memory as wealth

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MEMORY AS WEALTH, HISTORY AS COMMERCE 297

Abstract In this article, I look at how inhabitants of Guanajuato, Mexico, a city with

a rich mining past, draw on different accounts of their citys glorious past, accounts

that we might describe as histories and memories. Through an analysis of this case, I

propose an analogy between history and memory, on the one hand, and inalienable

and alienable forms of wealth, on the other hand. I examine Guanajuatenses con-

ceptualizations of place, substance, and wealth from the perspective of the

classification of resources (silver and cultural properties) as patrimonio, or patrimony.

I argue that in these local conceptualizations Guanajuatenses engage questions ofinalienability and alienability and the complex relationship between them, and that by

looking at the politics of designating wealth as inalienable or alienable, we can also

learn something about how local accounts of Guanajuatos past (described in analytical

terms as memories or histories) are understandable as forms of wealth subject to complex

political processes. [memory, history, Mexico, patrimony, inalienability]

Romance clings with astonishing pertinacity to many of these Guanajuato minestoday, and will never by the natives at least, be allowed to die out.

Percy Martin,Mexicos Treasure-House (1905:85)

U.S. Dept. of Retro: We May Be Running out of Past.

The Onion, November 5, 1997

At the dawn of the 19th century, the German natural scientist and mining

expert Alexander von Humboldt visited the central Mexican city of Guanajuato

ETHOS, Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. 297324, ISSN 0091-2131, electronic ISSN 1548-1352. 2006 by theAmerican Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopyor reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website,http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

Memory as Wealth, History

as Commerce: A ChangingEconomic Landscape in Mexico

Elizabeth Emma Ferry


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and recorded his impressions inA Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain

(1811). At that time, Guanajuatos mines produced one-sixth of the worlds

silver and Guanajuato itself was the third largest city in Spanish America, sur-

passed only by Mexico City and Havana. Humboldt marveled at the citys

gracious European-style structures, saying:

One is astonished to see in this wild spot large and beautiful edifices in themidst of miserable Indian huts. The house of Colonel Don Diego Rul

who is one of the proprietors of the mine of Valenciana, would be anornament on the finest streets of Paris or Naples. [1811:171]

Humboldts reflections echo an aspect of the citys self-presentation even today,

as an elegant enclave of world-class baroque architecture that nonetheless pre-

serves a quintessentially Mexican and Guanajuatense character and that owes

its beauty and distinctiveness to the extraction of silver from the local mines.

Inhabitants describe Guanajuato as a city born of silver, a phrase that under-

scores both the causal connection between the mines and the city and the

generative quality of the mines and the earthy, muddy ore that is taken from

them. They also often describe the physical structures of the city as being madeof silver, emphasizing that the roads and walls of churches, plazas, and houses

have a high silver content because the stone and clay to make them were mined

in the area. As one Guanajuatense said to me, When you walk on the roads,

you are walking on silver.

If silver is present in the structures of their city, Guanajuatenses also know that

for these structures to be built in the first place, silver had to taken from the

mines and sold on the world market. In this sense, it is silvers departure thatmade Guanajuato; the built environment of the city embodies silvers absence.

In its departure, silver has left behind a memory of itself, and the memory of

silver and the past glories it made possible is embedded in the citys walls.

Although characterizing the built environment of the city as the embodied

memory of silver conflates the substance itself (walls, rock, and adobe), with the

mental processes that Guanajuatenses engage in with respect to that substance,

doing so coincides with local conceptions of the city and its substance. Many of

my informants similarly conflated the citys glorious past, their own individual andcollective memories concerning that past, and their material urban embodiment.

Furthermore, in describing the citys material forms in this way, many of

Guanajuatos citizens draw on a version of memory that articulates well with a


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scholarly tradition emphasizing memorys sensuous, embodied, and material

aspects (Connerton 1989; Csordas 1990; Feeley-Harnik 1991; Halbwachs

1925, 1950; Stoler and Strassler 2000). That is to say, they vividly experience

the relationship between the interior cognitive faculty of memory and the past

as immanent in the structures surrounding them, which evoke memories of

Guanajuatos glorious past and of their own distinctive claim on that past by

virtue of their Guanajuatanness (see The Immanent Past Birth this issue; see

also Cole 2001, White 1999).

In this article, I examine the implications of Guanajuatenses conceptualiza-

tions of place, substance, and wealth from the perspective of the classification

of resources (silver and cultural properties) aspatrimonio, or patrimony. I argue

that in these local conceptualizations Guanajuatenses engage questions of

inalienability and alienability and the complex relationship between them, and

that by looking at the politics of designating wealth as inalienable or alienable,

we can also learn something about how local accounts of Guanajuatos past

(described as memories or histories) are similarly understandable as forms of

wealth and similarly subject to complex political processes.How do Guanajuatenses experience and use their memories of past prosperity in

the context of a declining silver mining economy? Silver mining is no longer ter-

ribly lucrative either in Guanajuato or anywhere else in the world. The price of

silver has fallen steadily in the last several decades (with the spectacular exception

of the Hunt Brothers attempt to corner the market in 1980, which drove the

price from $7 to $50 per ounce in one month). The development of video and

digital camera technologies may have delivered the fatal blow, for one of the main

industrial uses of silver has been for black-and-white film. Deprived of a solid

market for silver and faced with declining ore grades, the local economy has

shifted more and more from mining to services, especially tourism. As this hap-

pens, many in Guanajuato are drawing on the citys glorious past and its material

traces as an alternative economic resource, one that is not so exhaustible as silver.

Along with these changes, the idiom of patrimony has been used increasingly

by actors within and outside Guanajuato to refer to the material remains of the

past, especially the glorious past of the silver city (ciudad de plata).These uses

contribute to strategies to market that past as a tourist attraction. By no means

unique to Guanajuato, this shift allows us to see transformations of inalienable

and alienable wealth in a new light. Patrimony, which used to characterize silver,



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the substance that leaves Guanajuato, in terms of inalienability, now refers to the

substances that have stayed in placethe landscape, built environment, and the

bones of Guanajuatensesin terms of marketability.

As a city born of the extraction of nonrenewable resources that also places great

store in the distinctiveness and continuity of its built environment, Guanajuato

is an ideal place to examine the complex relationship between those forms of

wealth that enrich the collectivity by staying put (and that are supposed to

stay put) and those that enrich the collectivity by leaving (and that are supposed

to leave). Since at least the 18th century, when the bonanza of the Valenciana

mine made Guanajuato into a world-class city (at least in the estimation of its

inhabitants), the relation between these different kinds of wealth has been

fraught with questions and contradictions.

