| Published monograph of the Production, Storage, and Exchange (PSE) in a Terraced Environment on the Eastern Andean Escarpment |
Chapter 8 - Maldonado: Peasant Miners in the Frontiers of Capitalism
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Closer examination of this group without partners (Table 8.5) reveals its significance. Among this group of 21 owners there is a small segment (38 percent) who worked alone, i.e., without partners or wage workers. These eight owners had very small lots and purposefully produced gold at low output levels in order to extend the life span of their properties while they were looking for an alternative work place. Given the limited size of their territories, they rarely attract potential partners. They could claim truthfully that they have no land left.
The second and largest group (62 percent in Table 8.5) is more interesting because they seem to contradict the labor pattern that predominates among most Cuyo Cuyo migrants. About half of them (7 out of 13 miners) were the Cusqueño or Cuyo Cuyeño migrants with the largest land-holdings in Cabecera Huaypetue. The 6 remaining have cortes of an intermediate size and all were Cuyo Cuyeños. They could be described as entrepreneurs who fend off relatives to maximize cash income. I do not have clear evidence for all these cases. However, I had extensive conversations with two groups of owners who had the largest landholdings in Cabecera Huaypetue. These were three siblings in one case and two in the other, from Aripo and Sayaca annexes. Both sets of siblings came from families extremely poor in landholdings at home and they appeared to be severing ties to Cuyo Cuyo (see below). Thus, the size of the claim seems an important variable in explaining its labor structure. For different reasons, owners of the smallest and the largest claims are able to avoid the economic encumbrance of partners.
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The limited group of miners who control large territories (up to approximately 10 ha) rely mostly on the physical force of their wage workers and on aggressive verbal behavior to protect their claims. Operators of claims of this scale often abandon their home communities to settle permanently in the jungle and work intensively their goldfields or invest in other economic enterprises. These miners are loosening their social ties in a double sense. They resist community obligations when in Madre de Dios and they are not compelled to reestablish them by returning to the highlands. Separation from the network of community relations follows as a consequence. This is accompanied by an "entrepreneurial" attitude and ideology that consciously militates against the peasant creed of kinship solidarity.14 Cuyo Cuyeño peasants seem simultaneously to detest these aggressive paisanos for their power and arrogance, and admire them for their capacity to accumulate wealth. It is not surprising that they explain the wealth of these people either by referring to secret pacts with Tío, the Devil who owns the gold, or to their having founding buried treasures in their community. Rarely is the wealth of these campesinos explained by Cuyo Cuyeños as the outcome of entrepreneurship, accumulation and effective investment of resources in mining. By contrast, small miners avoid working with partners or with wage workers in order to reduce the annual output and thus extend the productive life of cortes. Potential partners will rarely be attracted to work in these conditions, in any case.
Contrasting with the relatively small group of owners who fend off partners, most Cuyo Cuyo miners in Cabecera Huaypetue work with one or more of them (see Table 8.4). Among the group that participates in this type of labor arrangement in Cabecera Huaypetue, there is an average of 1.15 partners for every owner (Table 8.6). Medium-sized owners benefit from their use of partners in a number of ways that to some extent compensate their monetary losses. For instance, miners who claim average-sized plots and who have an adequate supply of water combine partners and wage workers to secure territorial protection from small and large miners' encroachment.
Mining camps run by Cuyo Cuyeño peasants rarely use people from their
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own district as peons. Miners told me that it is fairly easy to find workers in Huaypetue, although stories about peones who run away with gold or tools indicate that owners must think carefully before hiring a wage worker.15 Thus, internal security is an additional benefit brought by partnership with trusted relatives.
In my census of Cabecera Huaypetue I found that 44 percent of the camps did not use peons and the rest used from one to ten (see Table 8.7). The size of the plot, the intensity of gold extraction, and technological factors determine the number of workers that owners use. As indicated above, the basic work crew or cuadrilla in Maldonado is composed of two to four people. Owners who use more than one cuadrilla in their properties place one partner in each work crew they have. An important benefit of using partners together with wage workers in a work crew is that the former set the work intensity of the crew through example, thus raising the crew's productivity and consequently the owner's profits. This modality of labor management is linked to a distinctly non-capitalist work ethic:
We have to work more than the peons, until our hands are bleeding, only then the peon starts to work. If we pretend that we are working, then they pretend they are working too, and we have failures.
