Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (19 page)

In the earliest days of the mita the mitayos were collected
in their villages on the appointed day, along with their families, making a
group of thousands. These people were joined by the animals being sent to the
mines, and all marched off to their assignment. Upon arrival, communities would
likely be split up; at least no effort was made to keep people from the same
communities together.

The work may have been rather bearable in the first few
decades of the mid-16th century when there was a lot of silver and it was
located near the surface, but as time went on, the silver became harder to
reach, and the work became more arduous. Some of the original workers may have
been miners in Incan times, and due to the need for skilled workers, they would
have been the earliest of the skilled mine workers, who were freer than the
unskilled mitayos. According to one survey by the crown, some groups of workers
preferred Potosí to other options for producing tribute, and they were able to
supply a better, more varied diet to their families working at Potosí than in
other forms of tribute production. The survey should not be taken too
literally, as it would have been in the interest of agents of the crown to show
that the lives of the mitayos were not too unpleasant.

Mine workers were divided into different groups, depending
on the type of service they provided. Already in the middle of the 16th century
there were two basic categories of workers: the mitayos, who were working to
provide tribute, and the
yanaconas,
who were domestics serving a Spanish
master. In Mesoamerica, the term
naboría,
borrowed from the Caribbean
Taíno, designated a group equivalent to the yanacona of the Andes. These
yanacona workers were a bit more free than mitayos, since they had the
privilege of leaving to seek another master. They also did not pay tribute
before the 1570s when Viceroy Toledo abolished their exemption. Another
category was that of
indios varas,
Indians in charge of working a
certain number of
varas
(a measurement roughly equal to a yard). The
vara Indians hired other indigenous people to work for them so they could
exploit their assigned section most efficiently and effectively.

Mine Work

There were various types of mine work: cutting the ore out
of the face of the rock, carrying the ore from inside the mine and piling it on
the platform at the mine entrance, picking over it on the platform (sometimes
done by women), and taking away the useless part of what had been dug up before
the ore was taken to the refinery. In addition, stonework structures had to be
built to hold up the roof of the tunnel because the altitude made for a lack of
the large trees that provided wooden supports in mines at lower altitudes. All
this work might be directed by Indian supervisors.

In the refinery, the ore was fed into the crusher, then
shoveled into a sieve to cull out the silver. Women and young people also
sieved ore by hand. The silver then went into the refining process where it was
mixed with amalgam and other inputs, a step usually performed by a Spaniard or
mestizo.
The amalgamation process involved Indians tramping bare legged through the
mixture, after which washers ran the amalgamated silver through water in a tub
designed to remove the waste. Workers moved the ore from one step to another on
their backs. In some cases, there was a provider of wood or charcoal for the
refining process and someone to tend the ovens used in the amalgamation
process.

Working Conditions

Working conditions in the mine were primitive. There were
day and night shifts of 12 hours each to keep the mine working around the
clock. When the work was going on a thousand or so feet below the surface, the
workers carried the ore to the surface on a series of ladders, each one 50 feet
long. To tie the ore onto his back, he used a square of wool blanket that he
provided himself. This sack could be tied to his feet when he had to wriggle
through small spaces pulling the ore behind him. Often the air quality was poor
due to the dampness, and some mines were plagued by flooding. Many miners
probably got silicosis, but this was not a clinically recognized disease until
the end of the 19th century. Walls frequently collapsed, although this was not
as much of a problem at Potosí as elsewhere due to the sturdiness of the igneous
rock there. Punishments were severe, with mine workers being whipped if they
were slow.

Accidents were common. One estimate puts deaths in mining
accidents at several hundred annually. In addition, 50 or more Indians died
every year in the hospital from accidents that occurred in mining and in the
refining process, according to a contemporary observer. Other deaths were the
result of illnesses related to mine work, especially breathing the dust created
in the crushing of the ore. Workers often contracted pneumonia passing from the
heat of the mine to the cold of the outside air. The remains of colonial
workers around Arequipa show signs of tuberculosis, and some workers surely
died of lead poisoning or mercury poisoning caused by breathing the mercury
vapor or by absorbing mercury through the skin while treading the mixture of
ore and mercury in the amalgamation process. Most mercury came from a mercury
mine at Huancavelica that had its own detachment of mitayos. Mercury
contaminated the water and air of the area, poisoning everything the workers
breathed, touched, or ate.

In addition to working in the mine, there was plenty of
other work to be done in the mining regions. In the view of some historians,
the mita workers could not have worked continuously throughout their four-month
shift because they would not have survived it. Some sources indicate that the
Indians did other work around the mines for two out of every three weeks. When
they were not working in the mines, Indians at Potosí were put to work as porters,
vendors, woodchoppers, and charcoal makers.

Women and Silver Mining

Women, mostly the wives of mitayos, worked at the mines as
well. Toward the end of the 16th century, women took over the
guayra
process
of smelting ore using the wind-driven furnace of pre-Columbian times. Women
also brought the miners’ food to them one day a week and received selected
pieces of ore from their husbands who came to the surface to collect their
food. Some research indicates that the mine worker’s practice of passing a
chunk of ore to his wife was widespread and accepted by the supervisors. Women
added these rich bits of ore to the tailings they had pulled out of the heaps
of discarded ore. The mitayo’s wife and children either worked at tasks
connected with mining or performed other jobs like raising animals for food to
make up the difference between what the mine worker earned and what it cost to
support the family for the year. The population of women at Potosí grew until
by the end of the 18th century it made up just over 50 percent of the mining
center’s population.

