By Jorge Recharte, 1993.

Chapter 7 - The Sacred Road to Capitalism: Apu Ñan

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cualquiera!)

In this description it is evident that the teacher, a professional, resented the conspicuous expenditure of wealth by prominent miners of peasant background. Although unable to speak proper Spanish they could undermine his authority and social status as a member of the small, relatively well-off elite of state bureaucrats. The image of "the miner" is thus woven through events and narratives like this one.

After the fiesta miners always are to a degree uncertain about the exact timing of their departure. If news about unusually early rains in Madre de Dios reaches Cuyo Cuyo via commercial radio stations from Puno and by word of mouth from paisanos or truck drivers, a miner might decide, sometimes rather abruptly, to begin the trip early. The peak of migration to the Madre de Dios goldfields occurs during the last weeks of November and the first days of December, when the season of heavy rains is well underway there. By the end of the year, the community is nearly deserted of men. Most go even though some do not yet have partners or a place to work by the time the trucks start leaving town.

Indecision about these arrangements can result from labor associations that are considered inadequate or from uncertainty about expected income. The following quotation from my conversation with an Ura Ayllino migrant illustrates the undertone of ambiguity and of openness to alternatives that is so common in the economic culture (and interpersonal style) of Cuyo Cuyeños:

[My former partner] also asked me last year [to travel again with him to Maldonado], 'let's go, let's go' [he said], but I did not want to. Of course I said 'yes, let's go,' but I didn't.

In this case the migrant was looking for a way to "retire" from a partnership in which he had a subordinate position. But he did not want to demonstrate overtly his intentions, lest he foreclose this alternative and no better one appear.

Travelers who embark on a trip to Maldonado without a verbal agreement to join a work team risk not finding a job or appropriate labor conditions when they arrive. The later the trip the higher the risk, as opportunities close rapidly with the arrival of school-age migrants. These youngsters form the last wave of migration, undertaken by the primary- and secondary-school youngsters between the last week in December and the first two weeks in January, after the school year is over. If a miner's plans to travel have not been concluded by early January, the opportunity for mining in Madre de Dios during that season likely has be forgone.

Travel to Maldonado other than during the central months of the rainy season is rare. However, small groups of comuneros journey from Cuyo Cuyo to Madre de Dios between the months of April and October. These mostly are owners of goldfields who go to the mines in order to join workers and

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partners who remained working there from the previous season.¹² These visits usually are short. Peasants who leave the community with some frequency must have enough cash resources to replace their labor in their household.

Whatever travel arrangements are made, the weeks that immediately follow Rosario are devoted to finishing potato plantings in the upper altitudes of the valley and to weeding the plots that were planted earlier at lower elevations. Most migrants will not leave Cuyo Cuyo until these tasks are completed, usually around the end of November (see Figure 4.1). Husbands are expected to leave a substantial supply of firewood for their wives' hearths and ideally they buy flour, noodles, and other foods in bulk to leave with the members of the family. These purchases usually are financed with loans from the Agrarian Bank and more rarely with informal loans from relatives or local lenders. The latter entail cumbersome and time-consuming negotiations.

The wealthiest mine owners usually leave early and return late. Because of their extended absence from the community, they must find workers who will help their wives with the agricultural tasks. For example, a man who was joining (as partner) the mine of a well-placed owner, asked one of his aunts to help his new partner's wife as an expression of gratitude (cariño). In return, he brought cloth and bread for the aunt when he returned from Madre de Dios. This type of arrangement is common. Through service to the migrants, older people and others who do not migrate to the goldfields garner indirect access to the gold obtained by their relatives.

Attention to all of these arrangements makes life hectic in the weeks prior to the trip to Madre de Dios. This level of activity continues until the night before the journey, when the partners who will travel together to work in the same mine join for a coca chewing ritual called Rikch'asqa ("waiting awake for the dawn"). The partners spend the night of the Rikch'ay awake chewing coca leaves and drinking cane alcohol in honor of Pachamama and the road to Madre de Dios. Their wives participate and sometimes, if the miners are able or willing to spend enough money, the services of a "wise-man" (yachachiq) are solicited.

