By Jorge Recharte, 1993.

Chapter 5 - Regional History of Markets and Money in Cuyo Cuyo

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Today, there are three types of wage labor among the peasants of Puna Ayllu and Ura Ayllu: 1) agricultural work within the communities of Cuyo Cuyo; 2) agricultural work in the coca, coffee and fruit fields of the montaña in Valle Grande and San Juan del Oro; and, 3) semiskilled work in carpentry and masonry in the Cuyo Cuyo District.

Agricultural wage labor within the community seems to function mostly as a way to correct seasonal imbalances in the distribution of family work rather than as an important means of generating cash income. Labor relations within the community are dominated by non-capitalist values. Among the twenty-seven people I interviewed, wage work for other comuneros was important in the economic strategy of only one person (no. 12 in Table 5.1). He was an "in-law of the community," a label applied outsiders who marry women of the community. He had recently settled in Ura Ayllu. Yet, even for this person the monetary aspect of wage work was of relatively little importance. Rather, it was a way of building social support that he later manipulated to obtain work in the goldfields. It helped him generate connections in the community.

In the context of the community, labor in exchange for payment in cash is not properly (or purely) a wage form. People who work for others for a wage often do so on the condition that the employer promise to reciprocate. Although no one said so explicitly, this is in fact a form of ayni exchange. Most of the people I interviewed (Table 5.1) had indeed worked for a wage on several occasions during the year, but, they did not consider this cash a form of income. Several had worked for others for as many days as they themselves had hired wage workers.²⁴ In contrast, a few rich miners who have ample cash resources do not hire themselves out for wages (e.g. no. 2 in Table 5.1). They can easily attract as agricultural wage workers relatives who also are seeking access to their mines. These relations typically receive higher salaries than workers who are not socially related to the owner. Thus, even in this case, labor relations are personalized (see Chapter 8).

Work in the montaña is an important source of cash for Ura Ayllinos and for some Puna Ayllu families, although in the group of people I interviewed there were only two men who worked in the lowlands during the year. Wage labor in the montaña is not attractive to Cuyo Cuyeños now that the price of gold is high; it was more important in the past. For example, a man from Puna Ayllu said that:

when the price of gold was low we worked [harvesting] coffee, in San Juan [del Oro]. . .that was our main way of getting money. Now that gold has a better price we all have come here [to Ancoccala mine] or

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to Maldonado.

There are a few carpenters and masons in Puna Ayllu and Ura Ayllu. These people are specialists in these activities and derive much of their income from their trade while continuing to work in agriculture, commerce, and gold mining. There is steady peasant demand for the services of these craftsmen because house construction and improvement is an important form of investment of gold income in Cuyo Cuyo (see Chapter 9). There are also some six comuneros from Puna Ayllu and Ura Ayllu who are employees in the schools and in government offices of the district. Two of these civil workers were among the people I interviewed about household economies. One worked in Ura Ayllu's fishery, a development project sponsored by the Catholic Church; the second was a teacher at a private Adventist school. The first did not migrate to work in the gold mines; the second worked for only a few weeks per year in a relative's mine.

Stores and Farm Produce Marketing

Tiendas, dry goods stores, were misti businesses until just a few decades ago. During the mistikuna timpu (see Chapter 2) there were only three stores in Cuyo Cuyo, all located in the central plaza of the town. Merchants accepted gold as payment, which they then sold to their wholesale suppliers from Arequipa.²⁵

There are now so many stores in each of the communities of the Cuyo Cuyo District that one wonders how can they make any money at all.²⁶ Most are under supplied and are closed a good deal of the day. Peasant stores mushroomed with the demise of the misti elite and their commercial monopoly. It seems that many stores in the community represent little more than a means to partially protect the household savings against the high inflationary trends that have characterized the Peruvian economy since 1975. Besides the many poorly supplied tiendas, there are a few stores in Ura Ayllu and Puna Ayllu that are well stocked with peasant staples: bread, brown sugar, flour, noodles, candles, beer, and basic school supplies among other items.

