Tlalpujahua 3 – silver mines
Saturday, March 21, 2009
I started the day bravely with a shower in the orange plastic terrarium, enjoying several intermittent moments of warmish water and a thorough awakening.
By now we were regulars for breakfast in the Tlalpujahua market. Many dishes were brewing, bubbling away redly in ceramic pots the size of saucer sleds set over charcoal braziers. On offer this morning: chicken soup; shrimp patties seething in foamy red broth; chicken with black mole; a plate of rice. Also: caldo de pancita de res o borregón (soup made, I believe, of the stomach of either cow or sheep); menudo de borrego (boiled sheep intestines); and carnita de puerco con nopal, which is what Dad ate: chunks of pork in a green chili sauce, with chopped up cactus paddles. That turned out to be delicious, but having been afraid it would be too spicy for me, I asked for my usual: eggs with chorizo and beans. Clearly mine was the weirdest breakfast selection, as the señora had to send her daughter off with a few coins to buy some chorizo, and also some eggs; but she obligingly scrambled them up for me and served them with tortillas and salsa. Dad showed me a great way to roll the tortillas up with the flat of my hand, something he learned observing a woman in a Cuernavaca restaurant.
Tlalpujahua market
simmering breakfast options
our breakfast spot
We spent the morning in a pretty, wooded ravine 4 km outside town, in the Museo de la Mina de Dos Estrellas – the Museum of the Two Stars Mine. The extensive mine opened for business in the early 1900s and continued excavating gold and silver (the “two stars”) through the 1960s. For a time it produced the greatest haul of gold of any mine in the world. But we were interested in silver: Dad is following a research thread that began in the Inquisition documents housed in Mexico City, about a miner named Fonseca who worked a small mine near Tlalpujahua for 32 years, until he was arrested by the Inquisition in 1590. This is why we came to Tlalpujahua: to get a feeling for the place, and to hunt for any clues the town’s mining history could provide.
Fonseca followed the silver rush to Tlalpujahua in 1558, when the ore was discovered and the pueblito swelled into a boom town. The Mina de Dos Estrellas, on the other hand, didn’t get going until the 20th century, when more refined mining and extraction techniques led to another industry boom. The buildings comprising the museum extended well up the sunny little valley. A super-fast talking young guide named Karen zoomed amiably through her memorized spiel as she led us through big sheds, the company store, refinery machinery and hundreds of yards into the dark mouth of the mother tunnel itself. I had to listen with my entire head to unscramble the torrent of specialized vocabulary she threw at us, and sometimes, my ears tingling, asked dumb questions just to establish a short time-out.
But it was a lovely spot in a narrow creek valley, and the old photos of miners (in hock to the company store and on their way to dying by age 30 of silicosis) brought the history alive. Ancient boards creaked under our feet. On one wall an enormous map on blue architect’s paper showed a terrifyingly extensive network of tunnels burrowing for kilometers through the hill beneath us. At regular intervals Karen asked us if we had any questions (“¿No tienen alguna duda?”) but it made her nervous to stray too far from the memorized path. However, she assured us that Señor Bernal would be the one to talk to, and when our questions overburdened her knowledge she abandoned the tour and helpfully took us right to him.
We found him in his study, the offices of a huge old wooden shed overlooking much of the property. Wreathed in cigarette smoke and surrounded by papers, paintbrushes, and little statues on shelves, Bernal turned out to be a garrulous, congenial man in his 70s, hale and mustached and dressed with a rustic formality of an earlier era. He was also king of the mining museum, one-time mayor of Tlalpujahua, an accomplished painter (the shed was full of his tortured mining paintings), and an amateur local historian who was delighted to make the acquaintance of a likeminded professor with unusual data and interesting questions. (From what year are you? asked Bernal collegially, as though Dad were a wine. From ’42. Ah! I am from ’36.) They traded information and stories for the next two hours while the dueña of the museum served the men coffee in small fat teacups. Since I don’t drink coffee, Bernal insisted I try his own mineral water, saying it had taken him years of searching the property to find the spring.
Bernal, well-versed in local history of the more recent centuries, told us about the mining catastrophe of 1937: unusually heavy rains breached the retaining wall holding mine tailings (including cyanide remnants), which swept down the valley and washed out the lower part of town, including the original church and its cemetery. The toxic mud drowned 300 people and buried houses many meters deep. Only the top storey of the church tower could be seen after the flood, and it was declared a miracle when the statue of the Virgin of Carmen survived, her head poking up through the mud. She was the only piece salvaged and eventually moved to the new church, the confection on the top of the hill.
After lunch we explored the lower reaches of town, wound down a valley road, and found the drowned church tower in a lumpy meadow across a rickety wooden bridge. Most poignant were the remains of the campo santo (graveyard), where the corners of stones and the top bars of crosses reached eerily out of the dry ground.
We wondered: what would a small, private mine such as Fonseca’s have looked like, back in the 16th century? People we asked said that the hills immediately around town were riddled with dangerous pits, half grown over, so we headed just a km out of town, peering into the hills for likely ridges and rocky gullies. We found an unmarked dirt road, parked, and roamed up into a narrow ravine forested with smallish oaks. To our shivery excitement over the next couple hours we discovered several dark, abandoned mine shafts, the biggest horizontal tunnel about 2 meters high and wide, full of insects and deep drifts of oak leaves. Slowly (because of the altitude and the slippery oak leaves) we followed narrow sheep tracks and the weathered remains of an old road cut into the steep hillside. We found chunks of quartz and volcanic rock, and several chimney shafts to bring air into invisible mines, one chimney as big around as a house and too deep to see into. Unknown birds trilled from the pines and oaks, my favorite with a splendid, lollygagging descant, maybe some kind of thrush. From the top we gazed at Tlalpujahua draped over the hills beneath us. Slipping and sliding back down to the car we found a solemn security guard who announced we were on private property. Launching innocent smiles we sweet-talked our way out of trouble and shortly he was pointing out birds for our binoculars. In the end he walked us to the road where we shook hands all around and parted friends.
Sunday afternoon we came to Morelia. More on that soon – we leave today for the Patzcuaro area. I hope all is well with all of you.
Deborah