In other writings, I have explored these contradictions from the perspective of

the anthropological literature on value, arguing that this case, lying at the heart

of global commodity exchange, sheds light on the hybrid nature of value and the

complex transactions by which forms of wealth are transformed into one another

in different societies. These transactions are encapsulated within an idiom ofpatrimony that Guanajuatenses have used to classify resources as inalienable

possessions, even as they are extracted and sold on the world market. In this arti-

cle, I turn attention to the question of memory and history in Guanajuato in the

wake of silvers decline and tourisms rise. On the basis of participant-observation

among members of the Santa Fe silver mining cooperative (Sociedad Cooperative

Minero-Metalrgica Santa Fe de Guanajuato; hereafter Santa Fe Cooperative)

in Guanajuato from 1996 to 1998 and on numerous subsequent visits to the

field, this article grows out of a larger project investigating the intersections of

inalienability and commodification as they are understood by cooperative

members, their families, and as they are played out in a Mexican idiom of

patrimonio (Ferry 2002, 2005). This article incorporates ideas of hybrid and

transformational forms of value into a consideration of memory and history.

Memory and History as Alternative Forms of WealthThere has been a great deal of debate over what exactly separates those

accounts of the past described as memory from those described as history

(among others Bourguet et al., 1990; Geary 1994; Nora 1989; Thelen 1989).

Many of the distinctions drawn have then been criticized as either ethnocentric

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or romanticizing in one way or another. Agreeing strongly with Kevin

Yelvingtons (2002) assertion that the designation of distinct representations of the

past as memories or histories is itself a political process, I borrow from the

literature on the anthropology of exchange to propose a distinction that may help

us in this analysis of memories and histories in Guanajuato and may even provide

some tools for examining the politics surrounding their separation and interaction.

One difference between memory and history lies, I suggest, in their differing

claims of inalienability and alienability. Memories, on the one hand, are seen as

belonging to particular individuals or to particular groups in the case of collec-

tive or social memory. Integral to memories is a claim that they cannot be

transferred without fundamentally changing their character and they will never

become memories of some other person or group in the same way. For

instance, many Guanajuatenses stress that their relationship to the city and its

material forms and to the past inhabiting those forms is inalienable; no one

from outside can partake in that relationship in the same way.1 In the eyes of

these citizens, the memory of silver and the citys great past has a particular

value for its native citizens that cannot be told or transferred to outsiders. Inthis sense, the memories of the past embodied in the citys built environment

might be productively characterized as the inalienable possessions (Weiner 1992)

of the collective. To characterize them this way suggests that memory can be

seen as a kind of wealth, embodied in substance and place, whose dispersal or

decay would lead to a dispersal or decay of the collective itself.

Histories, on the other hand, claim to be alienable and transferable. They are a

form of representation that posits a transitive relationship among different

recipients. That is, to describe an account of the past as a history is to make

the claim that it is the same history for all listeners (whether or not this is in

fact the case). Such a claim is not made when describing a memory. Every-

where in Guanajuato one finds historiesin the newspapers, in the rehearsed

speeches of tourist guides, on glazed tile plaques affixed to plazas and churches.

These are largely aimed at outsiders, those who cannot participate in the mem-

ory of the past (although certainly there are also plenty of scholars at the

University of Guanajuato who read and produce such histories).2

Althoughthose histories that describe Guanajuato and its former glories draw on forms

of embodied memory significant for residents, they are seen by these residents

themselves as qualitatively different. In particular, they are seen as produced for

and transferable to outsiders.



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Certain aspects of anthropological theory further suggest the applicability of

concepts of value and wealth to the question of memory and history. Consider

these two distinctions that have generated a great deal of debate within anthro-

pology: between gifts and commodities, on the one hand, and memory

and history, on the other hand.3 Both distinctions (giftcommodity and

memoryhistory) were first established as more or less strict dichotomies, focus-

ing on fixed categories defined in opposition to each other. Both distinctions

were further used as diacritics between modern and traditional and more

recently Western and non-Western societies. In both cases, these dichotomous

and diacritical aspects have been roundly criticized over the past two decades,and for the same reasonsthat they reify differences between West and

non-West and consign the latter to a timeless, unreflective domain: the people

without history.

So for instance, C. A. Gregory (1982) created a typology between gifts and com-

modities and then extrapolated this to a typology of gift societies and

commodity societies. In recent years, scholars such as Arjun Appadurai,

Annette Weiner, and Nicholas Thomas have upset this dichotomy and proposedother possible relationships between gifts and commodities and especially

between inalienability and alienability (Appadurai 1986; Thomas 1991; Weiner

1992). Compare this to the differences between hot societies and cold societies

(Lvi-Strauss 1966) or lieux de mmoire and milieux de mmoire (Nora 1989) and

the ways these have been critiqued by a number of scholars whose positions have

been largely accepted (Cole 2001; Geary 1994; Yelvington 2002). In their after-

math, scholars have proposed a variety of ways to describe the relation between

the dichotomous terms and their referent concepts: as ideal types wielded foranalytic purposes, as a continuum, as an assemblage of features that can occur in

different combinations, and so on. If we apply the analytical concepts developed

in the anthropology of exchange and value to the question of memory and his-

tory, we may be able to examine the politics of their interaction from a fresh

perspective. Before examining this question in ethnographic context, let me give

some background on the city of Guanajuato and its surrounding mines.

Guanajuato City and Mining District

The Guanajuato mining district has been in continuous production for 450

years. The first of the mines directly on the main vein system, the Veta Madre,

began to be worked in 1550, and the outpouring of these mines created the

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glory of the city of Guanajuato, capital of Guanajuato state. The city reached

its apogee at the turn of the 19th century, just at the time that Humboldt visited

the mines. Guanajuato was a focal point of the War of Independence from

Spain, which broke out in 1810, and it took decades for the mining industry to

recover from the damages incurred in fighting and from the neglect of the

mines. As elsewhere in Mexico (Randall 1972), the British experimented

unsuccessfully with turning a profit from the mines in the 1830s and 1840s

(Rankine 1992; Ward 1828). A bonanza at the nearby mines of La Luz in the

1850s helped spur a return to economic prosperity for Guanajuato. Much of

the more ornate, frenchified architecture in the city, although associated inpeoples minds with the Spanish and with colonialism, actually dates from the

second half of the 19th century.

