The Other Slavery (18 page)

Finding silver at Parral was not nearly as difficult as securing the human power to get it out of the ground. Miners were initially attracted by the superficial outcroppings of the metal at the top of La Negrita. But once these easy pickings were depleted, they had to dig tunnels following the veins wherever they led—usually down. Already by the 1650s, the shafts plunged 250 feet underground. A nearby mine known as San Diego de Minas Nuevas was even deeper. The principal shaft of that mine went down 420 feet, more than the length of a football field. The effort needed to make these tunnels is hard to imagine. Workers dug with simple picks, wedges, moils (metal points), and crowbars, toiling from sunrise to sunset. (Explosives were not introduced until the early eighteenth century.) Some of the tools weighed thirty or forty pounds. Merely lifting them was difficult, let alone wielding them for twelve hours or more a day. In addition to being taxing in the extreme, the work was dangerous. Diggers regularly fell into the shafts or were crushed by collapsing sections of the mine. Many more lives were lost to the floating dust laced with sharp silica. Workers could not help but breathe in these particles, which became lodged in their lungs, causing scar tissue and decay. The unmistakable symptoms of such damage were fits of coughing, shortness of breath, chest pains, and vomiting. Silicosis could develop within a year and would gradually build up over five to ten years, causing severe scarring of the lungs, low blood oxygen levels, and ultimately death.
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Digging the shafts was a major undertaking, but it was only the start of the operation. Unlike much of the gold of the Caribbean, which could be collected as flecks or nuggets, silver was mostly embedded in the rock and combined with other substances. This geological reality added immensely to the work that was necessary to extract it. In Parral, as in many other silver mines throughout Mexico, Indians and black slaves carried the ore to the surface. Carrying leather bags full of rocks, they had to crawl through low passages and ascend by means of notched pine logs, or “chicken ladders.” Since the carrier’s hands were occupied holding the ladder, the heavy bag—which could weigh between 225 and 350 pounds—dangled perilously from his forehead and was propped against
his back. Ore carriers were generally referred to as
tenateros,
a name derived from the Nahuatl word
tenatl,
a fiber or leather bag. Needless to say, the danger of slipping or falling was constant.
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Workers continued to carry heavy bags of ore on their backs well into the twentieth century. An American engineer toured Mexico in 1905 and took this photograph while visiting the famous mines of Guanajuato.

Once the ore reached the surface, it was transported by carts pulled by mules to any of dozens of estates devoted to processing the ore. In 1633 there were already twenty-two ore-processing estates, known as
haciendas de beneficio,
in the region. Each of them was a world unto itself. The main work took place on a central patio, where one could see heaps of ore and crews crushing rock and isolating the silver. Most of the haciendas in Parral used the smelting method. After crushing the ore into coarse gravel, workers shoveled it into blast furnaces and combined it with molten lead. The idea was to use gravity to separate the silver from the rock, as the heavier silver-lead alloy sank to the bottom, while the lighter waste product, known as “slag,” rose to the top and was raked
away. Although this was the most common method of processing ore in Parral, it was not the most efficient.

