol was worth 10 arrobas (or 113.5 kilograms) of corn (Raimondi [1864] 1911) and the per capita value of the coca harvest thus was equivalent to 381.4 kilograms of corn. Clearly, coca was an important item in the peasant economy of the district then. The leaf was not sold, however, but was consumed or exchanged for puna produce locally.

³The roads were financed with a tax on the Bolivian coca consumed on the high plateau in Puno Department (BMS: 26/9/1929, Oficios, cartas y otros).

⁴For example, Jose Maria Ccori from Cuyo Cuyo bought a field for 70 soles (see ANPS, year 1926, instrument no. 169). In that same year a sheep was worth 4 soles; hence, the monetary value of this coca field was equivalent to 17.5 sheep.

⁵I was told that these encargados, people taking care of other people's plots, harvest all of the coca for themselves, but I doubt that this is the whole story. I do not know the details or variability of these transactions. I assume that owners receive some percentage of the crop, or other remuneration. I know that gold miners try to maintain some control over their coca plots even though they may derive little or no immediate benefits.

⁶Some fields only yield two harvests or mitas. The names of these mitas (Pascua, Santiago, and Concebida) originate in the fact that the owners try to complete their harvests by the dates of these fiestas (movable from mid-March through the end of April, July 25th, and December 8th, respectively). Until a few decades ago these fiestas were also major regional trading fairs. It is likely that during the Colonial Period the fiestas of Santiago and Concebida were also close to the time in which peasants had to pay their biannual tributes in coca and other products (Platt 1984: 10-12).

⁷The acreage was very small. Raimondi ([1864] 1911: 332) estimated that the total output of coffee in Sandia was 350 quintales. A quintale is a measure that is equivalent to 50 kilograms.

⁸The residents of Limata, located in the punas above Puna Ayllu, however, specialized in the transportation of produce from the montaña. They were known as fleteros because they hired themselves and their animals out for this long haul (Raimondi [1864] 1911: 327).

⁹Tejada ([1904] 1907: 70) also noted that coffee output in Sandia was insignificant by 1904.

¹⁰I base these statements on an interview with a comunero from Ura Ayllu.

¹¹Peasant coffee producers who had invested more extensively in this crop, such as those from Sandia District or the Aymaras from Moho in San Juan del Oro, did not abandon their fields during the period of falling prices.

¹²The cascarilla boom in the region of Carabaya and Sandia lasted until the 1850s (Raimondi 1883: 11), but it continued to be exploited until the 1870s (Vidal 1896: 191). Apparently some cascarilla was still extracted at the end of the century, for Stiglich referred in a travelog to the extraction of cascarilla in the region of Tambopata (1908: 375).

¹³These included several ayllus of Phara (Basadre 1892: 192) and the village of Saqui in the headwaters of the Tambopata. In both cases, Indians combined gold panning with the extraction of cascarilla bark (ibid., p. 192). This mixed extractive strategy was also used in Ura Ayllu (see below).

¹⁴The most important ones were the Inca and Inambari companies (Anónimo [1900] 1902).

¹⁵Phara was also famous for its waturu trees which grew in forests that extended to above 3,200 meters in altitude until late in the nineteenth century (Basadre 1892: 191).

¹⁶This same informant explained to me that the Kallawayas from Charazani (in fact, only people from Upiniwaya and Tuliniwaya, he said) used to dance at the fair of Limaqpampa on December 8th as a traditional "payment" for their right to harvest the resins. They also were said to have cast powerful spells on the waturu stands that prevented any local person from extracting resin without being attacked by poisonous serpents.

¹⁷The waturu trees grow mixed with other species on very steep hills, sometimes separated by hundreds of meters. The pairs of workers split up and walk an area in search of trees. They call to each other periodically to make sure that neither partner has had an accident.

¹⁸For this comment on trading practices I also relied on interviews with Cuyo Cuyeños.

¹⁹Produce is also traded outside of this precio antiguo system, using other non-monetary weight and volume equivalencies. For example, 1 pound of coca is exchanged for 1 arroba (25 pounds) of potatoes; 12 pounds of coca for one live (en pie) sheep; 1 sheep hide for one arroba of potatoes; 1 sheep carcass for 2 quintales (50 kilograms each) of potatoes; 4 cheeses for one arroba of potatoes; and chuñu (dehydrated potato) is exchanged for an equal volume of corn. Commercial products also are bartered; for example, one pound of sugar and a piece of bread bring one half arroba of potatoes; and one bottle of kerosene brings eight pounds of potatoes.

²⁰This economic dimension of textiles is not new in Cuyo Cuyo or Sandia. For example, in 1925, Petronila Ccori, a widow from Cuyo Cuyo, bought a coca field for 40 soles, with "money that is my own, obtained from the selling of my weaving" (ANPS, year 1925, instrument no. 69). I found other examples of women mortgaging or selling weavings to finance the acquisition of land.

²¹Women who want to learn to weave must start a small piece and finish it by the end of the fiesta day.

²²There are several examples of this kind of transaction between caciques and Spaniards. The following is a receipt given by the cacique of Cuyo Cuyo to a Spanish official: "I, Joseph Yanapa, Segunda of the ayllu of Cuiocuio have received from Mateo Garcia de Viana, accountant of the Royal Mint of Carabaya, ninety pesos for the salary of 240 apiris [porters], at three reales each, which sum he has entered as a partial payment of the tributes that I have to pay for my Indians, Poto, February 2, 1762." (AGN, Real Hacienda, Carabaya, L.12, c.189, 1763-1765, p. 6.)

²³This trade system affected not only wage labor, but other sorts of transactions as well. For example, in 1800, the rental of a coca plantation was agreed upon by two men in pesos, but they state that "payments ought to be delivered in corn as [it] is customary" (AAC, G, 38,307,2, año 1800.)