After a strong start before the revolution of 1910, when U.S. companies

brought electricity and the cyanide method of ore processing to Guanajuato

(Meyer Coso 1999), the mines were again hit hard by the revolution, so much

so that the plight of the miners of Guanajuato became one of the topics dis-

cussed at the constitutional congress in 191617 when the Constitution of1917 was drafted (Niemeyer 1974). Indeed, the silver market continued to

decline throughout the 20th century, although at moments the mining econ-

omy has revived because of technological changes in ore processing, vagaries of

the world market, or new discoveries. Although silver is still a commodity to be

reckoned with in global markets, it has lost much of its power and cachet over

the course of the 20th century. Faced with declining yields and prices in recent

years, mining companies and the city as a whole have sought alternatives in a

number of areas, not least that of mining heritage (patrimonio minero) tourism.

In doing so, they follow a general shift in the areas economy. Tourism to

Guanajuato began to rise during World War II, when many U.S. citizens

forewent their European travels in favor of Mexico. As elsewhere in Mexico,

tourism has increased exponentially in the past two decades, becoming Guanajuatos

most important economic sector by the mid-1990s. This means that at the

same time that the mines of Guanajuato are producing less and less silver, more

and more efforts and resources are invested in tourism and services. Theseefforts include the opening of hotels, the promotion of the Festival Internacional

Cervantino, a performing arts festival that largely caters to Mexican tourists,

and the marketing of the distinctive beauty of Guanajuatos plazas, churches,

and architecture. Although the winding alleys (callejones) of Guanajuato became



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an emblem of old Mexico and a draw for tourists as early as the 1930s

(Saragoza 2001:100), the push to promote Guanajuato as the most accessible

(because of the nearbyAeropuerto del Bajo, opened in 1992) and quaint of

Mexicos silver cities has intensified tremendously in the past 20 years.

Today, Guanajuato is a city of about 75,000 people. It is the capital of Guanajuato

state and the cabecera (municipal seat) of the municipality of Guanajuato, which

has approximately 140,000 inhabitants (Instituto Nacional de Estadstica,

Geografa e Informacin [INEGI] 2000). It is the site of the state University of

Guanajuato and of the state government, which together provide many of the

local jobs. Other jobs are provided by the remaining mining companies and by

various activities related to tourism. The nearby GM plant in the town of Silao

also provides some jobs. Many of these, however, are short-term contracts, in

keeping with the neoliberal vision promoted by former governor Vicente Fox

Quesada (president of Mexico from 20012007).

The state of Guanajuato has for decades been one of the biggest sender states

of migrant labor to the United States. In the past, those communities where

many men worked in the mines (such as the town of Santa Rosa de Lima,where I lived from 1996 to 1998), tended to send fewer migrants than agricul-

tural communities, but this seems to be changing as the mining economy

declines. In 1998, the four most important economic sectors for Guanajuatenses

(esp. men) in terms of personnel employed (PE) were commerce (4,352 PE),

construction (3,475 PE), mining (2,366 PE) and hotel and restaurant work

(2,351 PE; INEGI 2000).4The activities of migrants were not captured in

the census.

Guanajuatos citizens demonstrate a strong sense of place based on the prac-

tices associated with mining, the local landscape and built environment, and

Catholic devotionalism. The city is located in the northern part of the Bajo

region. It was in the Bajo that indigenous people, displaced from their villages

further south, moved to work in the mines, haciendas, and textile workshops in

the early and middle colonial period. As Eric Wolf has noted, these processes

gave rise to a more rapid emergence of a mestizo (mixed European and indige-

nous) class, one that tended to favor class and national over ethnic and local

interests (Tutino 1986; Wolf 1955). Thus, the Bajo and the state of Guanajuato,

not surprisingly, became the center for the independence movement in the

early 19th century. Indeed, Guanajuato city was the site of the first major defeat

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of the Spaniards (Brading 1971, Rionda Arregun 1993). It is based on this his-

tory that abajeoscall their region the cradle of the Mexican nation.

Some years later, after the Revolution of 1910which has often been presented,

especially by those supporting the state and ruling Partido Revolucionario Insti-

tucional (PRI) party, as the true birth of the Mexican nationmany in this area,

especially the landed elite and those who were strongly Catholic, came into con-

flict with the national state. President Plutarco Calles, who governed Mexico

from 192428, imposed a series of anticlerical policies that were deeply resented

by many in the Bajo and in Guanajuato. The government is suspected of back-

ing a successful attempt to dynamite the statue ofCristo Rey (Christ the King)

that adorns the top of a mountain outside La Luz, Guanajuato, at the geograph-

ical center of Mexico. One informant, in his late eighties in 1997, told me of an

attempt he and his brothers made to retaliate by planting a bomb in the Jurez

Theater during a meeting of government supporters. The plan failed and he was

forced to flee the city. These events formed part of what has been called the

Cristero War, one of the most formidable challenges to the postrevolutionary

state until the Zapatistas in the 1990s. Indeed, Guanajuato is one of the centersof the Partido Accin Nacional (PAN) party, which grew out of the ashes of the

Cristero movement and now controls the presidency. And the area continues to

be strongly Catholic; in the town where I lived during my fieldwork, many

houses have a sign posted outside the door saying: this home is Catholicwe

do not accept Protestants or members of other sects.

In the city of Guanajuato and its surrounding towns, historical memory, local

pride, and Catholic devotionalism are strongly imbued with a sense of place

and substance located in rocks and mountainsthe soil and the minerals it

contains. Nearly all of the important public and sacred buildings (including the

statue of Cristo Rey and the Juarez Theater mentioned above) are carved from

local green and red porphyry (cantera verde y rosa),while the adornments of the

patron saint Santa Fe are made from local silver. In the mines and in miners

houses, mineral specimens adorn altars in a more personalized version of this

practice. And these facts are often referred to by Guanajuatenses. As well see,

the substances of the city are continually put forward as distinctive and forma-tive aspects of local knowledge and pride.

This aspect of local ideology is demonstrated especially clearly among miners,

who are seen as most closely tied to the citys history and reason for being over



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the past 200 years. In this project, I have focused especially on members of the

Santa Fe Cooperative, which has been in operation since the late 1930s.

