Not Ours Alone: Patrimony, Value, and Collectivity in Contemporary Mexico

297 Pages·2005·2.25 MB·English

by  Elizabeth Emma Ferry

Not Ours Alone

Not Ours Alone
Patrimony,Value,and Collectivity in Contemporary Mexico
Elizabeth Emma Ferry
columbia university press new york
columbia university press
Publishers Since 1893
new york, chichester, west sussex
Copyright © 2005Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ferry,Elizabeth Emma.
Not ours alone :patrimony,value,and collectivity in contemporary Mexico / Elizabeth
Emma Ferry.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-231-13238-7(cloth :alk.paper) — ISBN 0-231-13239-5(pbk.:alk.paper)
1.Miners—Mexico—Guanajuato (State) 2.Guanajuato (Mexico :State)—Social
conditions.3.Cooperative societies—Mexico—Guanajuato (State)—History.4.Cooperativa
Minera Santa Fe de Guanajuato—History.5.Mineral industries—Mexico—Guanajuato
(State)—History.6.Silver mines and mining—Mexico—Guanajuato (State)—History.7.
Globalization. I.Title.
HD9506.M63G8327 2005
334′.68232423′097241—dc22
2005045453
Casebound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable
acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
c 10987654321
p 10987654321
To my parents,Anne and David Ferry

contents
foreword by june nash ix
acknowledgments xvii
chapter 1 Introduction:Inalienability,Value,and Collectivity 1
chapter 2 The Santa Fe Cooperative in Guanajuato,Mexico 22
chapter 3 Labor,History,and Historical Consciousness 55
chapter 4 Recent Challenges and Responses 75
chapter 5 Realms of Patrimony:Mine and House 100
chapter 6 Patrimony,Power,and Ideology 139
chapter 7 Veins ofValue,Rocks of Renown:An Anthropology of
Mined Substances 172
chapter 8 Mexican Languages of Patrimony:Land,
Subsoil,“Culture” 199
chapter 9 Conclusion:Not Whose Alone? 217
appendix i Historical Silver Prices from 1975 to 2002 224
appendix ii Aspects of Mineral Production in the
Santa Fe Cooperative 225
notes 235
works cited 253
index 269

foreword
June Nash
In her book Elizabeth Emma Ferry presents an impressive argument that resi-
dents in the historic mining community of Guanajuato,Mexico,are commit-
ted to a collective identity related to the mining wealth still active in that in-
dustry’s declining economy.The residents’assertion of the enduring value of
place and religion is another instance of the persistence of local identity with
place,despite the assumptions of disjuncture in a globalizing economy.With the
decline in the mining economy,the tourist industry replacing it attracts visitors
as much with the area’s history of mining as with the religious architecture that
survives from the colonial period.
Ferry’s exploration of the nature of this patrimonial relation echoes with
that of other mining communities where mine workers consider that their off-
spring have a right to a job by virtue of the sacrifices they themselves endured
working in the mines.This is believed to be as sacred a right among the miners
of Bolivia with whom I worked in the 1970s as it is for the miners of Guanaju-
ato.It defines their sense of the relationship between the community and the
state,as well as their collective relations with family and community.The fertil-
ity of the Guanajuato mines,ranked as the richest in the world in the eighteenth
century,extends to its citizenry and particularly those who work the “mother
lode.”Paradoxically the very concentration of power and wealth in the mining
economy conducive to a “pyramid”of power at the same time has resulted in a
coalescence of collective challenges to that power.
Recent critiques of the “peoples and places”paradigm have made us more
cautious of correlating the identities of people with geography.Yet the replica-
tion of similar gender characteristics and cosmologies related to powerful fig-
ures above and below the earth in mining centers around the world captures
similar metaphors of the relation between natural and supernatural entities
through which this identity is reproduced.With her comprehensive ethno-
graphic summary of the lives of the workers and their families both under-