Although it is not openly acknowledged, difficult to observe and impossible to quantify, the partners' contribution to labor control is thus another benefit to owners.
Few Cuyo Cuyo migrants work for wages. However, there are Cuyo Cuyeños working with their relatives and receiving an income that is only slightly better than that of peons, in spite of the fact that they are considered and think of themselves as partners. For example, the school-age youths who work during their summer vacations are usually paid in cash, like the wage workers. They have little influence over the amount of money they receive. Similarly, there are a few men from Cuyo Cuyo who work as
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overseers (mayordomos) for goldfield owners. They are rarely paid in gold and usually at rates that are barely above those paid to wage workers.16 Finally, there are Cuyo Cuyeños who receive the same pay as peons, and yet they are not considered wage workers because the owners allow them to work in the corte on Sundays and keep the gold they extract then as a small bonus.17
These foregoing descriptions present ideal principles of gold distribution. In fact, there are many subtle variations in the specific relationships between owners and partners. There is also considerable variation in the miners' perception of the drudgery of work and of the utility of their product. This is the result of labor status differentiation, minor technological variations, degrees of territorial conflict, changes in health risk, quality of living quarters, and differences in accumulated mining experience from camp to camp. To examine these variations I must move inside a casa.
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Pedro's Casa
The camp that I will describe is located in Cabecera Huaypetue. The size of this corte (8 ha) is above the average. This goldfield is claimed by two brothers from Ura Ayllo who settled there around 1974.18 Brothers Pedro, Juan, and José come from one of the poorest families in Ura Ayllu, a situation that forced two of them to migrate early in their youth in search of alternative sources of income. The camp comprises a single casa, one unit of production which is composed of ten workers divided into two work teams or cuadrillas. These two cuadrillas work in locations only a few meters apart in the same corte. The owners of this goldfield are considered to be relatively wealthy miners in their home community.
The main house of this corte is carefully constructed. The roof is made of palm leaves and the walls, bunks, tables, and benches are built with local wood products. The house like the water tanks and water canals are symbols of labor and hence important for the establishment of a solid claim to the deposit. When I visited this camp the owners were busy cutting trees and producing wood planks with a newly purchased saw. They wanted to rebuild their camp house, "this time with a tin roof," in order to further solidify their territorial rights.
The house has a kitchen neatly organized by the cook, a young woman from Ura Ayllu. The owners, partners and peons of the casa sleep in the same building, although in 1986 when I visited them a second hut had been added to accommodate additional workers. The dormitory is separated by a bamboo wall from the kitchen. Water is brought to the camp by a bamboo pipe from a rivulet fifty meters away and is shared with the neighboring camp (owned by a brother). After the work day is over, all workers take a refreshing cold-water bath. The two adjacent camps also share a small and rudimentary soccer field used frequently after work for matches with neighboring groups.
At the time of my visit there were ten people living in this casa. Table 8.8 summarizes each person's kinship relationship to the camp leader (ego), labor status, and average daily net income in gold.19 With the exception of Jacinto and Gerónimo, the wage workers, all the individuals of this camp were from Ura Ayllu.
The miners living in this casa and surrounding camps were closely related to each other, as illustrated in Figure 8.3. Each casa in the figure is a separate corte and property. The original settlers of the hill were three siblings, Pedro, Juan and José. Pedro and Juan were living in house 1 and José in house 2. Later on José invited his brother in-law (who had started an independent corte) together with his youngest brother to be
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partners. They settled in house 3. The owner of house 4 was recently invited by one of the brothers in house 1 with whom he had godparenthood ties. He received a small, relatively poor section of casa's 1 claim. This owner, later on, invited his brother to be a partner.
This case illustrates a process of growth and fissioning of casas that has taken place in the majority of goldfields owned by Cuyo Cuyeños in Maldonado. The deposit exploited by this casa was discovered by one of the three brothers. He called in the other two in order to be able to defend it and work in their company. They began to develop the property when they were still unmarried. After José married, his two brothers said his "mean" wife compelled him to claim a separate lot. In order to avoid conflicts, "we decided to divide the corte, this part for you [José], this part for us."