²⁴Harald Skar (1982: 215) has described a similar non-commodity form of wage labor relations in the peasant community of Matapuquio, Apurimac, where: "A peon one day may be the master the next day. In such cases the peon is receiving money which in a later incident will be handed back to his opposite. . .Then, the difference between monetary and non-monetary labor arrangements in Matapuqio is not so much the degree of integration into the monetary system, but rather the degree of trust between partners in the labor exchange."

²⁵A comunero from Puna Ayllu, a man in his early 60s, said that, "the Turks, Shenker and Kerneski, came every year to buy gold, but they bought only from the mistis who had [gold] in quantity." Months after this conversation took place, I found the name of Mr. Eduardo Shenker in the notarial books at Sandia. He was a Swiss born merchant working in 1931 for an Arequipa branch of the Paris based Braillard company. He was in charge of buying gold in Sandia and supplying most of the stores there (ANPS, año 1931, instrument no. 65).

²⁶I did not make a complete census of these stores, but there were no less than 10 in Ura Ayllu, 20 in Puna Ayllu and 10 at the mine of Ancoccala.

²⁷Guariguari was the colonial spelling for the Wari Wari River located in Valle Grande, to the north of the town of Sandia. The river is identified in current maps as the Upper Inambari.

²⁸For almost identical opinions from other travelers see Tejada (1907: 71-72), and Vidal (1896: 178). These gold entrepreneurs were dismayed by the Indians' lack of interest in devoting themselves fully to the extraction of gold, and worse, for their refusal to work in the mines as wage workers. These travelers also noted reproachfully that Indians were interested in money only when they had to finance religious festivities in their villages.

²⁹In Colonial times, gold also was one of the important means by which the Indian people of Sandia could pay their tributes (see Chapter 1). As late as 1727, Indians still relied on gold mining to pay most of their ayllu taxes. In 1727 the Indians from Coasa and Usicayos brought gold nuggets to be minted at the Cajas Reales in San Antonio de Poto. Once minted the yield was 1,305 castellanos de oro (AGN, Cajas Reales, L.15, C.75, April 18 1727.).

³⁰According to Raimondi's population data (1911: 327), the community had approximately 205 families.

³¹Prices quoted in Raimondi (1896: 139; 1911).

³²From an interview in Quechua with a man from Puna Ayllu as translated to me by his son.

³³From several interviews with older people from Llaqta Ayllu (see also Chapter 8).

³⁴I was told that Cuyo Cuyeños planned their arrival to coincide with the festival of Qoyllur Rit'i (which has a movable date between late May and early June). They participated in a dance with others from their district. Qoyllur Rit'i is the most important pilgrimage of peasants in the southern Peruvian Andes and it takes place above the town of Marcapata. While the dancing may simply have been a way to seek spiritual protection for their work in the jungle, the context reminds me of the Kallawaya people, who were expected to dance at the Limata fair in exchange for the incense they took from the region (see "Incense" above). Cuyo Cuyeños no longer participate in Qoyllur Rit'i.

³⁵In the summer of 1944, at the famous Bretton Woods Conference, the Western economic powers established the international trade and monetary norms that framed the economic expansion of the United States and Western Europe between the end of World War II and the 1960s (Anikin 1983:162).

³⁶For a more detailed picture of the history of migration to Madre de Dios see Chapters 7 through 9.

³⁷I use the term "owner" with the following proviso: in Madre de Dios Cuyo Cuyeños are squatters; legally speaking they do not have ownership of the deposits. In the Ancoccala mine the mineral deposits belong by law to the state. However, in both places, from a practical point of view the term "owner" describes the fact that they have uncontested control over the process of production, and the circulation of the gold they obtain.

³⁸In all the tables that follow in this section I have grouped together all of the households in my sample from Puna Ayllu and Ura Ayllu, in order to give a closer idea of the trends that predominate in the Cuyo Cuyo District as a whole. Note that the number of households (n=) varies, because I did not have complete information for all households. The information usually refers only to the male head of household, even though adolescent sons also migrated to the gold mines. The time framework is the twelve months prior to the day of my interview (see Chapter 2 for more details).

³⁹For example, this is the case for carpenters, who never are out of work (see "Wage Work" above and Chapter 9).

⁴⁰Young single men and, more rarely, single women also migrate to Ancoccala and Madre de Dios; this will be discussed separately below.

⁴¹Dependent members of the household traveled an average of 69 days during the year (My source is the same 1986 survey used to construct the tables in this section, see Chapter 1).

⁴²I base this assumption on the fact that ethnographic work on Andean peasants generally shows that men are primarily in charge of agricultural production, while women are in charge of the distribution of agricultural produce.

⁴³The separation of male and female economic and social spheres of production has been accentuated by the fact that the timing of the migration has changed. In the early history of the migration to Maldonado, men went during the dry season, when agricultural work diminishes. Now the men migrate during the peak of the rainy season, from November through March, when there is much agricultural work to do. Men's labor is still an essential component of the agricultural system (see Chapter 4), but men no longer seem to have primary control over the process of subsistence production. I discovered this while gathering information for the PSE survey on field rotation. I realized that wives knew more about the household fields than respective husbands. In spite of this new sexual division of labor, there are a number of social and cultural processes that integrate both male and female economic spheres into a single well-coordinated production system (see below).

⁴⁴I refer, in other words, to the regional transformation of land use patterns from "archipelago" to "compressed" types (see Chapter 4). In the course of this transformation, money came to be used to maintain the quantity and diversity of a diet derived from an increasingly limited access to ecologically diverse subsistence resources. Money also served to empower peasant resistance to political control by mistis, as did the transformation of ayllus into communities.