The market for local agricultural produce has little economic significance except in the sale of alpaca wool, coca, and coffee. Only

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four of the families listed in table 5.1 sold potatoes to wholesale merchants, and these were small quantities ranging from 40 to 500 kilograms. Another three families sold even smaller amounts of potatoes (below 50 kilograms) to fellow comuneros in the course of the year. Marketing of subsistence goods is limited simply because most families produce only enough to feed themselves. Furthermore the income received from the sale of agricultural products is low relative to costs of foods that they could buy in the stores.

Gold Mining

Carabaya has fascinated travelers and colonizers since the Spaniards discovered its immensely rich gold deposits in the years immediately after the Conquest. Late in the seventeenth century, Juan Martinez de Carvajal, priest of the Parish of Sandia, wrote:

According to the local inhabitants, this is a land very rich in gold mines, and on this issue I have received news of some gold creeks, such as Chontabamba, Utumayo, Chinoha, Muiu Mayo, Tticana and many others that cannot be worked because of the lack of means and workers. . .in the said creeks there is an abundance of aromatic resins such as incense, copal and other medicines. . .the region is separated [from the nation of the infidels] by a copious river, very rich in all sorts of fishes. Its sands have such an abundance of gold that, according to rumor, it has to exceed the river Nile in wealth. . .and the name of this river is Guariguari.²⁷ (Mollinedo [1689] 1982: 106, my translation).

Later during the Republican period, international explorers, government officials, and merchants continued stoking the myth of El Dorado. For Modesto Basadre, an important regional trader of alcohol, wool, cascarilla and gold, who roamed the region in the second half of the nineteenth century, Sandia was poor in spite of its rich gold deposits because of the:

criminal laziness of its inhabitants, the majority of whom are Indians; who, satisfied with obtaining enough to keep their miserable way of life, are not interested nor stimulated in the least to obtain the pleasures that civilized nations desire. They are born miserable, live a life without any aspiration for progress and without needs. [Indians] only care about satisfying their most despicable dietary needs and getting money for their fiestas in which all they want is to get drunk. (Basadre 1892:202.)²⁸

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It was in fact access to gold that gave peasant households some degree of independence from large scale gold miners and other would-be entrepreneurs of the region.²⁹ The same merchant quoted above angrily explained the difficulties involved in obtaining Indian labor for large-scale mining:

The Indians from Carabaya refuse these jobs because they can, with little effort, work their own creeks and obtain incomes higher than the salary paid to mine workers. If in 1851, when the Indian tribute was still in force (a heavy load in the Indian's eyes), they were seditious and lazy, how will they be now that they no longer have the staff of their ilacatas and tribute collectors over their heads? (Basadre 1884: 145, my translation.)

These passionately biased observations, made through the ideological lenses of late nineteenth-century capitalists, sharply portray the true nature of gold in the peasant economy of Cuyo Cuyo late during that period. Inadvertently, Basadre made an insightful observation. Peasant extraction of gold was not ruled by capitalist logic and motivation. Rather, the purpose of money was to finance the celebration of fiestas and drinking, both of which were essential to the maintenance of communal organizations and personal prestige in the social context of the ayllu (see Chapter 3).

The Indians of Cuyo Cuyo have been mining gold without interruption since at least the mid-nineteenth century. Raimondi (1911: 328) noted in 1864 that Ancoccala, a mine even then exploited exclusively by the people of Puna Ayllu, produced around 10 pounds of gold per year. This put the average output at close to 20 grams per household.³⁰ At the price of 9.6 soles an ounce in 1864, the average household income would have been equivalent to 6.7 soles, enough money to buy at least 6 arrobas (= 25 pounds each) of corn.³¹ The gold extracted by Indians was collected by rescatistas ("gatherers"), who purchased it or bartered for it (Basadre 1884: 181).