The Santa Fe Cooperative

The Santa Fe Cooperative is a mining cooperative that, during the time of my

primary fieldwork in the late 1990s, had approximately 900 members and con-

trolled all of the most important mines of the colonial period. As elsewhere in

Latin America, the Mexican subsoil is constitutionally defined as national pat-

rimony. Therefore, the Santa Fe Cooperative does not own these mines, but

leases concessions to exploit them from the central government.5These mines

were discovered by the Spaniards and became immensely profitable in the 18th

century. Since then, they have been controlled by British, U.S., and now

Mexican interests, in the form of a producers cooperative in which members

receive a share of the profits rather than wages. The insular structure of the

Santa Fe Cooperative and the links between mining cooperatives and the apex

of Mexican postrevolutionary nationalism (Bernstein 1965, Ferry 2005) have

meant that the Santa Fe Cooperative is a particularly fertile site for exploringunderstandings of alienable and inalienable wealth. As well see, debates over

mining and tourism as sources of wealth are also particularly charged in the

Santa Fe.

Many members of the Santa Fe Cooperative and many observers state that the

cooperative differs dramatically from other mining companies in Guanajuato

because it has a social goal (fin social), that of preserving jobs for future gen-

erations. In the past, when the price of silver was high, there was the ability to

provide jobs for miners sons not only in mining but in the satellite businesses

such as the ceramic and silversmith workshops or in the central plant. The

Santa Fe Cooperative administration tended to give less dangerous jobs on the

surface to those whose fathers gave their lives to the mine, whether through

accidents or silicosis. In recent years, efforts aimed at tourists have also been a

site in which older miners or the sons of miners have found jobs.

Because it is a producers cooperative, the Santa Fe has no outside investors and

thus no one to answer to beyond its own membership (they are even exempt

from much government regulation, aside from safety and health codes). This

fact promotes a sense among members that the wealth produced by the Santa

Fe Cooperative is for the membership. Silver may be sold, and thus leave

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Guanajuato, but the profits remain to sustain and enrich Santa Fe Cooperative

homes and families. As one engineer said to me, If I want to eat in a restau-

rant, I eat in Guanajuato. If I get my shoes shined, I do it in the Jardn de la

Unin [the citys main plaza]. It is the same with the Cooperative. The money

we make stays in Guanajuato.

However, the fact that this is a cooperative does not necessarily mean that divi-

sion of resources has been equitable among cooperative members. Since the

Santa Fe Cooperatives foundation, every president of the administrative council

(the highest elected position) has been accused of embezzling in more or less

spectacular ways. And others well placed in the hierarchy or production process

(often from established Santa Fe Cooperative families) have been said to steal

ore concentrate or mismanage resources for their own gain. Accusations like

these were constant throughout the period of my fieldwork. I do not have the

capacity (or the inclination) to judge the validity of any one of these claims,

although some at least are clearly true. However, their constancy shows two

aspects of the Santa Fe Cooperative clearly: (1) it does not always live up to its

ideology of fairness and the right use of patrimony, and (2) it differs from privatecompanies in that it is not seen as legitimate for the leaders to profit more than

the miners, at least not beyond a certain degree.

The mines of the Santa Fe, which have been worked extensively since the 18th

century and have produced a significant percentage of the New Worlds silver,

are nearing exhaustion. Furthermore, the world silver market continues to

diminish and the support from the government for the cooperative has dried

under recent neoliberal administrations. In response to these exogenous and

endogenous factors, the Santa Fe Cooperative has undergone a series of eco-

nomic crises that have intensified over the past 15 years.6

Cooperative members and the institutions elected leaders have tried to

respond to economic crises in a number of ways, but one of the most impor-

tant, and most hotly debated, has been the marketing of the Santa Fe

Cooperative and its multiple picturesque mines and other structures as tourist

sites. They have made several mines available to tourists, and cooperative

members work after hours as tour guides or selling mineral specimens and trin-

kets to visitors. In doing this, they have followed a more general trend in

Guanajuato, and in other places where people attempt to make the shift from

mining to industrial heritage tourism (Edwards and Llurdes I Coit 1996).



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These strategies, which depend on a marketing of the built environment of the

mines as material traces of the citys glorious history, stand both in tension and part-

nership with notions of Santa Fe Cooperative wealth as embodied in the substances

of the earth, the mines, and the city and, thus, as something that should be handed

down from generation to generation. As I hope to show, the question of whether

the Santa Fe Cooperative should shift to tourism restates old questions

concerning what happens when the wealth of the city leaves the cityin new ways.

A defining moment in the shift from mining to tourism came in 1988, when

the city of Guanajuato and its surrounding mines was included on the UN

Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) list of World

Heritage Cities (in Spanish Ciudades de Patrimonio Mundial).7To understand

the significance of this event, let me first turn to a discussion of two faces of

Guanajuato: the city as substance and the city as patrimony.

The City as Substance

In the case of Guanajuato, the immanent past includes all manner of things

linguistic and bodily practices, foods, aesthetic norms, and so onbut certainkinds of things are more strongly valued than others as embodiments of the past.

The mines, the silver and gold emerging from these mines, the 18th- and 19th-

century architecture of the city, the tunnels that run beneath it, the locally

quarried green and pink porphyry stone (cantera verde y rosa), the rocky landscape

around the city, and the bones of native citizens are all specially marked categories

of Guanajuatanness. Except the bones, these kinds of things all have an obvious

connection: they are all part of what could be called the mineral patrimony of

Guanajuato, the rocks and earth on which and out of which the city is built. Citi-zens of Guanajuato, when talking about their city often emphasize these earthy,

rocky characteristics including the walls, houses, mines, and streets, and the natu-

ral landscape surrounding the city, which lies nestled in a canyon crowned by rock

formations. One cooperative member, for instance, told me that because many

Guanajuatenses eat from dishes made out of local clay, they have probably

ingested a good deal of silver, and could now be thought of as part silver

(una parte plata). Sometimes local residents express a sense of regret and nostal-

gia for lost features of the landscape; another cooperative member told me that

the landscape to the east of Guanajuato was pretty as could be (bonito con ganas)

before the mining company Las Torres came in the 1970s and began to blast in

the hills.

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Festivities on the Day of the Cave (August 31), which honors one of the citys

patron saints, San Ignacio, take place in a cave near the largest of the rock for-

mations, called La Bufa. On this day, hundreds of Guanajuatenses hike (often

in dress shoes or high heels) to the top of this hill overlooking the city to attend

mass and to picnic. A local legend tells of an enchanted city made of silver

buried within La Bufa. Although this story is now mostly used as a tale for

tourists, the image it evokes remains at least somewhat compelling. As one

shopkeeper once said to me, beneath Guanajuato lie many Guanajuatos. The

intimate presence of the mines so close to the city and of the innumerable small

crevices whereby prospectors have entered working and abandoned mines forcenturies, may in part account for the notion of many Guanajuatos. And

when one goes down in the mines themselves, one is struck by the citylike

quality of the underground space. One walks along tunnels like streets and

alleys, climbs stairs and ladders and crosses bridges. Now and then the close

walls open out into cavernous atria with huge arches and ramparts. It does

seem, at least to me, like a vast complex of city streets and spaces, unpeopled

except for the miners who tramp through in pairs or small groups, whistling to

each other.

