Santa Bárbara's Legacy

It is hard to think of somewhere more emblematic of how colonial commodity frontiers moved through the Americas, leaving social and ecological exhaustion in their wake, than Huancavelica. In 1563, a Spanish encomendero named Amador de Cabrera induced Indians northeast of Huamanga to reveal a local deposit of cinnabar, or llimpi—a scarlet ore that Andean elites collected as a ritual cosmetic but that when fired produces liquid mercury. Mercury is toxic but when amalgamated with other metals—like silver—allows the refining of lesser-quality ores. The Santa Bárbara mine opened, the urban center of Huancavelica grew to its north, and their mercury ensured that Potosí's silver continued to flow, keeping Philip II's global ambitions afloat. All that it cost was the lives or health of the Peruvian miners whose encounter with that mercury poisoned their bodies, their homes, and the surrounding landscape.Santa Bárbara's Legacy uses colonial archives, published primary materials, and modern environmental testing to argue that the afterlife of that encounter is unending, given that Huancavelica remains one of the world's most mercury-contaminated urban areas. Unlike Robins's Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes (2011), which examined Huancavelica alongside Potosí mostly over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Santa Bárbara's Legacy reaches back, in the first chapter, to Huancavelica's geological formation and pre-Hispanic history and forward, in the sixth chapter, to the locale's nineteenth- and twentieth-century neglect. The book's second chapter explains how Viceroy Francisco de Toledo's adaptation of the Incas' turn labor system, the mita, drew unfree native Andean laborers to Huancavelica to commodify the llimpi that had once been a “spiritual currency” (p. 35). Chapter 3 details how the number of Indians who showed up for Huancavelica's mita plummeted due to death, flight from their communities, or payouts to Spanish miners; these Indians were largely replaced by a wage labor force. The fourth chapter considers Bourbon attempts to halt corruption and make the mine more productive, ultimately legitimizing the pallequeo system, in which independent and largely indigenous miners and refiners, humanchis, worked surface tailings. Chapter 5 digs into the bodily consequences of working a cinnabar mine and ingesting volatized mercury before the viceroyalty worked to improve ventilation: “From 1601 to 1604, of the 560 mitayos from the town of Huananhuancas,” writes Robins, “a dozen reportedly survived” (p. 111).Excavating such a toxic site over the longue durée highlights a vexing question: As the mita declined, how could Huancavelica attract any workers at all? Robins has little patience for the “denialist” answer, that working conditions “could not have been as bad for the mitayos as many have suggested” (pp. 91–92). Instead, he argues that the opening of a horizontal adit to the mine in 1642 improved ventilation and conditions, but not as much as viceregal reformers claimed. Mitayos continued to do the most dangerous tasks, and Robins questions the actual freedom of free wage laborers forced into the cash economy and debt peonage.With this line of argumentation Robins challenges the improvements claimed by viceregal reformers much more forcefully than he does the reformers' earlier claims of mercury's death count. This is not to say that Huancavelica's harm wasn't real but that the reformers' reactions are fascinating, regardless of the reality. Robins's book in fact does double duty as a history of both technocrats' unexpectedly early responses to the unsustainability of Toledan Peru and laborers' calculation of its harm. In particular, the tenacity of humanchis and their families into the twentieth century invites consideration of the universe of social values outside mercury's toxic measures. Jane Mangan's lessons on Potosí's subaltern mobility and June Nash's discussion of ritualized, existential bargaining among twentieth-century Bolivian tin miners usefully complicate some of the claims made here—for example, that “the Andean had gone from a person largely harmoniously and sustainably integrated into their physical and cosmological environment, to being little more than one more natural resource caught up in a tug of war by their colonial masters” (p. 44). We should be wary of fetishizing agency, but still more wary of native peoples so natural that they melt into the mountain.These observations may misread a history as environmentalist as environmental, whose worthy brief is of present concern; the returns of that approach are enlightening, even without the postindependence archival research that awaits the researcher. Robins draws from collaborations with environmental scientists to reveal that 75 percent of Huancavelica's earthen-structure homes have mercury concentrations that exceed at least one public health screening level. But Robins also notes that preliminary results for drinking water and foodstuffs sampled in 2015 revealed no detectable levels of mercury. This hardly dispatches Huancavelica's hangover. Its extreme poverty and poor health statistics might indeed owe to the structural violence of the “mita effect” and its environmental legacy (pp. 157–58). But it does historicize the humanchis' decision to double down in a place that the commodity frontier left behind. Santa Bárbara's Legacy shows how after the state stops caring, societies have no choice but to rely on those corners of the environment that are not yet exhausted. As such, Huancavelica becomes no artifact of the colonial past; it points to a shared future

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Cinnabar · Colonialism · Empire · Ethnology · Geography · Mercury (programming language) · History · Latin American history and culture