Your debt to your friend is no less important than our family’s debt to the cooperative, she had said. With two more nights of guarda money, plus what she and Abuelita had been able to earn breaking rocks, we finally had enough to cover food and for me to take what I needed with me when I walked Belén to school this morning.
My pocket swings heavily as I walk down the mountain. The jingle is a cheerful sound. I’ve hated that I stole from a friend. Now I’m finally going to make it right.
My steps are brisk as I make my way into Potosí. But faced with the imposing slab of the posada door, I hesitate for a moment. Taking a deep breath, I force myself to lift my hand and knock.
“Can you get Yenni for me, please?” I ask the gardener who answers. “It’ll just be a moment.”
He nods and closes the door. I wait on the street, chewing the inside of my lip nervously. Finally, the heavy door creaks open and Yenni is standing on the other side of it.
“Ana?” She looks surprised. “What on earth are you doing here?”
I open my mouth to reassure her that I’m not here to ask for anything else.
“I’m sorry,” comes out instead, in a miserable whisper.
“For what?” Yenni scrunches up her forehead, confused.
I reach into my pockets and pull out the handful of coins. I clear my throat.
“The last time I was here, you went shopping. You dropped your coin purse when you left the shop.” I find I can’t meet her eyes. “I should have given it back to you right away, but instead . . . I borrowed it.” I shove the coins into the space between us. “I’m so sorry I took it without asking.”
I want to go on, tell her why I took the money, tell her how I felt, but there’s a lump clogging my throat and the words are jammed up behind it. Besides, all of that is my problem, not hers. So I just let the apology stand, and hold out the little mountain of silver.
When I feel her warm hands under mine, I open my fingers, and the coins slide away from me. I drop my hands to my sides, feeling like a great weight has been lifted off my chest. I take the coin purse out of my pocket and place it on top of the pile. Then, finally, I look up. Yenni is considering me, the coins cradled in front of her.
“I thought I’d lost the grocery money,” she says. Then, after a pause: “They took it out of my wages.” She considers me. “I wondered why you never came by for breakfast.” After another moment, she nods and tucks the money into the purse, putting it in her pocket. “Well, thank you for bringing it back. It’s good to have an honest friend . . . even if it’s honest with a delay.”
“You still want to be my friend?” I ask, hardly daring to hope.
Yenni smiles.
“Silly,” she says, and pulls me in for a hug.
I leave the posada happily because that too is a door I know will open again for me in the future.
* * *
I get to the entry lot of El Rosario right at six.
I stand to one side and watch the miners as they tidy up for the night. I’m starting to know more of them, and as they pack up and head home, they greet me by name, wishing me a quiet Friday night.
“Don’t worry,” I call after them. “Everything’ll still be here in the morning.”
They laugh good-naturedly. I’ve developed a reputation with dynamite.
The last one out, lagging far behind the others, is César. Though I hate how slowly and painfully he moves, after a week of being bedridden, I am so glad to see him on his feet again.
He straightens as he leaves the mine, checking around to make sure everything is where it should be. When he notices me, he comes over.
“Ana,” he says.
“Hi, Papi,” I say.
The smile that breaks across César’s dirty face is like a ray of sunlight through a cloud bank.
“What are you doing here?” he asks. “Now that I’m back, you don’t have to work nights anymore.”
“I’ve decided I’m going to keep working as a guarda,” I say, holding up my books. “It will let me help the family and still continue with school.”
César considers me silently for a moment. I play my best card.
“Mami already said yes . . .”
A laugh bursts out of him.
“Daughters!” he says, throwing up his hands. “Who knew they were so much trouble?”
I only notice after he reaches out to playfully tug my braid that it didn’t even occur to me to flinch.
* * *
I wait until everyone is long gone and it’s full night before I strap the acetylene tank to my hip, put the helmet on, and head into the mine. The trip down the main entrance tunnel feels shorter than it did last time, and before I know it, I’m standing in front of the Tío.
I consider him in the flickering glow of my headlamp. Then I take a pencil out of my pocket and hold it in front of his face.
“This is not an offering,” I tell him. “It’s a promise. A promise that I am going to work hard. I am going to study, and save my money, and find a job that is not guarding your mines or sorting your rubble. I am going to get my family off your mountain. You can’t have them. And you can’t have me.”
I stand there a moment longer, waiting to see if the devil will say anything. But he is nothing more than a statue made of clay, and the only breathing I hear in the tunnel is my own.
I put the pencil at the devil’s feet and walk out of the mines.
* * *
Later, triple wrapped in blankets on my perch beside the newly cleared entrance to El Rosario, I allow myself a moment before opening my math book. I look down at the city, once the envy of kings, spread below me. Then I tip my head and consider the hill looming above me, and the constellation-spangled sky above it. The Mountain That Eats Men has taken so much: my father’s life, my brother’s health, my childhood.
But it can only take my hope if I let it.
I choose not to let it.
I will find a path off this mountain that is not bought with the pain of others.