The owner of the mine hosts the Rikch'ay in his house. The festivities start a few hours before mid-night. The person who knows the proper placement of the offerings puts an inkuña (a special-purpose textile used by women for carrying coca leaves) on the floor and the host places his coca and cane alcohol on it. In the ceremony in which I participated, each person in the house picked up three large, unbroken coca leaves from the inkuña. These make up an offering called the k'intu. It is presented to the district's mountain spirits (Apus). Then the owner of the house and head of the work crew offered some alcohol to each corner of the inkuña, in salutation of Pachamama, and they drank a shot of alcohol with the senior male in the house. The k'intus held by each adult were then collected by the host, first from all men and then from all women in a tin cup in which

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the participants poured a few drops of alcohol before taking a shot themselves. After the collection was completed, the host walked to the exit and poured a few drops of alcohol on each one of the corners at the base of the door (ch'allay). Finally he walked outside the house to fling the contents of the cup toward the places where Apu Ñan (Sacred Road) and other local Apus dwell. The protection of these spirits is invoked through spells. A miner shared the following incantation with me: "Sacred road, of all [places] you truly sacred place, take us in the best of conditions."¹³

After the k'intu and ch'allay rituals were over, the owner of the house distributed the rest of the coca and alcohol to all of his guests. This required several rounds lasting throughout the night, until dawn. The purpose of the Rikch'ay is to honor Pachamama and salute the Apu Ñan with coca and alcohol, as well as to show consideration for these spiritual beings by not sleeping. In the quiet atmosphere of this reunion:

we talk about all the details [of the trip]: we are going to do this and that, this is our plan, [we talk about] everything. Once there [in Maldonado] we abide by this conversation.

Although some miners request the services of a ritual specialist (yachachiq) who knows how to perform powerful (and expensive) offerings, this is not very common. More frequently, the owner of a goldfield buys a ricadu, a special ritual offering for Pachamama to request good fortune during the mining season. It is burned in the goldfield plot upon arrival in Maldonado.

Rikch'ay guarantees the contract between partners. One of the main topics of conversation has to do with the distribution of the anticipated gold among members of the work crew. However, these agreements only establish points of reference, because the actual percentages change depending on a number of factors (Chapter 8).

Most migrants take a local truck and pay a lump sum for the trip from Cuyo Cuyo to the banks of the Inambari River. Travelers need to make arrangements in advance and secure their place with the driver. Truck drivers let passengers take only a small bundle of personal belongings. Migrants cannot for instance take agricultural products with them, except for perhaps a small amount of dehydrated potatoes, corn, or habas.

The trucks leave Cuyo Cuyo at different hours. In late November it is common to see one or two of the overcrowded vehicles leaving town every day. For a few hours before they finally depart, the valley reverberates with the sound of the truck horns calling the passengers going to Madre de Dios. Travelers have one or two hours for a farewell meal with their families. Although the personal emotions of family separation are never expressed in public, some miners referred to them an impediment to spending

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longer periods of time mining gold in the lowlands.

The trucks normally take twelve hours to reach Juliaca, the main commercial town of Puno Department. Passengers spend one or two days there. They sleep in their customary paradero, the city house of a paisano who charges a small fee for space and for a reed mat to spread on the floor.¹⁴ In Juliaca the truck is overhauled for the trip's most demanding leg, that from Cusco to the goldfields of Madre de Dios.

The approximately 300 kilometers from Juliaca to Urcos (Cusco Department) are covered in one day. From Urcos the road winds up a steep slope to a mountain pass, and then rapidly descends into a valley. If the rains have started early, the dirt road already has been nearly destroyed by November because of the constant flow of heavy traffic. Passengers have to do large parts of the ascent from Urcos to the pass on foot, to lighten the truck so that it can get through.

