A History of Mining in Latin America: From the Colonial Era to the Present

4: Workers’ Response to Colonial Mining

71 Chapter 4 Workers’ Response to Colonial Mining . BythebeginningoftheseventeenthcenturyabouthalftheIndianlabor force directly engaged in producing silver in Potosí was voluntary. —Peter Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain \ Although direct and indirect coercion played a crucial role in the supply of labor for the colonial mines, it did not explain completely why workers went to work at Potosí, Guanajuato, or the Brazilian gold and diamond fields. Nor did it explain why some coerced workers stayed on at the mines at the end of their required terms. The mita and slavery provided large numbers of laborers, but so did daily wages and ore-sharing arrangements such as the kajcheo and the pepena. Nor did the coercion so thoroughly repress mine workers that they became completely compliant to the mine owners’ wishes. Many miners found ways to resist the operators’ demands or to garner greater personal benefit from the labor they were forced to do in the mines. OnesuchindividualwasthekajchaandtrapicheoperatorAgustínQuispe. On a September day in 1725, Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, a chronicler of Potosí, was on the Rich Hill with four Frenchmen when they passed near the chapel of the kajchas. There they happened upon Quispe, famed throughout Potosí for his bravery and brawling. Quispe owned a trapiche in which he ground and smelted the ores he and other kajchas extracted from the mines at night or on feast days and weekends. The chronicler obviously admired Chapter 4 72 Quispe and reported that when they met that day on the Hill, Quispe offered him a jar of chicha, the indigenous maize beer. He also offered chicha to the four Frenchmen, who were Arzáns’s friends. They haughtily rejected the indigenous brew. The offended Indian grabbed a flagstaff and launched himself at the Frenchmen. He broke one’s head with the stick. The drawn swords of the other three provided them no protection from Quispe’s onslaught, and they fled, hastened onward by fifty kajchas who began to stone them. With difficulty Arzáns stopped the kajchas from killing the Frenchmen. On another occasion the kajcha Quispe was visiting the Bethlehem sanctuary some distance from Potosí and encountered a militia unit drawn up in formation. When the soldiers refused to let him pass through their lines, Quispe took his harquebus and fired it through the lined-up soldiers, sending men running in all directions. The captain took two swipes at Quispe with his pike. The kajcha parried the first blow with the harquebus but suffered a chest wound by the second. Quispe fell to the ground, where he was wounded two more times. Just as the soldiers gathered to finish him off, six of Quispe’s companions arrived and threw themselves into the brawl to save the fierce kajcha. Despite his injuries, Quispe wounded the captain, his sergeant , and four soldiers before the village priest intervened to restore peace. Quispe’s boisterous and assertive example shows that mining at Potosí was more than gangs of oppressed Indians toiling mournfully under the pitiless control of Spanish azogueros and their overseers. In his brawls with European visitors and even with militia troops, the kajcha leader Quispe often received help from other kajchas and mitayos, as well as from some local clergy who protected him. To many he was a hero, an Indian who defied authority and yet also enriched himself as an “ore thief.” To the chronicler Arzáns, Quispe was not dangerous or threatening: although he worked abandoned diggings or snuck into operating mines, “he took out ore without knocking down buttresses or causing substantial damage.” Some kajchas were not so careful, stripping ore out of the mine’s natural buttresses and causing cave-ins. It was probably inevitable that mines owners detested Quispe as a leader of the kajchas and wanted “to drink his blood.” Indeed, his most serious fights were with the owners and their guards, and as a result Quispe took to carrying a pair of pistols with him into the mines. NotlongafterhisbrawlwiththeFrenchmen,Quispehadaseriousrun-in with Magistrate Antonio Rodríguez and twelve Spaniards. They had tracked him down because of complaints made by the son of a mine guard, who had tried to keep Quispe and his kajchas from entering the mine. Quispe Workers’ Response to Colonial Mining 73 and his companions managed to enter anyway, and out of spite for having been denied entry extracted all the good ore in the mine. Rodríguez and...