A few of the haciendas used the “patio process,” which resulted in a higher yield of silver. In this case, the ore was crushed to a fine powder, spread on a courtyard or patio, and sprinkled with mercury. Water was added to allow the heavier metals to sink to the bottom of this sludge. In Parral the worst job consisted of walking in shackles over this toxic mud in order to mix it thoroughly. This job invariably resulted in serious health problems, as the poisonous metal would enter the body through the pores and seep into the cartilage in the joints. Miners ordinarily purchased convicts who were serving out their sentences to perform this dreadful task at the
morteros
(mortars), where the ore was crushed and processed. The last step of the patio process was to heat the amalgam in order to vaporize the mercury and water and leave only the silver behind. Workers involved in this step absorbed the mercury vapors through their mucous membranes, which generally caused uncontrollable shaking of the limbs and death in as little as two or three years.
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Security was no afterthought at these ore-processing haciendas. Workers were frequently monitored during their shifts. Moreover, the patios were completely enclosed by single-story buildings that included a chapel, stables for the draft animals, a granary, a storage room for the ore and silver, a main house, and living quarters for the servants and slaves, many of whom were kept locked up or chained at night. To be sure, not everyone was compelled to work at Parral. As we shall see, there were many salaried Indians, as well as mestizos who worked alongside forced or semi-forced Indians, blacks, and mulattoes. But compulsion was very much a part of the mix.
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The work required to dig the shafts and tunnels; carry the ore to the surface; crush it completely; mix it with lead, mercury, and other reagents; and recover the silver was prodigious. And that is not even counting the demands on surrounding businesses, such as livestock ranches, timber camps, salt pits, and
carboneras
(charcoal-producing fields), that supplied the mines with various essential products and required yet more workers. It is no wonder that mine owners complained
about the lack of laborers, often claiming that this was the main limiting factor in the production of silver. As early as 1572, the viceroy of Mexico, Martín Enríquez de Almanza, a capable administrator with personal knowledge of the mines of northern Mexico, wrote to the king of Spain and presented the owners’ quandary in a remarkably lucid manner: “For the mine owners the key is to have workers, and the [black] slaves are not enough. I have already written to Your Majesty about the importance of sending Indians to the mines and paying good wages to them. Many of them go on their own accord and earn enough to eat well. But the natives are lazy by nature and do not persevere in any kind of work unless they are compelled. Without a direct order from Your Majesty I do not dare to give Indians to the miners because it is a practice that is forbidden, although it would be very suitable.”
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Mine owners went to extraordinary lengths to procure workers. To get a sense of Parral’s gravitational pull, all one has to do is consider its population. Of the 8,500 residents in 1640, about 1,000 were African or mulatto slaves. It was easily the largest concentration of African slaves anywhere in northern Mexico. About half of them had been born in the New World and were Hispanicized. The other half had been imported directly from Africa. They came primarily from Angola—a major slaving region in western Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—as well as from the Congo and as far away as Mozambique, in eastern Africa. They had been conveyed through the interior of Africa, across the Atlantic, from Veracruz to Mexico City, and finally along the royal roads leading to the silver districts of northern Mexico. Hispanicized or not, these slaves were greatly valued by Parral owners. They were dependable, sometimes already possessed mining skills, and, since they came from such remote lands, could not run away and easily find refuge in the local population. From the standpoint of the owners, African slaves had only one major drawback: they were extremely expensive. The going rate for a healthy African or mulatto slave in Parral ranged from 400 to 500 pesos (with men commanding somewhat higher prices than women, thus suggesting that black slaves were employed primarily in mine-related activities). To put things in perspective, a black slave cost as much as three to five Indian slaves. Bishop Alonso de la Mota y
Escobar observed that in the mines of Zacatecas, “the most difficult job is to dig up the metal and bring it to the surface, because the mines are very deep. And it is the Indians who do this job and not the black slaves because it is known from past experience that African slaves get swollen and are afflicted by a thousand illnesses because of the great cold and humidity of the mines.” Bishop Mota y Escobar’s medical reasoning may have been off the mark, but his observation that black slaves were generally used for aboveground tasks makes perfect sense economically. In effect, their high price restricted the tasks to which they were assigned.
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There were also “Chinese” slaves in Parral. (“Chinese” was a blanket term used for all Asian people.) Although they were never numerous, their presence revealed a network of enslavement that operated across the Pacific Ocean. Nicolás de Tolentino, for example, originally came from the Indian subcontinent; he is variously identified as being “from the Malabar coast” or “of Bengali caste.” When he was twelve years of age, Nicolás was sold on the coast of India to a Spanish officer who took him to the Philippines. Once in Manila, Nicolás changed hands until he was acquired by an Augustinian friar named Joseph Duque, who kept him for some years. In 1658 Fray (Friar) Duque made the decision to ship Nicolás across the Pacific, entrusting him to a broker who was to sell him in Mexico. At the port of Acapulco, Nicolás was acquired by an encomendero, resold to a captain from Cuernavaca, and finally transported to Mexico City and on to the northern frontier. When he finally reached Parral at age twenty-eight, Nicolás had been the object of a string of transactions throughout most of his life, having traveled immense distances and experienced bondage with masters from widely different cultures. Like their African counterparts, Asian slaves were extremely expensive. When Nicolás was first sold on the coast of India, the Spanish officer paid 50 pesos for him. By the time he reached Acapulco, he was sold for 380 pesos, and in Parral he commanded no less than 700 pesos. His very presence in this northern mining center, along with that of other men and women hailing from other remote locales, is indicative of the tremendous power of the local miners and their extreme need for laborers. But fetching such high prices, Africans and Asians could only be a partial solution to this vexing problem.
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The sheer number of Indians at Parral, speaking different languages and engaged in all aspects of the silver economy, was as impressive as the sight of Africans and Asians. Indians came from all quarters. We may be inclined to think of Parral as a Spanish or mestizo mining center, but its majority population was in fact indigenous. By 1640 fully 5,500, or almost two out of every three residents of Parral, were Indians. They could be found all around the town, some as squatters or servants living directly on La Negrita, others locked up at the ore-processing haciendas, and many more scattered at the base of the hill and throughout the mining district. Indians from some regions became so numerous that they formed their own neighborhoods. One section of town, for example, was known as the “Yaqui neighborhood” for the predominance of Yaqui Indians from Sonora living there.
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The most privileged Indians came to Parral of their own volition to work for wages. Perhaps 2,000 of the 5,500 Indians were in this situation. They hailed from more densely populated areas, especially central Mexico, or from more established mining areas. Lured by the glint of silver, they had taken their chances by venturing into the Chichimec frontier and accepting dangerous jobs at Parral that they performed for interminable hours. For their troubles, they were compensated with real salaries and, “far more important,” as Bishop Mota y Escobar perceptively wrote, “with silver ore that they got to keep and which they call among themselves
pepena.
” Indeed, after doing their daily work, free Indians were permitted to collect any silver-encrusted rocks they wanted. They could then sell this valuable ore in the black market or attempt to refine it into pure silver on their own. The
pepena
system existed in many mines throughout Mexico and shows that mine owners were willing to offer extraordinary concessions to attract workers.
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Impressed by the ubiquity of salaries and
pepenas,
some historians have hailed these silver mines as the vanguard of the free wage system in colonial Mexico. Already by the late sixteenth century, free wage earners outnumbered forced workers in some mines. More recent studies have revealed a sobering reality, however. While salaried workers did indeed account for a significant percentage of the workforce in many mines—including thirty-six percent of all Indians in Parral—these
workers did not replace coerced laborers, but rather coexisted with them. One reason is that mine owners never fully embraced a labor system that essentially allowed workers to plunder the mines. From the owners’ perspective, the incentives were completely wrong. Free workers hid the richest ores in order to claim them later as part of their
pepenas.
They were also prone to drift from mine to mine in search of better conditions. If they felt the ore was not rich enough or heard about a more promising strike down the road, they had no compunction about packing up at a moment’s notice and leaving behind unfinished jobs. Mine owners therefore regarded salaried work not as an ideal form of labor, but as a necessary evil and a first step toward acquiring a more pliable and stable workforce.
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