The possibility of an accident always is present. Travelers to Madre de Dios talk frequently about the road's dangers and almost everybody seems to have been involved in a mishap. The dangers of the trip are considered a liability by migrants. The people of Puna Ayllu cite them as a compelling reason to stay in Ancoccala. However, in the truck in which I went to the goldfields (which carried several tons of gasoline in addition to some twenty passengers), people were relaxed enough to sleep much of the time.

The road condition worsens and the dangers of the trip intensify as the truck zigzags up and then begins to wind down from Walla Walla (a second cordillera pass, about 4,900 m) to the town of Marcapata in Quincemil (Cusco Department) and finally to the lowlands of Madre de Dios (see Figure 1.6). Tropical rain forest has become dominant before the road reaches Quincemil (600 m). The section from Urcos to Quincemil takes some twenty-four hours in excellent conditions, and often much more. The descent brings people into zones with considerably higher levels of temperature and humidity, and they change from their stereotypical campesino clothes to short pants and T-shirts stamped with images of "Bruce Lee" and other icons of urban culture. The last stretch of the road, from Quincemil to Masuko (a small commercial town) covers less than 100 kilometers but it can take more than a day to travel because landslides are common. In the best of conditions, this leg of the trip takes about five hours. The long journey concludes as the miners cross the Inambari River in a motor canoe and take a short two-hour truck ride to Huaypetue. This is the central market town of the region where most of Cuyo Cuyeños work (see Figures 1.6 and 8.1).

By the time people arrive in Huaypetue, they already have spent up to

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seven days traveling exposed to the elements in the back of an overcrowded and uncomfortable truck. However, despite the cost of the trip, its dangers and its discomforts, some migrants were willing to take the long round-trip back to Cuyo Cuyo a couple of months later to stay for just one week in order to dance in Carnival before returning again to Madre de Dios. This temporary return to Cuyo Cuyo also entails the opportunity cost of work forsaken at the peak of the rainy season and placer productivity. The willingness of the miners to undergo such hardships shows the importance of community-based social relations. It also is an indication of the degree to which maximizing gold income in the short term is subordinated to strategies aimed at the acquisition of community prestige over the long term.

In sum, embarking on the trip to Maldonado takes people from the social realm of a remote peasant valley in northern Puno, into the capitalist, market-structured economic realm of the Madre de Dios goldfields. Maldonado appears to be a textbook example of an underdeveloped region characterized by an extractive modality of capitalist production. However, it is inaccurate to describe this transition simply as the movement of Cuyo Cuyeño peasants into a geographically separate locus of capitalist production. Community-based social relations and commitments are embedded in the economic organization of gold production among Cuyo Cuyeño peasant-miners even when in the lowlands. In other words, the articulation Cuyo Cuyeños to the national capitalist economy is not dictated simply by the usual demands of market organization. As Norman Long (1984: 2) has aptly phrased it:

Peasant households of family farms are thus not simply reproduced by the workings of the wider structure, but also depend upon the way existing cultural rules and social relationships affect access to a utilization of essential resources. These internal reproductive processes also influence people's work ethics, and generate different types of social consciousness.

My description of the transition undertaken by Cuyo Cuyeños on the "sacred road" to Maldonado is a prelude to ethnographic documentation of the idea that these peasants adopt an idiosyncratic role in capitalism. Taking the peasants' point of view facilitates understanding their representation of the transition from one economic space to the other. It helps us to understand changes in their economic behavior. The native metaphor of Apu Ñan and the rituals of transition at both of ends of this road point to the ambiguous nature of the socio-economic space Cuyo Cuyeños know as Maldonado.

My description of Madre de Dios Department, a region at the margins of the national capitalist economy, highlighted the complex texture of the social formations there. In the next chapter I further document the peasant perspective on capitalism by means of a detailed examination of the economic organization of Cuyo Cuyeño gold mining firms.

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