What is described as "meanness" is in fact the brothers' perception of their sister-in-law's power over her husband, and of her capacity to win his loyalty for the benefit of her own set of siblings.20 The role of wives in pressuring husbands to favor the woman's brothers is evident in other life-histories of miners. Although I was not able to pursue this in
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more detail or to gain a view of it from the perspective of women, my impression is that a wive's pressure on her husband to favor her siblings is a common occurrence and thus an important hidden dimension of gold mining. Notably it is one that takes place in the kitchens and backyards of Cuyo Cuyo. Generally women, except for the young unmarried ones, cannot travel to Maldonado because they are said to be too weak and prone to sickness "entering" their bodies.21
The authority structure of Pedro's casa is loose, but he is the oldest of the two brothers who claimed this property and acts as the group leader. In his role as "treasurer" (Tesorero) of the casa, he is responsible for keeping records of the weekly extraction of gold, of all advance payments made to wage workers and the days they did not work, of the gold received by the partners before the end of the season, and of the weekly expenditures on supplies for the casa. At the time of my visit Pedro was married and had three children. He had his eight-year old son, Percy, with him. Percy performed no productive tasks for the goldfield, except that he guarded the house. This boy received no payment and was there simply as his father's companion.
Although Juan discovered the goldfield where this claim now is established, he is subordinate to Pedro partly because he is the unmarried chanaku or youngest member of the sibling group. As expected of a chanaku in Cuyo Cuyo, he lives with and supports his mother in exchange for preferential inheritance. Pedro's higher position in the camp also results in part from his considerable investment of time and labor in the defense and development of the property that Juan discovered in 1974.
The eldest brother, Lorenzo, is treated with respect by his younger siblings but his moral authority over them does not translate into a greater share of profits. In fact, he receives considerably less gold than his younger brothers. A few years after their father died (in the late 1950s), Lorenzo left the natal house to establish a coffee plantation in the montaña of Sandia. This was a time (the early 1960s) when migration to the goldfields of Madre de Dios had less importance among the peasants of Cuyo Cuyo (except for those from Llaqta Ayllu). When his younger brothers began migrating to Madre de Dios (about 1972), his investment in the coffee plantation was considerable and his income from that source sufficed to sustain his household. Consequently, he was not attracted to join his brothers in the first migratory wave of miners. His case is typical of people in his age group, most of whom owned coffee and coca fields (see Chapter 5).
Subsequently, a prolonged crisis in the price of coffee and a sustained upward trend in the price of gold widened the gap between Lorenzo's income and that of his brothers. As he remembers it, his brothers invited him to come to work with them in Maldonado:
[They told me] you are like a father [to us]. You have to see our
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work [in the goldfield]. We have a very large claim. We have a big [property]. Our neighbors are trying to encroach from all corners, you have to come no matter what. Come to see us, [tell us] help us with our neighbors. We are fighting. You can't stay all the time here in Valle [Grande]. You look very sad, all yellow, pricked by the flies. You [and your family] are not eating properly. Leave your coffee for two or three years. Of course you don't have to sell it, just leave it, [we] can clean that easily. So my brothers spoke to me.
Although probably it was Lorenzo himself who asked his brothers to take him to their goldfield, his account recognizes their fraternal solidarity. In his recollection, his brothers saw him, as he says, "all yellow and pricked by the flies." Yet it is interesting that Lorenzo, who had already sponsored several Ura Ayllu fiestas and had undertaken the prestigious position of Lieutenant Governor of the community, is quick to identify the advantage that his political weight could bring to his brothers, as they tried to protect their gold mine against competitors from their district.
Lorenzo has migrated to his brothers' corte since 1982. Apparently his share of the goldfield income has been improving since he joined them. This shows that seniority can be manipulated to obtain economic advantages, although it does not necessarily overrule labor investment and other customary ownership rights as the main criteria for the division of profit among casa siblings.
