I Sweat the Flavor of Tin

Robert L. Smale’s book documents the history of Bolivia’s labor movement at the height of one of Bolivia’s many mineral boom cycles. The author analyzes the relationship among the Bolivian state, the tin industry, and the workers in the tin mines around the departments of Oruro and Potosí in the Bolivian highlands. The population of these areas has historically been mostly indigenous and has a long tradition of mining. However, Smale does not concentrate on the rural history of Andean peasants. He views tin mine workers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as the heirs of a uniquely Andean urban culture that harks back to colonial silver mining. This culture was uniquely mestizo and urban rather than indigenous and agricultural. During the period under study, tin miners produced most of Bolivia’s wealth as the windswept plateaus of Oruro and Potosí attracted unprecedented amounts of foreign and local investment and became Bolivia’s industrial heartland. The author believes that this unique culture produced a labor movement unlike most Latin American labor movements. Although it was initially influenced by anarcho-syndicalism and Marxism, like movements elsewhere in Latin America, it bore Trotskyist traits until the demise of tin mines in the 1980s.Smale’s main thesis is that, despite its late arrival, its numerical weakness, and the ferocious repression that it suffered, Bolivia’s labor movement became an important player in the shaping of the country in the twentieth century, and seminal events such as the 1952 National Revolution could not have taken place without the participation of organized miners. This is illustrated by the fact that many Bolivian governments of different political tints took the miners’ movement extremely seriously by either attempting to co-opt it or by viciously repressing it. To this day, the image of miners marching on the city of La Paz is still a powerful icon of Bolivian politics. To boot, the cocalero movement, which eventually led to the 2006 election of President Evo Morales, had its roots in relocated miners who settled in the Bolivian tropics to cultivate coca after the closure or privatization of most tin mines. They had inherited the militant spirit and organizational skills that Smale describes in his book.This book is a timely addition to Latin American labor history. Like many recent scholarly works, it does not solely document traditional working-class politics. It also explores issues such as the relationship between the rural and the urban in Latin America, working-class culture and ethnicity, and the latent nationalism of Latin America’s oppressed during the republican period as evidenced, in this case, by working-class enthusiasm for the Chaco War or its participation in the 1952 Revolution. Although he does not carry out an ethnological or anthropological analysis of the ethnic makeup of the area, the author suggests that there were open links between the city’s artisan intelligentsia, the miners, and Andean peasants.The book is the result of a meticulous investigation of little-used sources. Its documentary base includes local archives, working-class journals, newspapers, and company archives. The use of various archival materials produces a nuanced and very detailed picture of the conflicts among the different historical players of this story. Yet the author does not get lost in minutiae; his narrative flows easily and is free from jargon.In sum, this book is an important contribution to the history of Bolivia and to Latin American working-class history. It sheds light onto the history of one of the most understudied and more historically significant labor movements of Latin America. It also contributes to an understanding of the complex relationship between the state and workers’ movements and elucidates the complicated and often contradictory relationship between Latin America’s rural and urban areas. Scholars, students, and members of the public who want to understand the complexities of present-day Latin America should find this book very valuable

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