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Gold was also exchanged at any of several trading fairs that took place throughout the year in the punas of Ananea (see "Alpaca wool" above). Puna Ayllinos also went to Cojata, a puna village located near the Bolivian border, to trade their gold for puna products and for corn and other tropical produce that came from the Bolivian yunkas:

Some worked in the jungle, near Quiaca, some worked in Ancoccala. Those [working] in the jungle had to return for Christmas [Natividad]; this was our custom. Then each person had to take [to Cojata] no less than one quarter or one half of an ounce [of gold]; no one took less than 7 grams. . .In that place [Cojata] we traded our gold. We bought oranges, fruit, corn, but we went mostly to buy wool fabrics which we use here [in Cuyo Cuyo] to make waistcoats: navy blue, white, red bayeta [a handwoven woolen fabric]. There was something [else we also had to bring back], q'isa, sliced bananas with sugar; people in Puna Ayllu loved it.³²

In this traditional economic scheme, gold was one of several products exploited by the peasants of Cuyo Cuyo to complement their subsistence production and finance the purchase of certain commodities that were part of standard peasant household requirements (bayeta, as noted above, was one of these).

With the exception of Puna Ayllinos who had a placer mine in their community, peasants from the ayllus of the Cuyo Cuyo District extracted gold from a multitude of creeks in the densely forested montaña of Sandia. Gold deposits in the creeks immediately below the town of Sandia had been depleted during the Colonial Period, and by the early 1900s the Indians from Cuyo Cuyo already were exploring and working creeks close to the Bolivian border, Naranjani, Titigallo, Apugallo, and others. They went in small groups carrying all their food supplies and spent no more than a few weeks for fear of contracting malaria, which at that time was endemic to the lowland region.³³ Although it is possible that they found some rich deposits from time to time, it is my impression that they spent as little time as possible there and extracted gold in small amounts. During the 100 years of the "Gold Standard," from the early 1820s through the late 1920s, the price of gold was remarkably stable (Anikin 1983: 144). This factor may in part explain why gold extraction did not attract Cuyo Cuyeños in the way it would come to do so during later periods (see Table 5.2).

Some time early in the 1930s, Cuyo Cuyeños learned of a major gold discovery in the region below Marcapata in the Department of Cusco (Figure 1.6). The rediscovery of Marcapata's wealth in gold deposits and the gold rush there were certainly triggered by the jump in gold prices between 1931 and 1940, a phenomenon related to the world economic depression (see Table 5.2). Within a few years Cuyo Cuyeños were exploring the newly discovered

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gold deposits. In those early years, most migrants were peasants from Llaqta Ayllu. They worked the deposits during the dry season, May through August, the traditional gold panning season in their native Sandia Valley. These trips were longer than those to the lower Sandia Valley and to the border with Bolivia because they had to walk most of the way to Marcapata. But still they spent only a few weeks working in the jungle. This was because they had to carry their supplies, and because they wished to reduce the chances of infection from yellow fever, malaria and other tropical diseases.³⁴ In their search for virgin deposits, Cuyo Cuyeños moved from Marcapata to Quincemil, to Huaypetue and then to the geographical limits of the mineral deposit in the vicinity of the Colorado river, a tributary of the Madre de Dios River (Figure 1.6).

Between 1944 and 1971 the price of gold stabilized³⁵ at levels considerably below those of subsequent years (Table 5.2). Nonetheless, gold mining was profitable for Cuyo Cuyeños in this era because they were highly skilled explorers who exploited only the richest deposits. After the high yielding zones were exhausted, Cuyo Cuyeños returned to the creeks of Huaypetue, searching for less productive deposits and changing their extractive technologies to suit the demands of the ores. In the late 1960s seasonal migration to Madre de Dios involved mostly people from Llaqta Ayllu and smaller numbers of peasants from the other communities of the Cuyo Cuyo District. But beginning in 1971 a continuous upward trend in the price of gold (Table 5.2) attracted more and more people from the other three communities of the district to Madre de Dios. Gold mining in Madre de Dios grew rapidly to its current proportions in the late 1970s.³⁶