Mauro, Lorenzo's son, was a 13 year-old boy identified by uncles Pedro and Juan as a partner. Despite the fact that he was an unproductive worker because of his age, he received a payment that was higher than that of Julio, Gerónimo, and Jacinto, the wage workers of the camp. Mauro's case is not common, since other migrant children of similar age make considerably less money for harder and emotionally less rewarding jobs as cooks. In a sense, Mauro's income was in fact an extension of his father's status, a privileged existence.
Among the miners I interviewed to reconstruct migration histories, it was fairly common to find people with childhood experiences of migration and work in Madre de Dios. Children are expected to work hard. However, the money they earn is usually their own and they often use it to finance the cost of their education. In one of the camps in which I lived there was a child-cook. He was a quiet boy with a tragicomical face dominated by a swollen eye because of a wasp sting. He was a twelve-year-old on his first trip to Maldonado, son of one of the wage worker's compadres. He awakened before dawn to start preparing breakfast. When the cock that slept inside the hut crowed at dawn he had already been working for quite some time. After workers left the house at around 7:30 a.m., he cleaned the dishes, played with his peer cook from the neighboring casa and started cooking again for lunch before 11 a.m. A short while after noon he wrapped the pot with the lunch and walked to the corte, which was located a half-hour away. After lunch he returned home, cleaned the dishes and prepared dinner.
The second youth in the camp, Edson, was Pedro's godchild, a fifteen
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year old high school student. As Pedro explained to me, this boy was now the bread-winner of his household and he (Pedro) felt compelled to help him. This was the moral obligation of a good compadre, he said. Edson was considered a partner too, and thus his income was above wage-worker's level.
School-age workers like Mauro and Edson are called escoleros. Their income is usually spent on their education and sometimes on bicycles and other commodities. Some Cuyo Cuyo boys drop out of high-school when, as their elders say with the smile of an accomplice, they "meet the money" (cuando conocen el dinero). They experience its purchasing power. But for most escoleros, education seems to have high priority and they invest their time and gold correspondingly. When the escoleros work in the fields of relatives their productivity typically is below that of the wage workers. Their elevated income amounts to a disguised form of gold redistribution. Nonetheless, escoleros help the owners who hired them in agricultural tasks and other chores in the home community because they feel obligated to reciprocate the favored treatment they receive in the goldfields.
Luzmila was the cook of Pedro's camp. She was an unmarried woman from Ura Ayllu described to me as an unspecified "relative." She was not considered a partner like the rest of Ura Ayllu male workers. Generally speaking, cooks are paid at rates that are below the salary of male wage workers, but the exact amounts vary. For example, children are paid less than adult women. Women in Luzmila's position are rare; typically only the very young females migrate to Madre de Dios. It is more common for women in general to go to Valle Grande to the coca harvest. In the past, young women who left the community to work for money (ideally a role confined to men) were despised by older women.22 However, the younger generation values to a greater degree the new role of women as merchants and cash producers.
Julio, an Ura Ayllu comunero and the oldest person in Pedro's camp, was addressed as tío (uncle) by ego and the rest of the residents. The term tío in this case was used to acknowledge Julio's seniority, for he was not related to the owners in any way. Julio was described to me as a partner by the owners. However for sixty days before my visit to Huaypetue he had been working as a peon in this same house. This apparent anomaly can be explained as follows: Julio works regularly as a wage worker for Pedro's household in Ura Ayllu, where it is always cumbersome to obtain this kind of labor. The loyalty of a wage worker to a family that has a labor shortfall is perceived by both parties as an act of allegiance which is entitled to compensation. Thus when Julio asked Pedro to take him to his mine "aunque sea como peon" ("just as a wage worker"), Pedro initially tried to resist out of fear that Julio could easily push for a better labor position. This in fact happened after Julio had worked as a wage worker for the first two months.
Jacinto and Gerónimo were from the District of Putina (Puno
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Department). Both were in their early twenties and were hired in Huaypetue as peons. They traveled together to work in Madre de Dios and had plans to meet again after March to work together in the coffee harvest in Valle Grande where their relatives own land. There were no clear signs of status differentiation between the owners and these two Aymara workers except on Sundays, when they were expected to spend a couple of hours cutting firewood for the kitchen (in return for a full day's pay).