Figure 1 shows a cross-section of the Valenciana mine as depicted in a mono-

graph of the Guanajuato mining district published in the 1960s. It

demonstrates both the circuitous alleys and paths of the workings underground

and shows a few of the churches and mine structures on the surface. This figure

gives a nice image of the ways the city on the surface is thought by many

Guanajuatenses to emerge out of and even to be born from the city underground.

The constitutive nature of stone and earth for Guanajuatanness is also exem-

plified in the green and pink cantera that comes from the tiny mining town

Calderones in the heart of the Veta Madre (in the municipality of Guanajuato

just outside the city). This green and pink stone adorns all important structures

in Guanajuato, and many other commercial and residential buildings are

painted pink and green in an evocation of cantera. Cantera verde in particular

is important enough to the self-presentation of the city that it is depicted on

the city seal.

Although bones may seem to be one of those things not like the others, bones

themselves may also qualify as mineral patrimony. Many Guanajuatenses

emphasize the intimate connections between the material forms of the city and



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mines and the bones of its citizens. There are stories of skeletons in the mines

of miners who lost their lives there, and comparisons are made between the

mines and cemeteries (panteones) of the city. One former engineer and nativeGuanajuatense said to me mining empties the mines and fills the panten, thus

making explicit the parallelism between the two underground spaces. Under-

ground altars and sacred onomastics in the mines further sacralize the

underground realm and liken it to other sacred spaces in the city such as churches

and cemeteries. There is even a mummy museum in Guanajuato that displays

the bodies of former citizens who have purportedly been naturally mummified by

the soils high mineral content (Ferry 2003). And to make the circle complete, the

walls of the Santa Paula Municipal Cemetery are topped with a line of skullscarved from the cantera verde so emblematic of the city as substance.

Part of the significance of these types of substances for Guanajuatenses is not

only the natural environment surrounding and underlying Guanajuato but also

310 ETHOS

Figure 1.Vertical Projection of the Workings of the Valenciana Mine, 1806 (reproduced with

permission from Antez Echegaray 1964, p. 287 [copyright Consejo de Recursos

Minerales]).


15/28

the labor that went into producing the citys mines, tunnels, and buildings.

Because most Guanajuatenses count current or past miners as part of their family,

they tend to identify strongly with the labor that went into producing these

structures. Although the earth and rocks of the city are theirs by virtue of

their birth in Guanajuato, the buildings are theirs by virtue of the labor that

they or their forefathers put into constructing them. Their commemoration

of this former labor is made manifest in one of the citys most important festivals

(and one of the few that is not strongly marketed for tourists), the Miners

Pilgrimage to the Basilica of Santa Fe de Guanajuato, which takes place at the

end of May. As one Guanajuatense told me, People dont come out to see thepilgrimage so much because they themselves are miners, but because their

fathers and grandfathers were miners and for the importance that mining has

had in the city.

Of course, this presentation of the city as produced through the labor of male

miners obscures lots of other forms of labor, especially that of women and non-

miners (Ferry 2003). Kevin Yelvington has rightly pointed out a tendency

among anthropologists to see memory as an unproblematic, possessable rec-ollection of an authentic past (2002:234). The erasure of female and nonminer

labor is just one indication that Guanajuatense memories are highly susceptible

to the processes of reconstruction that legitimate past and prevailing relations

of power. For instance, during my time in Guanajuato, the Santa Fe Coopera-

tive was always referred to exclusively as an enterprise made up of men working

underground extracting ore, in spite of the fact that ten percent of the work-

force were women and perhaps 60 percent did not work in the mines

themselves. Similarly, during years of bonanza, Guanajuato has been a city ofshopkeepers, moneylenders, chemists, bartenders, university professors, arti-

sans, and bureaucrats, to name just a few occupations supported by the mining

boom. But these are rarely referred to in accounts of the citys past.

The City as Patrimony

Another instance further emphasizes the substantial links between Guanajuatense

bones, earth, and stones and also introduces the theme of the city as patrimony.In 1991, on the 200th anniversary of the year in which Guanajuato received the

title of city from the Spanish king, Isauro Rionda Arregun, the official

chronicler or cronista, made a speech that echoed many of the sentiments of his

fellow citizens about the material substance of their city, and that also limned a



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connection between this sense of place and the marketing of the citys history

for outsiders. He said:

Guanajuato has never failed to surprise us with new motives for honoringher, as has now happened with the designation by UNESCO of [the title]of City of World Patrimony and its inscription, by virtue of this, in theselective list of world monuments with this characteristic. . . . The city ofGuanajuato offers to humanity its architectonic wealth and its notablysublime and beautiful singularity; but not as a complex of walls, ramparts,arches, doors, and buildings [that are] well constructed and surprising butempty and static, but rather as a propitious and optimal environment for

the development of aspirations and creative and artistic qualities of itsinhabitants, above all those who were born here and who have left theirbones here. . . . We Guanajuatenses, men and women who are well bornand better raised, feel honorably committed in the presence of humanityto preserve, augment, and enrich this patrimony, which is not ours alone[que no es solo nuestro].

Rionda Arreguns statement posits a distinctive relationship between native

Guanajuatenses (those who were born there and have left their bones there)

and the memory of the past embedded in the built environment of the city.

The walls, ramparts, and buildings have created these cultured and creative

persons who in turn guard these very structures and forms to be visited and

marveled at by outsiders. These material forms, then, both embody the mem-

ory intrinsic to Guanajuato and inalienable from the collective it represents

while also narrating a history for visitors from outside.

In this characterization of the built environment of the city as both inalienable

memory and alienable history, much hinges on the use of the termpatrimonio.

In 1987, (before UNESCOs naming of Guanajuato as Ciudad de Patrimonio

Mundial), for many of the listeners to this speech, the wordpatrimoniowould

have connoted the inalienable resources of the nation established in the consti-

tution of 1917, and foremost among these, subsoil resources. Using the term

patrimonio to refer to the memory of silver embodied in the city rather than the

silver itself would have been comprehensible to the audience, but still some-

what uncommon. However, the uses ofpatrimonio to refer to the material tracesof the past have proliferated in Guanajuato tremendously since the late 1980s.