It will be difficult, but I will use the currency of work to buy a new future for myself and those I love.
Girls like me don’t get choices handed to us. We have to make them for ourselves.
Just because something is hard doesn’t mean you can’t do it, I tell myself as I open the book and settle down to my first math problem by the light of my brother’s old headlamp. It just means it might take you a long time.
Epilogue
A long time later.
I set my foot on the mud-spattered running board of the beat-up pickup truck and haul myself into the cab. I wedge the bulging bag of notebooks and colored pens between my feet and wait. For a few moments I sit there alone, wound tight as a spring, drumming my fingers on my knees.
When the driver arrives, he pulls himself into the cab in one smooth motion and turns the key in the ignition. The pickup coughs and hacks like an old miner, but eventually shudders sullenly to life. He shoots a look at me.
“Ready?”
I relax my grip on my knees. I’ve worked long hours and studied hard to get to where I am. I hope I’m ready.
I remember the expressions on their faces yesterday when I told Mami and Belén that I was going to take a job working as a teacher at the little school up on the Cerro Rico.
You what? Belén had shrieked. She’s been shrieking a lot now that her final exams are right around the corner. The quiet, shy girl who hid behind César’s legs outside church ten years ago has been replaced by a confident young woman, eager to make her mark on the world. César would be so proud if he could see her. I think he would be proud of me too, and of what we’ve all managed as a family in the four years since he’s been gone. I hope my first papi would also be proud of me: anytime I got something wrong during those long nights of studying as a guarda, I copied it over and over until I knew th
e right answer by heart, just like he used to have me do.
Why? was all that Mami had asked. It was the same question she had put to Daniel when, after the four months it took his cracked ribs to heal, he asked whether he could stay in the lowlands and live with César’s cousin for good. With so much more oxygen in the air, he was able to help out around the farm even with his asthma. By the time he visited for Christmas, he was so used to having good air to breathe that he gasped like a tourist when he got off the bus from Sucre. We all teased him that he’d gone soft, but he just grinned and showed off his new farmer’s muscles and we had left it at that. César’s cousin was thrilled to keep him, and Daniel has built himself a good life in that green valley.
For me, though, the question Why? had echoed deeply. Which is why I didn’t tell Mami that I was just happy to get a teaching job after all my training. I didn’t tell her any of the light, easy answers I handed to my school friends and city acquaintances like so much popcorn at a parade. Instead, I told her the truth.
Because, I said, somewhere up there is another little boy who’s thirsty for the sky, facing a lifetime in the dark. And somewhere up there is another little girl who has no idea how to dig out from under the weight of an unwanted future. They need to know that there are other paths. They need to know that the mountain is only a mountain, and the metal inside it is only metal, but that they are the treasure of the world.
And Mami had folded me into a hug and hadn’t asked me anything more about it.
I smooth my hands over my knees to wipe the sweat off my palms. I look out the windshield and over the city around me to the ugly mountain hulking on the horizon. This is for you, César, I think, for folding me into your family. And this is for you, Abuelita, for showing me the right currency to use to value my life. But most of all, this is for me.
He’s still sitting there, patiently waiting for my answer.
“I’m ready.” I cover the butterflies in my stomach with a laugh. “Are you sure this rust bucket will get us there?”
“Well,” he says, wrestling the heap into gear and setting off up the streets of San Cristobal, aiming for the peak of the mountain, “if it breaks down, you’ll be extra glad your best friend is a mechanic, won’t you?”
“Shut up, Victor,” I say. But I smile when I say it.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I am rich Potosí
I am the treasure of the world
I am the king of all mountains
And the envy of all kings
—First coat of arms of the city of Potosí, 1547
My husband died a year ago. It has been very hard. It has also been a year since anyone has hit me. I have eleven children. May God grant that they not suffer as I have.
—Doña Serafina Sandoval Condor, 2016
My last book, The Bitter Side of Sweet, looked at the question of child slavery in modern-day chocolate production. There is near-unanimous agreement that forcing children to work, unpaid and unfree, is wrong. However, the fact of the matter is that in most of the world, kids work. After completing The Bitter Side of Sweet, I felt challenged to look beyond child slavery to the more nuanced issue of child labor. And few places are more nuanced to consider this question than Bolivia.
The International Labor Organization (ILO) is a branch of the United Nations. It defines child labor as “work that is mentally, physically, socially, or morally dangerous and harmful to children; and interferes with their schooling by: depriving them of the opportunity to attend school; obliging them to leave school prematurely; or requiring them to attempt to combine school attendance with excessively long and heavy work.” As of this writing, the ILO estimates that, worldwide, 218 million children age five to seventeen work, with 152 million being victims of child labor. Almost half are between the ages of five and eleven, and 73 million of them work in hazardous conditions. That’s a lot of kids!