The two wage workers labored in separate cuadrillas and were not assigned particularly demanding jobs. At the end of their contract they requested, to no avail, that "treasurer" Pedro pay their salary and fringe benefits in gold. This was one of the few occasions in which they addressed the owner as señor ("Sir").
The manner in which gold was distributed among the people who lived and worked in Pedro's casa is summarized in Table 8.8. Owners Pedro and Juan had a net daily income of 1.75 grams of gold.23 Their brother Lorenzo was next in income rank, but considerably below them with 0.440 grams of gold per day. His pay, however, was almost three times that of the wage workers. Considering that his young son Mauro had a net daily income of 0.233 grams of gold per day (paid, however, in cash),24 the pooled compensation of father and son was approximately one third that of his brothers, the owners of the goldfield. Lorenzo also benefited from a major gold loan from his brothers. Edson had a net gold income of 0.344 grams per day, a sum elevated by his family's needs and compadrazgo ties to the owner. Despite his age and considerably higher productivity, Julio earned less money than these two boys. During his first 60 days of work Julio made a peon wage at the market rate, which amounted to 0.161 grams of gold (paid in cash) for every day of work. After this period, he participated as a partner for another sixty-nine days, earning a net income of 0.217 grams per day. This was an improvement of seventy-four percent, and the payment was received in gold. His average income for the whole period was 0.191 grams (Table 8.8).
Jacinto and Gerónimo earned the local market salary of 0.161 grams a day (paid in cash) in addition to their meals. Upon completion of ninety days of work they also earned the right to claim the cost of their round trip from Juliaca to Huaypetue. Luzmila, like the salary workers and the two boys, received her pay in cash, not in gold. She was paid 2,475 Intis in early April, an equivalent of 0.123 grams of gold per day for her 129
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days of work with the casa. Her pay was below that of male wage workers and unlike the latter who had their Sundays free, she had to cook seven days a week. In all the time I spent in the camp she never ventured to go to Huaypetue.25
It is difficult to reconstruct the negotiations that lie beneath the final allocation of gold. While the figures quoted above correspond to the actual amounts that were received by each worker at the end of the main season, they do not include other less visible benefits. For example Pedro and Juan spent 84 grams of gold in early March on a motorized saw, intending to use it both in Huaypetue and to help to replant the coffee plantation that their brother Lorenzo had in Valle Grande before he joined them in Maldonado. At the end of March, Lorenzo's brothers gave him 248 grams of gold to purchase agricultural land for the three of them.26 Lorenzo's share was financed with credit from Pedro and Diego.
The owners of the corte also enjoyed unique privileges in the allocation of gold. For example, their share of the casa's net income was not affected when they left the mine for short periods of time. Minor partners' shares, by contrast, are correspondingly reduced when they do not work. While owners and workers of a casa share a basic idea of the expected compensations due to their labor, actual payments are subject to negotiations and the descriptions I collected suggest a great degree of flexibility.
Although peons are in the weakest of all negotiating positions, Gerónimo attempted to bargain with Pedro for better pay upon completion of his ninety-day labor contract. Gerónimo offered to continue working with this casa, an advantage because Pedro knew that he was a trustworthy person. Gerónimo then asked that he be allowed private access to the corte on Sundays, i.e., to extract gold for himself one day per week. After this request was denied, Gerónimo asked that his salary be paid in gold rather than in cash. Pedro refused, despite Gerónimo's claim that Pedro had promised to do so when he was hired.
In sum, this casa illustrates that labor relationships among owners and partners are based primarily on ownership of the means of production. Yet these relationships also are defined by moral concepts of kinship and community membership which limit the owner's opportunities to seek profit maximization. This mixing of economic and communal or kinship ties carries over to relations in the home communities, complicating any analysis
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confined strictly to the mining camps.27
Pedro's casa was typical of sibling-based mining firms in Maldonado. Generally speaking, this type of organization is the cornerstone of gold-mining among Cuyo Cuyeño peasant miners. Historically, sibling solidarity was the means to develop and secure control over the deposits. However, sibling partnerships are not always stable and usually break due to pressure exercised by wives over their husbands in order to favor their own male siblings.