Examples of this trend include a competition held in 1996 by the Institute for

Culture of the State of Guanajuato that included a recently introduced category

for historians, architects, and archaeologists called Diffusion of Patrimony;

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an international UNESCO-sponsored conference held in Guanajuato in

February 1997 for university rectors, bishops, and mayors of World Heritage

Cities (ciudades de patrimonio mundial); and numerous instances, including

plaques, civic speeches and proclamations, newspaper articles, municipal vehi-

cles, and soda machines, in which the city is described publicly aspatrimonio de

la humanidadorpatrimonio mundial.

This shift from patrimony as material, nonrenewable resources to a kind of

mnemonic patrimony is of course not unique to Guanajuato but can be found

all over sites of former industrial glory in Europe, the United States, and Latin

America. Nestor Garca Canclini (1995), Richard Handler (1988), Franois

Hartog (1998), Pierre Nora (1989), and others interested in the connections

between memory, commemoration, and patrimony describe an extension and

intensification in the uses of the term over the past 25 years, especially in the

areas of natural parks, genetics, cultural properties, and so on. This shift is the

latest in a series of transformations in the uses of the termpatrimony and its ref-

erential domain.

The termspatrimonio, patrimoine, andpatrimony derive from the Latinpatrimo-

nium, and originally referred to entailed, patrilineally transmitted property,

especially land. During the rise of absolutism in Europe, it became closely asso-

ciated with the holdings of royal lineages, and after the French Revolution,

these properties became reclassified juridically as the patrimony of the nation.

Patrimony has had a particularly intense history in Mexico, which like the rest

of Spanish America was itself defined as royal patrimony during the colonial

period. As in France, the protagonists of the Mexican independence movementand later the revolution insisted at the moment when the juridical personality

of the king ceased to exist, that is, the moment of independence, the kings pat-

rimony automatically converted into national patrimony. In the Mexican

Constitution of 1917, subsoil resources, agricultural land, and cultural proper-

ties received special consideration as national patrimony and this formulation

became an ideological cornerstone of the postrevolutionary state and the ruling

political party.

This has made uses of a language of patrimony particularly charged in Mexico.

In recent years, in keeping with the decline of Mexican postrevolutionary

nationalism and the authoritarian politics that went along with it, patrimony



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has been increasingly applied in areas outside that of national resources. Rionda

Arreguns speech, which emphasized both local and universal collectivities

(humanity) but did not mention the nation, is typical of this trend.8 However,

in all cases in which it is used, patrimony entails notions of inalienable, intrinsic

value, a form of wealth that is intended to be handed down intact from generation

to generation, usually through the agnatic line.

The intrinsic, inalienable character of patrimony has been a big problem in the

case of subsoil resources. How do you deal with the contradictions of classify-

ing exhaustible, nonrenewable resources as inalienable? It is all very well to

classify land as patrimony, because with landat least agricultural landyou

can separate use rights from rights of alienation; you can say, for instance, that

the land is inalienable but its fruits are not (and this is the origin of the term

usufruct). But in the case of mining, use equals alienation. Guanajuatos citizens

have sought to reconcile this contradiction by focusing on the ways that silver

returns in other forms, especially in the material forms of the city. This partic-

ular form of patrimony based on the memory of silver embedded in the built

environment has gained new force as Guanajuatenses try to attract resourcesbased on the beauty and distinctiveness of these places. In the process, the

idiom of patrimony as deployed in Guanajuato continues to encapsulate the

tensions between forms of inalienable and alienable wealth (Ferry 2005). For-

merly Guanajuatos citizens struggled to iterate the inalienability of those

substances that left the city (above all silver) and did so in part through the

memory of silver retained in the citys material forms. Now they struggle to

make a living from those forms by telling histories of the substances that

remain (buildings, rocks, and bones). In each case, patrimony mediatesbetween these forms of wealth without ever resolving their contradictions.

Tensions over the uses of patrimony in the Santa Fe Cooperative in the late

1990s and early 2000s reveal these uneasy mediations.

Patrimony in the Santa Fe Cooperative

The Bocamina San Cayetano is a converted entrance to the Valenciana mine

now open to tourists. The Bocamina is an adit entrance rather than a mine-

shaft, which means that miners (and now visitors) enter by a staircase rather

than in a mechanical hoist. This particular entrance has been closed for pro-

duction since the 19th century and used as a showpiece for occasional visitors

since that time. The site is currently managed by the Santa Fe Cooperative.

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In the 1990s, the Santa Fe Cooperative refurbished the grounds of the Bocamina,

which lies on one side of the magnificent Valenciana Church several kilometers

outside of Guanajuato proper. They installed bathrooms and hung old photos

depicting the mines and mining activities from the last century in Guanajuato.

Samples from the Santa Fe Cooperative affiliated ceramic and silversmith

workshops are also displayed.

Several older miners and widows and daughters of cooperative members work

at the Bocamina selling tickets, dispensing hard hats and leading visitors 50

meters down the staircase into the mine. In 1997, 58,770 tickets were sold to

the Bocamina (at eight pesos or about 90 cents each), mostly during the periods

of Mexican school vacations. The site appears to be more heavily frequented by

Mexican tourists than by foreigners. The Bocaminas main benefit for the Santa

Fe Cooperative comes from the fact that it provides a job for a number of

cooperative members unfit for more strenuous work (because Santa Fe Coop-

erative members cannot be fired). This is an example of the efforts by Santa Fe

Cooperative leadership to maintain the source of jobs. Nevertheless, the

existence of the Bocamina forms part of a concerted Santa Fe Cooperativestrategy to exploit the burgeoning tourist industry by constructing an experi-

ence of Guanajuatos past for those from outside.

The appeal of places like the Bocamina lies in their ability to tell a story of the

past to visitors, but also to give these visitors a unique experience that will leave

them with their own memories. Here, the unfinished business of the past

makes possible emergent forms of collectivity and agency (Murakami and

Middleton this issue). Such places do not close off the past, but make it

immanent, as Kevin Birth puts it, in such a way as to open up new forms of

action and remembrance (see The Immanent Past this issue).