Life in the Mining District

Living conditions were not much of an improvement over
working conditions. Twenty to 30 Indians might live in each house in the
section of town set aside for the workers; the rooms were small, barely
allowing for a bed, a fireplace, and a few jugs of homebrew made from fermented
corn known as
chicha.
The gathering together of many Indians in one spot
may have exacerbated the epidemics, causing the demographic collapse that one
historian estimates at 50 percent between 1570 and 1620.

By the beginning of the 17th century, the work week was
supposed to be six days long, leaving Sunday for rest and attendance at Mass.
However, Monday was the day to gather together the week’s workers, a process
that took most of the day, due in part to the fact that many workers had taken
the opportunity to get drunk on Sunday and had to be collected from their
dwellings, thereby delaying the process of distributing workers on Monday. This
task of rounding up the week’s workers on Monday meant that effectively the
work week was from Tuesday through Saturday afternoon. Workers were supposed to
be paid on Saturday evening but often spent much of Sunday waiting for their
pay.

The life of the mitayo was not much different from that of
a slave in some respects. The wage was so tiny that it served more to assuage
royal guilt, since after the 1540s the Spanish system officially opposed
enslaving the Indians, than to provide for the worker and his family. Around
the beginning of the 17th century, the wage for the mitayo was between 2.75
reales
and 3.5 reales per day (with eight reales making one
peso)
,
depending on the type of work performed. Out of this wage the mine worker
provided his own candles, which might cost him one-quarter of his weekly wage. (
Minga
workers, who performed the more skilled tasks, earned 4 to 4.25 reales per
day, plus either some ore for the mine workers or some coca leaves for those
working in the refining process). In addition, the mitayos were whipped if they
failed to meet their weekly quota. And like enslaved workers, they might be
sold or rented out. So while this form of “slavery” came to an end after a year
of work—unless the mitayo stayed on because he had not met his quota—during
that year, there was little difference between the life of a mitayo at Potosí
and that of an enslaved worker in any other part of Latin America.

AFRICANS, SLAVERY, AND MINING

Many years before the discovery of silver at Potosí, the
mining of gold was already well underway. By 1499, enslaved native laborers
were engaged in gold mining in the north of Hispaniola, and African workers
were soon being transported to the Americas to join them. Africans and their
descendants worked alongside Indians in mining, although in general the mining
of gold relied more heavily on Africans, while silver mining was done primarily
by indigenous workers.

The processes by which these two precious metals were
extracted differed greatly. Mining silver involved going deep into the earth,
with all the engineering problems that entailed, while gold mining was done by
scooping out deposits of gold-streaked rock in streams and separating out the
gold dust, a process that required neither construction of tunnels nor great
capital investment. Both forms of mining were labor intensive, and in both, the
work was divided according to gender. In silver mining, those who went down in
the mine were usually men, while women played a supporting role, keeping their
partners fed, clothed, and housed; women also combed through the slag heap
searching for silver to retrieve. In gold mining, men excavated the banks of
the rivers, and women panned the gold to separate it from the water and dirt.

Gold and silver were not the only desirable metals. By the
first decade of the 16th century, underground copper mining was being done near
Cap Haitien on Hispaniola by enslaved indigenous people and Africans. At first,
indigenous people were rounded up and brought to the mines to work a shift of
six to eight months. The inadequate shelter and food provided for the workers
left many suffering from malnutrition that lessened their resistance to European
epidemic disease. As the native population declined, Africans were brought to
replace them. Queen Isabella even proposed that the Africans be used as mine
workers, with indigenous workers being used in farming to produce food for the
African mine workers. Where was the “Defender of the Africans”? No equivalent
to Bartolomé de las Casas rose up to challenge the abuses inherent in the labor
system of slavery, although questions were occasionally raised about the
legality of the enslavement process in Africa itself. Las Casas himself
explicitly advocated the substitution of African for native labor in his
initial appeals to the crown for reform, only repenting of this morally curious
stance later in his life.

Gold Mining in Colombia

Mining had the same effect in Colombia as on Hispaniola;
the indigenous people were nearly wiped out by the combined effects of disease
and extreme exploitation, and the colonists turned to African laborers who
became the critical element in the accumulation of wealth by the colonists.
Gangs of hundreds of enslaved Africans and their descendants worked in colonial
Nueva Granada, especially in the Chocó area on the northern Pacific coast of
modern Colombia, where people of the African Diaspora predominate today.
Enslaved African miners were supervised by an overseer who himself might be of
African origins; the workers lived in camps at the mining site on the coast,
while their owners lived in the highlands where the climate was cooler and more
healthful. A quota was established for each worker, and if the laborer managed
to accumulate gold above his quota, usually by working unclaimed areas on
Sundays and holidays, he might use it for purchases at the store or save it
toward the purchase of freedom for himself or a family member.

Africans and Silver Mining

While most silver mining was done with Indian labor, there
were enslaved workers from Africa in all the mines, at times a lot of them.
African workers were expensive, especially due to the cost of transporting them
to the interior of New Spain and Peru, far from the slave markets of the
eastern coasts of the Americas, so that may account for their smaller numbers
in this type of work. In addition, some mine owners apparently believed the
altitude of silver mining was too great for the Africans.