Uyuni-Potosí-Sucre

           Of all the museums we visited on our weekend excursion, I was most taken by the Casa de la Moneda in Potosí.  The creaky wooden floors are some of my favorite features of the colonial architecture in Bolivia. Thinking of how such elaborate, expansive structures were built by human hands leads down a trail of thoughts. Workers carried massive wooden beams on their shoulders. They hauled boulders and stones to pave new floors. Once the painstaking and severe work of constructing the building was finished, they were the source of even more labor. They now were appointed the task of toiling to create the riches of the Spanish empire. They tended the fires, and labored every step of the way, from unearthing the minerals, to stamping the final coin. But who are “they?"
           What struck me from this tour was the lack of records that were kept. It seemed as if every question asked led to the response of inadequate or nonexistent documentation. In the Basílica de San Francisco, we saw carvings in the stones, a mark of its craftsmen. Here, nothing exists to immortalize its workers. Instead, documentation exists for the mules that helped power the machines.

This is the fact about which I was aghast and curious. How did there exist plenty of documentation on the mules that worked the mines, but little trace of the workers who toiled there? The mules’ work was exhausted in about two hours, but the workers at the mint worked much longer. These people who mined enough silver to allegedly build a bridge from Potosí to Madrid.  And whose dead bodies provided enough bones to build another bridge back. What reasoning did the Spanish have for not logging information about their workers? A difficult undertaking given the time that has now passed since these events, but what methods might we use to try to discover more about these people? How were the bodies handled of the numerous workers who died? What can we learn from such a lack of evidence so long ago in history, and how can we get creative in order to do so?