The emphasis is on the knowledge that comes from direct experience; one

leaflet advertising the Bocamina exhorts the visitor to know the interior of the

mine. It is the physical passage from surface to the interior space of the mine

surrounded by the walls, stones, and silver of Guanajuato that creates this inti-

mate, embodied knowledge. Here we see that the distinction I have drawn

between memory and history in Guanajuato (like that between gifts and com-

modities) does not hold firm, for it is clearly the ideas of those who set up the

Bocamina about what is quintessentially representative of Guanajuatos past

that inform organizational and design decisions. Nevertheless the site is meant



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to be an experience for outsiders that resembles without ever replacing the

experience of those native to the city (oriundos).

Like the memories embodied in the citys substances, the histories told in the

Bocamina also enable processes of simultaneous remembering and forgetting. For

instance, although the tour guides who lead tourists into the Bocamina invariably

describe the brutal work engaged in byindiosworking in the mine, hauling hun-

dreds of kilograms of ore by tumpline up hundreds of meters of narrow stone

stairs. This image contrasts strongly with that of the noble nonindigenous miners

whom Guanajuatenses imagine as their forebears. The question arises, what hap-

pened to those downtrodden masses; did they disappear at some point, or how did

they turn into the proud workers that typify local ideas of current and former

miners? The people I spoke with, for instance, would usually refer to themselves

as mestizo or even hispano (of Spanish descent). Although the former category

does emphasize racial mixture, both are in contradistinction to indio and indgena.

Indeed the very notion of mineral wealth as national patrimony may foreground

miners mestizo character, because national patrimony became a salient term as

part of the same processes of postrevolutionary state formation that establishedthe mestizo as national protagonist (Lomnitz 2001).

At the same time, this experience of visiting the Bocamina does not deplete the

site the way that other uses, especially mining, have in the past. For this reason,

some cooperative members point to marketing the mines as tourist attractions

as a possible way out (salida) of the economic crisis. In some ways, then, shifts

in patrimonys referential domain seem to resolve the problems that go along

with describing a nonrenewable, commodified resource as inalienable. How-

ever, in attempting to convert the inalienable wealth embodied in Guanajuatos

built environment into money, Guanajuatenses have moved from one contradic-

tion to its converse. Formerly struggling with the implications of describing silver

as inalienable, they now struggle with the implications of treating mnemonic

patrimony as alienable, that is, by selling it as history to tourists.

In marketing the substances of the city, tourism promoters in Guanajuato and

in the Santa Fe Cooperative call into question the egalitarian assumptions of

the city as substance ideology, in which all Guanajuatenses are presumed to

have equal access based on the fact that they were born there and have left their

bones there, to quote the cronista. This ideology is based on the erasure of

many forms of labor and many inequalities. But as with the Santa Fe Cooperative

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(in comparison to other mining enterprises), it claims equal access within the

boundaries of the collective. Tourist projects, often based on narrowing of access

and division of profits based on legal property rights, tend to challenge this claim.

Reactions to this challenge can be seen in debates over who (within and outside

the Santa Fe Cooperative) benefits from efforts to market the past for tourism.

In the late 1990s, during my fieldwork with members of the Santa Fe Cooper-

ative, a number of local actors and constituencies were vying to create projects

of historical patrimony (patrimonio histrico). In many cases, these are centered

on the mines themselves; they include a tour of the surface around the

Valencianas main entrance, a restaurant and banquet hall at another aban-

doned entrance, and a third entrance (the Bocamina San Cayetano) where

visitors can descend 50 meters into the mine itself. In 2002, another project was

proposed for the Rayas mine that includes tours into the mine, a museum and a

restaurant in one complex. Municipal and state authorities of tourism and eco-

nomic development continually try to attract resources for developing mining

patrimony and to attract tourists and investors on the basis of Guanajuatos dis-

tinctive architecture and the past it represents. Private corporations alsoengage in these strategies; for much of the 1990s, a billboard outside the GM

auto plant right next to the city of Guanajuato (the largest GM plant in the

hemisphere) proclaimed In Guanajuato, GM is also making history.

Attempts to promote new uses of patrimony in Guanajuato are anything but

uncontested. Rather than working together to capitalize more efficiently on

the tourist market, places like the Bocamina San Cayetano (owned by the Santa

Fe Cooperative) and the nearby Bocamina San Ramn (another entrance to the

Valenciana mine that is privately owned) compete fiercely with one another and

criticize each others forms of management and presentation. These criticisms

often carry a moral undertone, suggesting that competitors are cheapening the

experience or profiting from it unfairly. Guanajuatos citizens, like others living in

sites of former richness in Spain, Cornwall, Arizona, and elsewhere, are wrestling

with the contradictions and opportunities of turning memory as intrinsic

wealth into currency.

Since the entry of a new gubernatorial administration in early 2001, the economic

crisis in the Santa Fe Cooperative has become even more acute. When I went to

Guanajuato in the summers of 2001 and 2003, hundreds had left the Santa Fe

Cooperative, so that it had barely 400 members in 2003. Those remaining were



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quietly pessimistic about the future of the enterprise. One university professor,

from an old Guanajuato family and with many ties to the city government and

intelligentsia, told me that the city government (ayuntamiento) is poised to refur-

bish the Valenciana and Rayas mines as tourist sites (perhaps with a luxury hotel

attached to Rayas) as soon as the Santa Fe Cooperative cedes them. They have

been unwilling to put up the money to do this in conjunction with the Santa Fe

Cooperative because they do not want to deal with a general assembly of Santa

Fe Cooperative members, which votes on all major decisions.9

Against this backdrop, many cooperative members view the expressions of sup-

port by the state and local governments with considerable suspicion. And as

with all discussions of how resources are to be divided, the question of personal

gain over collective gain is at the forefront. In May 2005, I spoke on the phone

to a cooperative member who has worked in the Valenciana mine for over a

decade. I asked if it was true, as it had been reported in the newspaper, that the

governor of Guanajuato was looking for ways to save the Santa Fe Cooperative.

He responded with indignation, Yes, but for himself [para l mismo]. Thats

what theyve wanted to do for a long time. He then told me approvingly ofattempts by a local historian to get a feature into the newspaper asking the

governor if Guanajuato exists because of mining, why wont he help the

Cooperative, which has the oldest and most important mines?

As I see it, responses such as these operate on several levels: as reasonable and

predictable reactions to the decreasing governmental support for the Santa Fe

Cooperative and to the somewhat vulturelike circlings of state and city officials;

as expressions of ongoing debates and tensions within the Santa Fe Cooperative

and between the Santa Fe Cooperative and the state; and also as new formula-

tions of an old problem in Guanajuato: how to negotiate the relationship between

inalienable and alienable wealth, on the one hand, and memory and history, on

the other hand. The notion of patrimony as a form of inalienable resources that

nevertheless leaves open opportunities for commodification, and the recent

expansion of the category of patrimony to include the material traces of the past,

make it an ideal idiom for expressing (without necessarily resolving) this problem.