Santos: Miner Without Brothers
The life-history of Santos, a miner from Ura Ayllu who works in Quebrada Mahuay, illuminates other aspects of sibling ties in the aggressive economic environment of Maldonado. Santos had only one sibling, a sister. In the summer of 1986 he was married with four children. He is an exceptionally hard working person and has been mining in the region since the early 1970s. However, he has been unable to secure a corte of his own and has been forced to work with in-laws and other relatives instead. He perceives his career as a miner to be a failure.
Santos is married to the sister of an Ura Ayllu sibling group that controls a large mine in Huaypetue. For several years he worked with his brothers in-law, but always as a subordinate. This position clearly was not emotionally satisfying, even if economically he was better-off with the group than in the corte he was working in when I visited him in 1986. In his own words:
Just like a child, they always treated me like a child. I have to be alone to learn, right?. I will make it. For this reason [I left my brothers in law.]
In Santos' eyes this was not a fulfilling experience because he received proportionally far less gold than his in-laws and consequently was treated "just like a child." In other words, in the perspective of this Ura Ayllino peasant, gold-mining was not only an economic activity that brought money to his household. It affected his whole social being. His decision to move in search of other jobs involved considerations that were not narrowly economic. Santos had also worked intermittently in his mother's sister's sons' goldfield, but there he was also receiving a lower share of the total output than the owners, first cousins that he addressed as "brothers." Although Santos had a secure source of income in this and the former casa, and he described the relationship with his brothers in-law
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and consanguineous "brothers" as good, it was clear that in both places he had been segregated from the core of siblings. His case illustrates the difficulties of individuals who lack the support of male siblings and who wish to establish and defend a mining territory.
In 1986 Santos decided to try once again with a different kind of "brothers." He joined a casa composed of two brothers who were described by him as first cousins although they are not related to him. Santos explained that they addressed each other as kin because the mother of this sibling group had been raised as a criada (adopted child) in the natal house of his father, whom she addressed as brother. Santos moved to this casa because he had been offered an equal share in the output of gold and a vague promise of access to an independent piece of land within this goldfield. The casa was in a position to offer this because it wanted to expand the hydraulic infrastructure of the claim. Under this circumstance, Santos' labor investment in the tanks would give him a moral right to partial ownership. He worked for over a month in the construction of two reservoirs with this goal in mind. When I visited him and we talked about this issue, he was somewhat anxious because unsure about the fulfillment of such a promise by his "brothers."
When later in the year I interviewed one of the "brothers," he expressed a negative view of Santos. He pointed out that Santos drank too much, to the point that he often pawned his watch when drinking in Huaypetue. Santos squandered his income in beer while his home in Ura Ayllu looked unpleasant and his children were not well cared for.28 This perception of Santos as a failed miner contributed to the instability of his contractual relations with relatives.
Maldonado and Community
As I suggested in the previous chapter and have attempted to illustrate here, the expression "Maldonado" stands for the social space in which Cuyo Cuyeños make their living as gold miners. The ritual of Rik'chay performed at both ends of the journey to Maldonado (described in Chapter 7) is part of the native way of understanding the transition they must make to accommodate the differences between their village in Cuyo Cuyo and camps in Maldonado. Although peasants stress the contrast between Maldonado and Cuyo Cuyo, this chapter has shown that it is social relations in the home community and Cuyo Cuyeño peasant values that underpin money-making strategies in the goldfields.
The exploitation of auriferous deposits is based on relations of mutual protection among brothers and other close relatives through the informal labor contract of owner-partners. This is a relationship based on the moral obligations that are due kinsmen. One of the consequences of
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this form of interhousehold cooperation is the peculiar settlement pattern of the creeks: clusters of community and district paisanos.
This loose social organization, like the quite different institutionalization of corporate ownership developed in Ancoccala, constitutes a social space built by Cuyo Cuyeños. It is made out of social commitments embedded in social relations that are essential to the agricultural economy of their households and to the social reproduction of their community back home. This, I think, is the relevance of the owner-partner contract. The owner of a deposit would have no reason to subsidize the income of paisano relatives if such generosity were not a crucial element in his community social relations and household economy.
