| Published monograph of the Production, Storage, and Exchange (PSE) in a Terraced Environment on the Eastern Andean Escarpment |
Chapter 8 - Footnotes
1Drinking on Sundays throughout the season is common among the miners who hold this belief about the devil, but the practice is not followed with the same enthusiasm by everyone. However, it is said that everyone spends the first day drinking, to show gratitude to the "Sacred Road" (Chapter 7), "which brought us here safely." Although this is a topic I do not explore in this monograph, the Devil is a prominent figure in Cuyo Cuyeños' beliefs about gold and money. See Taussig (1980) and the critique of Turner (1986) on the relationship between the Devil and capitalism in peasant societies.
1For a description of this type of miner see Chapter 7, "Maldonado Mining Firms."
2The size of these claims range from 15 hectares to 120 hectares. There is one industrial mining company (Chavinsa) that holds approximately 2,000 hectares in claims that overlap somewhat with the territories currently exploited by Cuyo Cuyo squatters (CORDEMAD, Denuncios Mineros Amparados y Vigentes 1978-1985. Jefatura Regional de Minería de Madre de Dios. Manuscrito; see also Chapter 7, "Maldonado Mining Firms").
3This is the same group of people I have been using as informants in other chapters of this report. My source of information is identified in the tables as Survey 1986; more specific details on this sample of households are provided in Chapter 1.
4Currently, there are no other gold resources in the immediate vicinity of the region mined by Cuyo Cuyeños. Depending on future developments in the gold economy, they may or may not continue exploring for other territories.
5Results of this visit will be identified as "Censo 1986." I interviewed only the owner of the claim. I asked for his name, age, community of origin, number of partners and peons, and size of his plot.
6Ñacoreque was included in the Cuyo Cuyo group (despite the fact that it is situated in Sandia District) because in practice the people of this community conduct all their businesses in Cuyo Cuyo. They currently are requesting a change in their affiliation in order to join the Cuyo Cuyo District.
7This reconstruction is based on several interviews with old miners of the Cuyo Cuyo District. Dates are only approximate; they are based on the current age and life history of the informants.
8Cuyo Cuyeño miners do not extract gold from these last two layers; they were not diagrammed in Banco Minero's (1978) study.
9In 1573 the caciques of Moho and Huancané who sent their people to work in the montaña of Carabaya during Inca times told a Crown Inspector: "[All the gold is obtained from]. . .what the currents of the rivers or streams carried along; and when they wanted to get it, they diverted the water, dug out the still damp earth, and washed it in wash troughs." (Información sobre las minas de Carabuco, Relaciones Geográficas de Indias [1573], Madrid 1965 vol.2 p. 69, quoted in Berthelot [1986: 77]). A nineteen century description of this procedure among Indian miners of the montaña of Sandia proves that it was still in used in those years (Vidal 1896: 193).
10Short sections of the canals may need lining with plastic sheets, or aqueducts.
11In the territories mined by Cuyo Cuyeños there are a few shifting miners who are called chichiqueros, a derogatory term that simply means 'small miner.' A feature common to all chichiqueros is that they lack access to a plot of land. They therefore must move constantly in search of small deposits located close to the streams which provide water to sluice the material and extract the gold. The chichiquero miners work with a light, portable sluice. They walk up and down creeks that have a low gradient, searching for flood deposits that form after torrential storms wash auriferous material from the surrounding hills into the stream beds. An additional form of extracting gold, which does not require the construction of water reservoirs, is to divert water directly from a point in the river located above the deposit that will be sluiced. The farther the deposit from the river, the longer the canal. Due to the low gradient of the main tributaries of the Huaypetue and Caichive rivers, these canals are used to sluice only the lower sections of the hills.
12I do not have reliable estimates of the labor investment necessary to construct a water reservoir. A figure reported to me by a miner who had built a large-sized tank and its canal system the month before I visited him, indicated that he had worked with other people a total of 192 man-days. While nowadays Cuyo Cuyeños can use some wage labor, in the early days they could not afford this.
13Although it is true that owners loose income by using partners, they derive other benefits (such as protection against encroachers) that rarely are explicitly recognized by them. This egalitarian ideology may in some case be exploited by owners to mask the economic benefits they obtain from using the labor of kin. A similar phenomenon was described by Kahn (1980: 98-102) among blacksmithing peasant businesses in Indonesia.
14In other words, they make light of these peasant ideas and of the culture of deference that characterizes their social relations. Indigenous entrepreneurs were identified in the Andean literature of the 1960s as the "cholo" social class (Bourricaud 1967).
15A miner who was desperately looking for a wage worker in Huaypetue told me that he was not hiring anyone until he had a propitious dream.
16I met only one Ura Ayllino overseer in Huaypetue. He labored for a man from Llaqta Ayllu, not a close relative of his but an in-law of one of his wive's first cousins.
17This kind of contract may date from colonial times. At the mines in Potosi during the 16th century some Indian miners had the right to work for themselves on Sundays; this right was called the k'apcha (Rowe 1957: 173).
18Dates cited are approximate and reconstructed from interviews with the owners and neighbors.
19I spent two weeks living in this camp, participating in their work. In two opportunities I weighed gold with them. So I consider these figures on gold income to be highly reliable.
20Yanagisako (1979) remarks that it is common for men everywhere to explain women's power over them in irrational terms (like "meanness"), which hide women's very rational political strategies and political power in society.
21As far as I know, they are not barred from work in the coffee or coca fields of Sandia's yunka, an environment similar to the lowlands of Madre de Dios.
22They were nicknamed 'kara maleta' (or "empty suitcase") referring to the fact that they brought new ways of behavior and the empty, false pretensions of money-holders.
23This and the following figures refer only to the central period of production during the rainy season. Miners also worked at other times during the year and their income changed. Net daily income is calculated after all the corte's operating expenses (including transportation costs when appropriate) are deducted. Data was collected in my interview survey of 1986 and complemented with weighing the gold obtained in two seasons. One gram of gold was worth $9.11 dollars (see note a, Table 8.8).
24Both Mauro and Edson's income was paid in Intis, and thus affected by inflation. I calculated these figures using a March gold price, however, both were paid in April, when their gold income equivalent had deteriorated by about 10%.
25Women who work as cooks set portable sluice boxes if they live close to a stream. After heavy rain storms enrich the gold content of the streams it is common to see women working by the river bed, close to their kitchens. I do not know how much income this occasional work brings to women.
26This was equivalent to approximately 2,235 dollars, an inordinate amount of money by Cuyo Cuyo standards.
27One of my reasons for choosing Pedro's camp to illustrate the social life of casas in Maldonado is precisely because it is one of the few cases in which I was able to obtain details of gold circulation within the casa. However, in most cases, I had no difficulty obtaining data on total gold output or personal income. Conversations on allocation of gold seldom were very productive.
28Santos himself admitted to his drinking problem in Maldonado because, "Tío Juaniquillo (the Devil) is jealous [of his gold]. If one drinks beer there is gold, when one is very stingy there is no gold. We drink and we have gold," he said.
