Search

This dissertation brings together social and environmental history to examine how the Spanish Empire and multiethnic local society of Potosí engaged in a constant search for water in the Andean highland between 1545 and 1770. I explore the experience of tens of thousands of inhabitants, most of them Indigenous people, inhabiting a high-altitude urban mining landscape lacking permanent water sources and the interplay between the Andean environment and the Spanish colonization that led to the construction of one of the most ambitious engineering works to collect rainwater in the New World. In doing so, it seeks to provide a timely reflection on the pressing issue of how high-mountain societies in the Andes and beyond are constantly rebuilding their environments to meet water challenges triggered by climate change and extractive colonial economies and how the ever-changing physical environment plays an active role in human adaptations and livelihoods. It demonstrates how water —not just silver—became the most contested commodity within the Potosi mining society. Conflicts over water shaped both Spanish efforts of radical ecological transformations to sustain its global hegemony and the ways of experiencing the urban landscape by different people who inhabited Potosí. With this in mind, this dissertation traces the process of building of one of the most impressive engineering works in the early modern world: a network of thirty-four water reservoirs and the artificial river known as Ribera of Potosí. I study how the Spanish conceived and used this ambitious water infrastructure to sustain the colonial order and its political economy. Furthermore, this research joins the recent historiographical turn of mining in Latin America to scrutinize aspects little explored by the economic and social studies of past decades. In this sense, the study of the reservoir and waters in Potosí opens a field of possibilities to understand the experience of different people building and living the mining and urban landscape of Potosí. The dissertation is composed of five chapters that address different critical junctures in the history of the search for and management of water in the city of Potosí from its founding until the mid-eighteenth century. The first chapter “Water, Energy, and Mining Ecology in the Imperial City of Potosí 1545-1590" delves into the early history of the search for and uses of water in and around Potosí from the discovery of the silver mines in 1545 to the time of the revolution of amalgamation (1570-1590). The second chapter, “The Great Machine and its Water. Droughts and the Expansion of Potosí Hydraulic Infrastructure 1590-1610” scrutinizes a series of dry years between 1590 and 1610 that prompted the local mining society and Spanish government to expand the hydraulic infrastructure to sustain the machine-city of Potosí. The third chapter “A Flooded Imperial City. Climate, Hydraulic Practices, and Disaster in Potosí 1594-1626” provides a close examination of different episodes of flooding in Potosí between 1594 and 1626. The fourth chapter “Rebuilding the Mining Urban Landscape of Potosí. Infrastructure, Water, and Climatic Adaptations, 1626-1631” examines the process of reconstruction of the reservoirs, human-made river, and city of Potosí between 1626 and 1631 to illuminate the attitudes and responses of the Spanish monarchy, miners, and residents of this Andean colonial metropolis in the face of environmental transformations and climatic emergency in the seventeenth-century Andes. The final chapter, “Confronting Visions. The Spanish Bourbon Government, Azogueros, and the Conquest of a Fluid Landscape, 1700-1760” addresses the intersection between the hydraulic nature of Potosí and the desires of mining entrepreneurs and Spanish Bourbon government officials to boost mining production.

This dissertation examines the relation between language and mining practices in Potosi in the XVI, XVII and XX centuries. I take Walter Mignolo's notion of colonial semiosis and Gustavo Verdesio's notion of materiality of the indigenous past as my points of departure. However, I allow for a decolonizing critique that takes into consideration both the representations and the material conditions of possibility of mining practices. I understand that the historic-libidinal materialism of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari is a fundamental tool for the exploration of the tensions, conflicts and appropriations between colonial representation and the disruptive potential of the Indian miners. First, I argue that Acosta's use of the metaphor of the life of metals in his Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590) inadvertently displaces the basic political and philosophical presuppositions of Aquina's hylomorphic model of thought, which divides material beings into active-transcendent-determining forms and passive-chaotic-undetermined prime matter. Second, I analyze how Jose Luis Capoche's Relacion de la Villa Imperial de Potosi overemphasizes the role of the colonial administration in the invention and production of mining technologies. After attributing the Andean wind-furnaces called huayras to a Spaniard, Capoche constructs a narration that legitimates the mita, a system of corvee labor that was instituted by Viceroy Toledo at the moment of transition from the huayra to the amalgamation method of production in the 1570s. Then, I examine how Alonso Barba's Arte de los metales (1640) displaces and implicitly deconstructs the assumptions of both natural philosophy and the official narration of the introduction of metallurgical technologies by asserting that metals constitute an autonomous realm of material life grounded in the accidental. Finally, I analyze how the knowledge about these accidents, qualities and forces of the life of metals engenders an ethics of mining closely associated to political revolution. I explain how XX century texts by Adolfo Costa du Rels, Domitila Barrios, Rene Poppe and Victor Montoya construct the figure of the marginal miner who inhabits the interior of the mine and remains an external menace to the (neo)colonial State.

Varias de las obras teatrales halladas en el Convento de Santa Teresa de Potosí merecen incorporarse al canon de la mejor literatura boliviana. Entre ellas, el Entremés de los tunantes, pieza jocosa de las más divertidas de la colección y de la que el autor presenta una edición minuciosamente anotada. Several of the plays found in the Convento de Santa Teresa de Potosi deserve to be in the canon of the best literature in Bolivia. Among them, el Entremés de los tunantes, one of the most humorous piece of the collection. The author presents an annotated edition.