The extension of household and communal commitments to gold extraction is not without contradictions. For example, sibling groups coalesced to protect territories only to later split from the pressure of wives seeking to help their own brothers gain access to the claims successfully established. The composition of casas and the allocation of gold among workers in the same casa is partly the result of competition among women in the home community.
Cuyo Cuyeño migrants to Madre de Dios break from their home households and reconstitute casas which to some extent formally mimic non-wage household (wasi) relations of production. The potential for conflict among owners and partners, in spite of owners' rhetoric of generosity, is great. Corte division and a high turnover rate among partners result from differential rewards for labor among relatives who otherwise have relatively similar economic and social expectations in the home community. The brief life-history of Santos showed that inadequate social support contributed to a miner's failure.
There are a number of other factors that reveal the importance of community relations in the gold-mining sphere. For example, migrants sponsor the fiesta of Carnival which takes place at the peak of the rainy season. This celebration brings these men (and sometimes their brothers or other close associates) back to the community at great expense (see Chapter 7).
Women symbolically find their way to Maldonado by sending small encomiendas or remittances with the men who return to the goldfields after they have danced in the Carnival. These are always tiny amounts of food that evoke the "flavor" of life in the home village: cheese, toasted broad beans or corn, and chaucha or other choice potatoes from a special early harvest during Carnival. The encomiendas are miniature jute sacks, in the shape of the big containers used during the harvest, with the name of the husband -- "Jesos," "Ivarestu" -- neatly drawn on the outside. They contain at most a dozen small potatoes. Encomiendas from the village reciprocate the gold or cash remittances sent by the majority of miners who were not able to return to attend the Carnival. Although the amounts of gold usually are small, and primarily destined to cover the loans of the Agrarian Bank, women and their children use some of this money to buy commercial foods. This time of the year the household larder is almost empty.
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Women also use part of this money to buy wool to complete a weaving in time for the return of their husbands from Maldonado. This cloth is a symbol of a wive's sexual loyalty and industriousness, two sides of the same coin in the opinion of Cuyo Cuyeño men. The weavings are used by the husbands to dance during the Rosario fiesta in preparation for the subsequent trip (see Chapter 7).
A final illustration of the tensions which accompany reproduction of community social relations in Maldonado is the rudimentary institutionalization of an organization of gold miners in the headwaters of Huaypetue creek. On March 12 1985, a group of Cuyo Cuyeño miners from the area constituted the "Small Miners Association of Cabecera Huaypetue," with the aim of protecting their territory against a large mining company that was operating in the area. The immediate goal of this association was to obtain a collective claim to the land in order to prevent eviction by the company. In 1985, only one third of the seventy-one mine owners had joined the association.
The organizational aspects of the association as well as the etiquette that governs the interaction of authorities and miners were based on the political culture of the peasant community. Cuyo Cuyeño authorities of this association used moral notions of personal sacrifice for the collective good as a weapon to enforce order as they would in Cuyo Cuyo (see Chapter 3.)
The association also was seen by its members as an instrument to control the power of rich peasant-miners who did not abide by customary habits of deference among paisanos. In the first official meeting, the Secretary of the association wrote:
. . .that [the assembly] classifies brothers Gutierrez as big owners, in "the first category"; that there are still many complaints against them; [the assembly expressed] that in order to accept them as members of the association they must pay fifty grams of gold. . .If they do not accept our authority, they will be disciplined once the association obtains the title to the claim.
The authorities were able to assert their power with most small and medium-sized miners by appealing to the ethic of peasant solidarity. However, this form of peasant politics based on a social etiquette of deference did not work in the case of the large, rich miners precisely because they were attempting to shed their peasant mores and habits. Thus, the association leaders had to be particularly hard and shrewd in their use of collective power against these powerful men.
The fact that only one third of the miners had joined the association indicates that they were evaluating its chances of success before deciding to invest time and resources in it. The difficulties that Cuyo Cuyeños had in organizing this association (its success was far from clear when I visited Cabecera Huaypetue), show that communal institutionalization in the sphere of gold production was not guaranteed by the simple fact that all the producers were comuneros back at home.
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