(page 145: Table 5.2)

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Gold mining in Ancoccala and Madre de Dios have different organizational features, but in both places gold is extracted from alluvial deposits with placer technologies. These technologies require little capital (shovels and iron bars are among the most expensive tools used). In both places Cuyo Cuyeño peasants are the "owners" of the gold deposits.³⁷

Ancoccala, located near Cuyo Cuyo in the puna grasslands of the cordillera, is a goldfield exploited only by the members of Puna Ayllu community. Gold is extracted by households independently, but in a context of strong communal control over the use of the critical resources of production in the mine. Common rules serve the purpose of managing the conflicting demands of hundreds of households over these scarce resources. Community control over the water system of the mine prevents unequal accumulation of the mineral resources. Households owe service to the community and are subject to the rule of a group of authorities. However, under this cloak of communal control, Ancoccala is constituted of independent households that defend and maximize their share of resources.

In setting and character, the gold mines of Maldonado, located in the lowland region of Madre de Dios, appear to be extreme opposites of those in Ancoccala. They are located in a tropical rain forest region, hundreds of kilometers to the northwest of Cuyo Cuyo. The area is open to migrants from all regions of the country. In Maldonado there are no community membership regulations, to legally bar people from any particular area. Migrants settle anywhere they please, or more accurately, wherever they are able to defend the land. Cuyo Cuyeños proclaim this loudly: "we have no community here". Yet, in spite of this claim, I shall later argue that they are organized by social means that in fact reproduce relations in the home community. One of the key differences between work in Ancoccala and work in Madre de Dios is that men who work in Ancoccala live with their families throughout the mining season, while those who migrate to Madre de Dios go alone or in the company of other men.

Migration Patterns

"Only the elders, women, children and dogs stay in Cuyo Cuyo when the rains begin. . ." said a Llaqta Ayllu man when I asked him whether it was true that everybody worked in the goldfields of Maldonado. This vision of the town becomes reality, as I witnessed myself a short time after the first rains arrive in the valley. The rains signal to the men that it is time to embark on their annual journey to their mines. Cuyo Cuyeños move in a mass exodus to Madre de Dios and Ancoccala, the most important places where they extract gold for the livelihood of their families.

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Llaqta Ayllu comuneros have a longer tradition of migration to Madre de Dios than those of the other three communities of the district, probably because it appears that they have had less land than peasants of the other three communities (see Chapter 2). Seasonal movement to Maldonado also is more widespread among the households of Llaqta Ayllu, and it seems to last longer.

The goldfields of Madre de Dios are the most important center of work for the men of Ura Ayllu.³⁸ In this community and Llaqta Ayllu only a small portion of married male campesinos did not migrate to a goldfields in the year of my study (Table 5.3). Those who did not migrate were all from Ura Ayllu and either they owned coca fields, had relatively large amounts of land in the community for food production, or they had alternative sources of cash income.³⁹ Ancoccala is the second most important center of migration, although only Puna Ayllinos can work there. Some Puna Ayllinos, however, prefer to go to Maldonado, where they can sometimes obtain a higher income. Clearly, Valle Grande is no longer the important place of migration that it was in the past (Table 5.3).

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The total number of days that migrants spend in the goldfields illustrates the importance of this activity. Married men spend an average of 139 days away from their homes every year.⁴⁰ Some, however, remain away up to 240 days. In addition to their trips to the goldfields, some comuneros of Puna Ayllu and Ura Ayllu also travel to the region of San Juan del Oro or Valle Grande (the lowlands of the Sandia and Tambopata rivers) to work in the coffee and coca harvests. The comuneros who migrated to these places spent an average of 25 days per year there (see Table 5.4). Almost every single young man in Ura Ayllu and many from Puna Ayllu above age fifteen travel to Madre de Dios to work. The solteros ("single men," see Chapter 3) value migration as an activity that temporarily takes them away from the valley and gives them access to cash and the commodities that symbolize progress and build status.⁴¹ Training in the miner's trade begins for boys when they are only twelve years old, the age at which they start working as cooks in the camps of Madre de Dios, or begin to help their fathers with minor tasks in the Ancoccala mine.