Conclusion: The Dialectics of Wealth

Let us consider again what happensor is supposed to happenwhen a tourist

visits the Bocamina San Cayetano. This site, like others in Guanajuato, is, in

local perceptions, filled with the memory of silver. Although Guanajuatenses

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might not often visit the place, they consider it part of their city and its material

forms, to which they have a unique relationship. However, its past is also rep-

resented through histories produced mostly for the benefit of outsiders. These

include the memorized comments of the tour guide who leads visitors into the

mine, the brochure visitors receive when they enter, the yellowed photographs

on the walls, and the many descriptions in tourist guides, picture books, and

historical monographs of Guanajuato. These narrations and images of the past,

taking place as they do in the places where the past was enacted, are then con-

verted into new memories that visitors can take away with them. It is in search

of such memorable experiences that people visit Guanajuato, rather than simplyreading about it in a book.

If we see memory and history as alternative forms of wealth, then we may have

some new tools for looking at the relationship between them, drawn from the

anthropology of value and exchange. Maurice Godelier, in his analysis of Marcel

Mausss The Giftand its anthropological interpretations, goes so far as to describe

the essential nature of the social as the interdependence and relative auton-

omy of the spheres of the alienable and inalienable. He modifies Weinersformulation of the paradox of inalienability as keeping-while-giving into

keeping-for-giving and giving-for-keeping, (Godelier 1999:3536) a classic

dialectical chiasmus. This revised version may help us think about those

accounts of the past that are seen as quintessentially local and those that are

created for export, as well the mediations between them.

In the case of Guanajuato and the Santa Fe Cooperative, these mediations are

attempted through the idiom of patrimony, which claims to stand for uncom-

plicatedly rooted forms of wealth, but by means of which people have long

sought to accommodate certain kinds of transactions, including the extraction

and sale of silver and the marketing of mining patrimony for visitors. In the

past and especially before the late 1980s, cooperative members especially

focused on the ways in which the proceeds from the sale of silver might be used

to fortify and regenerate Guanajuatense substances, especially the built envi-

ronment, the natural landscape and the bodies and bones of its citizens. In

doing so, they sought to resolve the contradictions attendant on treating a non-renewable resource as inalienable possession (Ferry 2005). By expanding the

category of patrimony to include the material traces of the past and the memo-

ries embodied in them, they at first appear to have solved this problem, because

visits to the mine do not deplete it the way that mineral extraction does.



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However, these newer uses of patrimony rely on a process by which the memo-

ries of Guanajuatenses are converted into histories that are thus accessible to

outsiders, and can then be turned into their own memories, such as a visit to

the Bocamina where they can know the interior of the mine through their

own direct experience. They thus raise questions about who has the right to

have access to these sites and about how should properly benefit from their

commodification. Thus, the uneasy mediations between inalienable and alien-

able wealth have not been resolved but only rephrased.

Such mediations reveal much about the relationship between fixed and mobile

forms of value and the circumstances under which one form of value changes

into the other. If we use them to understand memory and history as alternative

forms of wealth, then the distinction between history and memory is not one

that maps onto a distinction between West and non-West, lieux de mmoire and

milieux de mmoire, hot societies and cold societies, or any other version of this

same dichotomy. Like other forms of wealth, memory and history exist in a

dialectic relation, in tension with and yet also entailing each other. Our job

then becomes not so much to identify this or that practice as memory orhistory to distinguish accurately between them but, rather, to analyze the

politics surrounding the continual transformations of one into the other.

* * * * * * * * *

In August of 2005, the administration of the Santa Fe Cooperative agreed to

sell most of its underground holdings and concessions to a Mexican subsidiary

of the Canadian mining corporation Great Panther Resources Limited, thus

ending, at least for now, the period of cooperativism in Mexican mining. As of

this writing, it is not clear what will happen to the Santa Fe Cooperative mem-

bers or to the future of industrial heritage tourism in Guanajuato.

ELIZABETH EMMA FERRY is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brandeis University.

Notes

Acknowledgments.This article was presented as a paper at the 2003 Biennial Society for Psycho-logical Anthropology Meetings in San Diego, California, as part of the session on History and

Memory organized by Kevin Birth and myself. I am grateful for the comments and suggestions of

Kevin Birth, Jason James, Janet Dixon Keller, David Middleton, Joanne Rappaport, Geoffrey

White, Carlos Vlez-Ibez, and an anonymous reviewer for Ethos.

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1. Brad Weiss has observed the converse; among the Haya in the Kegara region of Tanzania, the

destruction of inalienable goods (heirlooms) enables the deliberate act of forgetting the deceased

(while also enabling other forms of remembering; Weiss 1997).

2. Examples include Guevara Sangines 2001, Lara Meza 1999, L. M. Rionda Ramrez 1997, and

Villalba 1999.

3. It has been noted by Trouillot (1994) and others that the English word history can refer both to

the past itself and to representations or accounts of that past. In this article, I consistently use history

in this second sense.

4. In presenting the census data, I have extracted the numbers related to hotel and restaurant from the

larger sector of private nonfinancial services, a catch-all category that includes everyone from auto

mechanics to dentists to priests to waiters. Although the numbers of personnel employed seem small,

it should be noted that only 19,000 of the municipalitys 144,000 inhabitants showed up in this census.

5. Elsewhere (Ferry 2005), I explore the implications of this fact in detail.

6. For an extended discussion of the Santa Fe Cooperative, its history, and its current situation, see

Ferry 2005.

7.The Spanish wordpatrimonio is often translated as heritage, and the word heritage tends to be

more common in English. I prefer to use the word patrimony because it preserves the gendered,

kin-inflected, and property-owning associations of the Latinate versions.

8. See Ferry 2003 for a more extended discussion.

9. Indeed, in 1999 the Industrial Heritage Consultancy (IHC), a company from Cornwall, was

invited by the city to examine the possibility of a coordinated Silver Route (Ruta de la Plata) made

up of old mines open for tourists. Among the conclusions to its report, IHC pointed out that nego-

tiating with the Santa Fe Cooperative, which held most of the best sites would mean taking into

account 850 opinions and could result in problems in making decisions. This point was also

made to me by several functionaries of the state secretariat of tourism.

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