From the Mines to the Streets: A Bolivian Activist’s Life

Chapter 1. Rural Life

Chapter 1 Rural Life On April 30, 1946, I was born the fourth of thirteen children to an indigenous mining family in Maraq’a,the community of my mother, Lucia Poma, located in the Karacha ayllu, in the department of Potosí. Normally my family lived in Wila Apacheta, my father’s village, part of Bombo ayllu, in the department of Oruro.At that time my father worked at the mine and made the half day’s walk home to visit us once a month. Just before my birth, my mother walked ten hours to visit my father at the mine.When she went into labor, she hurried off to her parents’ home in Maraq’a, three hours by foot, far closer than Wila Apacheta, but she still barely arrived in time for my birth.A few days later, she carried me home, a twelve-hour walk. At that time about fifty families lived in Wila Apacheta, each with an average of five children, so in all about 350 people were scattered over the ayllu’s territory.We lived so dispersed because we dedicated as much time to raising llamas, which we used as pack animals as well as for their meat and skins, and alpacas, which we used for their fine wool, as we did to tending our crops. When I was born most of Bolivia’s people lived under a dictatorial political regime. “Democracy” was limited to an oligarchic minority because workers, indigenous people, and women did not have the right to vote. As well,the system of pongueaje—a kind of slavery—dominated on the haciendas,the large estates controlled by criollo families of Spanish descent. Even though pongueaje was officially abolished in May 1945, semifeudal social relations and debt peonage existed throughout the country until the 1952 revolution. Unfortunately, these relations still persist in some of the more remote parts of Bolivia today.When I was born, pongos did not have the right to leave the hacienda, indigenous people were not allowed to walk freely in the plazas of the cities nor contract their labor independently, and workers were prevented from organizing freely.Many people,however, 4 escaped either to the mines or distant rural areas.Wila Apacheta was one of those isolated free communities. Life in the mines was a little better,although it was hard and short.Many miners employed in Siglo XX and Catavi mines, for example, lived in giant sheds, more like a military barracks than family homes.These flimsy sheds, although they were 12,500 feet above sea level, where temperatures dropped below freezing every night of the year, were equipped with neither heat nor basic services.And even as poor as those conditions were, not all miners had the opportunity to live there; some slept in caverns in the surrounding hills.A small group of privileged workers had houses with their families, but even these houses were only thirteen by thirteen feet, with a tiny separate kitchen. Miners earned very little, and, as well, the foreman beat them if they fell off the pace. It was common that a miner, who began working at sixteen,died at thirty-five or forty years of age from mal de mina—literally,the“disease of the mine,”black lung (silicosis)—often found in combination with tuberculosis. My father worked in Uncía, one of the mines owned by Simón Patiño, then the third-richest man in the world, who had mansions in Oruro, Cochabamba, Paris, and New York. My dad was lucky, because instead of laboring in a hard rock mine interior, he worked in an open pit at the top of a hill known as Juan del Valle during colonial times and, before that, Intijalanta,a word that means west wind.He lived in the Miraflores mining camp in a small house that had four families crammed into it. Pre-Hispanic Andean Peoples Sophisticated Andean civilizations flourished centuries before the Spaniards invaded the area that would become Bolivia and Peru in the sixteenth century. As long as 21,000 years ago humans settled in the region, and archaeologists consider Andean civilizations among the ancient world’s most important (Mann 2005; Renfrew and Bahn 2008). The Tiwanaku civilization, centered on the altiplano south of Lake Titicaca, dominated the south central Andes between CE 400 and 1000. Its remarkable and complex hydrological systems permitted agricultural success and expansion in a very cold, dry climate, but after a seventy-year drought in the eleventh...