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Adolescents spend their cash incomes on education, on a limited range of consumer items (e.g., radios, trumpets, see below), or to support widowed mothers and younger siblings. For many boys it is important "to know money," as several of them explained to me (see Chapter 8). A thirteen year old boy from Puna Ayllu, who helps his father in Madre de Dios, told me with confidence that he mined a part of the corte (mine) by himself. To prove this, he pointed with pride to his radio and trumpet, common items associated with the transition to adulthood and independence among older adolescents.

There are also a few girls who start to migrate to Madre de Dios at this same age. They work as cooks for their relatives. Young women also work in the coca and coffee harvest season in Valle Grande.

Migration to Madre de Dios has introduced some important changes in the customary sexual division of labor. There now is a sharper distinction between the work spheres of men and those of women. Agricultural work, customarily a domain controlled by men,⁴² now has passed into the hands of

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women, children and the elderly.⁴³ Men have appropriated the sphere of migration and knowledge of the world beyond the community. Men thus have the responsibility for obtaining the cash that their families need to buy commercial food to fill seasonal gaps in agricultural production and to buy those commodities that are a part of their present social life.

From the perspective of men, the year is divided into the time devoted to gold mining, "true work" (Span.,trabajo de verdad), and agricultural work. The latter is perceived by men as "less hard work" and some even speak of it half-jokingly as "vacation time." This perception probably follows cultural norms that set the value of men's work above that of women's work. It also is true that gold mining involves tremendous drudgery and the reference to "vacation time" may reflect the fact that agricultural tasks are less onerously exhausting.

Women's agricultural work has surely increased in difficulty due to the men's prolonged absence from the community. It seems apparent that this new male perspective on the low value of agricultural work in contrast to the high value of work in the goldfields is an important issue of politics of gender in the community. Unfortunately, I do not know the women's point of view on this important matter.

Conclusions

Money and mining in some form long have had a prominent place in the history of Cuyo Cuyo. Gold mining currently is the most important source of income for the peasant households of Puna Ayllu and Ura Ayllu. However, there are other sources of income which still provide some cash and could be reactivated, should the profitability of gold extraction collapse due to a fall in the price, exhaustion of deposits, or a combination of both.

In Cuyo Cuyo the historical reliance on money to obtain market products has not been accompanied by a dynamic development of capitalist relations of production. From the late 19th century until approximately the mid-1920s, the production of commodities and the earning of money primarily served the purpose of financing fiestas, and secondarily the

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purpose of obtaining goods for household consumption. The order of those values has subsequently been reversed: money is now used primarily to buy food and items that are essential for the biological and social reproduction of the household. Surplus money is invested in the sponsorship of fiestas and in other activities that afford personal prestige (see Chapter 9). In spite of this inversion, money still operates within a framework of social processes that serve mainly to reproduce communal institutions.

The prominence of money in the household economy is connected with the historical process of ayllu division examined in Chapter 2. Before the segmentation of maximal ayllus in the nineteenth century, each household was capable of producing a far more diversified diet through direct control of multiple ecological resources. Money therefore had a limited role. The transformation of these ayllus into communities occurred during the time "misti timpu," when the entrepreneurial elites directed the construction of roads and otherwise invigorated regional markets. The commercial articulation they promoted facilitated expansion of markets and the access to money and commercial foods among the peasants. These processes were essential for the political separation of ecologically complementary minor ayllu segments.⁴⁴ In sum, money has been an essential element in the historical transformation of society in Cuyo Cuyo. In order to analyze its social and cultural significance in greater detail, I turn in the following chapters to an analysis of the gold mining economy in Cuyo Cuyo.