Sunday February 8,2009

I came to Postosi with hopes of finding small silver trinkets for all my friends and family. I am leaving with a story and no trinkets.

Potosi was built upon it`s mountain of silver. For 250 years, its` silver financed all of the Spainish empire. When 80% of the indigenous people had died, African slaves replaced them as mine workers. Over 8,000,000 men died from their work in the mines. Today all the mines are co-operatives but even today once a miner starts underground, slithering into small ladderless shafts, few survive more than ten years. The underground air is very hot and filled with dust, asbestos and silicon. When the miners are underground they feel closer to Tia, the devil-god of the underground.

Yesterday, Jim and caught a local bus to the miner´s market where dynamite, picks, wedges and all the basic necessary mining tools are for sale. Then we walked up the mountain of silver to be a part of the annual miner´s fiesta.

All the dancers and miners and bands met in front of their respective mines. They started drinking and partying and dancing their way down the mountain.
There were many many brass bands all with lots of tubas, trumpets and relentless drumming. Older women danced by in their beautiful orange dresses with embroidered hems and lace shawls. Their hair was tied with ribbons and huge pompoms and they wore large flat hats. Little girls and old women danced by in long red full shirts, black bowlers, white blouses, and lace shawls each tucked with a fancy blanket.
Many of the male dancers in elaborate costumes wore shoes with 5 inch soles and huge spur like bells on the back. There was lots of drinking. Even the people carrying the religious litters had their cans of beer propped next to the Virgin.

The miners, wearing their hard hats, cigaret in one hand, can of beer in the other and carrying flasks made of llama legs danced by. Always a little booze was dribbled on the ground for Pacha Momma. Men in dragon-like costumes, blues, green or reds, swayed down the mountain. At the end of the green dragons, one plump girl in a full gathered ultra mini skirt, strapless top, over the knee green boots with high gold heels and bright green bowler hat with peacock feathers shimmied by. Throughout the parade there were many such girls. Some wore clear raincoats over their glitzy revealing costumes.

All along the route, women in everyday clothes hunkered down beside tiny deep fryers and barbeques, complete with sheep heads and bits of meat with fur. They cooked, nursed their infants and sold food and drink to the hungery.

All of this sounds like a fun, a civilized party, but the fierceness of the miners life and the control and horror of Tia was present at this wild drunken party. In addition to the hundreds of miners with wedges and hammers that did an almost brutal lunging dance down the mountain, there were hundreds of people not in the actual parade who were shooting off enormous water guns, and fire crackers. They hurled water ballons and sprayed cans of foam at everyone in the parade and everyone watching it. And the explosions of dynamite were continual. Initially we could see and hear the the dynamite going off on the mountain side. Eventually the detonations got closer and closer until when they exploded, I experienced the boom and shake in every pour of my body. For just that second, the world stopped. Then it was over, my eyes opened and my heart resumed beating.

We watched the first four hours of the miner´s fiesta, and then we walked back to Potosi dogging waterballoons, spray foam and water from the big water guns. The miner´s fiesta continued all of yesterday, all night and all day today. Tomorrow life in the mines begins again for another year.