Bolivia has a very high poverty rate. Many families cannot get by without the money their children bring in. More than three-quarters of a million children under the age of seventeen work in Bolivia. Up until 2014, the minimum age for a child to work was fourteen—the same as the United States, where that is the age restriction for “nonagricultural” jobs. In the U.S., there are also restrictions on how many hours a person under the age of sixteen can work and a prohibition against those under eighteen working in “hazardous occupations.” Bolivia, however, made headlines in 2014 by lowering the minimum age a child can work. Since then, children in Bolivia can work with their families from the age of ten, and for other people from the age of twelve.
Groups like Human Rights Watch and the United Nations immediately opposed this law. They saw it as opening up more opportunities to exploit impoverished children and keep them out of school. This is certainly a danger: when something becomes legal, more people do it. But what makes the 2014 law interesting is not who was speaking out against the law change, but who was asking for it.
UNATSBO (Unión de Niños y Niñas Trabajadores de Bolivia) is a union of Bolivian child workers. These were a group of children who were all working to support their families’ incomes who realized that, as illegal underage workers, they had no protections under the law. So they banded together and formed a union. They asked that the working age be lowered so they could enter into legal contracts with their employers. However, even the union of child workers agrees there are dangerous jobs that children should not be required to do at any age. Mining is one of those jobs.
Potosí, the southwesternmost departamento (similar to a U.S. state) of Bolivia, is home to a mountain that has been mined without a break—or much of a plan—for almost five hundred years. That mountain is the Cerro Rico, and at the foot of it is the city of Potosí. Despite all the agreement that children should not work in mining, estimates are that 3,000–13,000 children between the ages of six and sixteen work in the mines of the Cerro Rico.
Mining is dangerous work: even if one survives the heavy metals, the toxic gases, the unpredictable explosions, and the occasional collapse of the tunnels snaking through the mountain, breathing the rock-dust-laced air without protective equipment inevitably leads to lung disease. Far from being the “Beautiful” or the “Rich” hill that it is sometimes called, to the over eight million people who have perished in it over the centuries, Potosí has another name: the Mountain That Eats Men.
Precious metals have always outweighed the value of human lives on the mountain of Potosí. From the tyrannical mita system the Spaniards implemented to exploit indigenous labor, where Incan men were forced to work for months without seeing the light of day, to the thirty thousand enslaved Africans who ground away their lives turning the mighty wheels of the colonial mint, the price of Potosí’s silver has always been blood.
There is little silver left in the Cerro Rico anymore, but mining has continued unabated to the present day, with poorer metals such as tin and zinc replacing silver as the mountain’s main output. Today, men still flock to the mountain for work whenever there is a bump in mineral and metal prices—just as they travel to the nearby salt flats of Uyuni to harvest the rare metal lithium to be used in our smartphones and the batteries for our electronics.
When you think about it, placing a value on a metal is a strange thing. You can’t eat it, nor does it help you in any concrete way. To use money means that everyone in a society agrees that something with no inherent value (a rock, a bit of metal, a piece of paper) is worth something. Usually, that value relates roughly to scarcity: the less of something there is, the more we think it should be worth. Before the discovery of the mines in Potosí, silver was quite rare and was worth three times as much as gold. When the Cerro Rico flooded world markets with silver, silver dropped to being one-sixth the value of gold.
Not every culture in the history of the world has used money. The Inca, the indigenous group that ruled the largest South American empire before the arrival of
the Spanish, did not use money. The Spaniards did. In fact, one of the most important reasons the Spaniards sent men to the “New World” was to find more sources of precious metals. The rallying cry of the European explorers is frequently summed up as “God, glory, and gold.” Wave after wave of explorers came in search of El Dorado, a mythical Native American city said to be made entirely of gold.
Though they never found El Dorado, the Spanish did discover so much silver in the one hill of the Cerro Rico that it bankrolled (and then, due to the Spanish crown’s international debt, bankrupted) Spain as a global superpower, and inflated currencies as far afield as the Ottoman Empire and the Ming Dynasty.
Potosí was hugely famous in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the 1600s, it was the fourth largest city in the Christian world. It was a hub of wealth and power: it was larger than London, Paris, and Madrid. Rumors circulated that the city streets were paved with silver. The first epigraph on this author’s note, from the city’s first coat of arms in 1547, captures this sense of grandeur. It was “the king of all mountains and the envy of all kings.” Today, it is the poorest city in one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere. Most have never heard of it.
The second epigraph is from a mother I met working as a palliri on a slag heap of the Cerro Rico when I took my research trip for this book in 2016. Doña Serafina Sandoval Condor was sending her youngest child, a seven-year-old, to school in the back of a pickup truck along with her daughter’s child, also seven. That daughter worked the slag heap beside Doña Sandoval. Her greatest wish in life was that her kids not suffer as she had.
That research trip was the first time I had been back to Bolivia in over twenty years. I lived in Bolivia from the age of five, when my family moved there from Ecuador, until the age of ten, when we left to move to the Dominican Republic. We likely would have stayed longer, but my eyes were damaged as a result of ultraviolet radiation leaking through a hole in the ozone layer of the atmosphere, and the doctor finally gave my family the ultimatum: move before the next dry season or she’ll go blind.
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