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Memory as Wealth, History as Commerce: A Changing Economic Landscape in Mexico


Elizabeth Emma Ferry

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 conceptualizations 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 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 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 mines today, 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 the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Presss Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

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and recorded his impressions in A 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, surpassed 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 the midst of miserable Indian huts. The house of Colonel Don Diego Rul who is one of the proprietors of the mine of Valenciana, would be an ornament 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 preserves 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 underscores 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 made of 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 that made 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 and collective 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 conceptualizations 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 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 terribly 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 happens, 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 of patrimony that Guanajuatenses have used to classify resources as inalienable possessions, even as they are extracted and sold on the world market. In this article, 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 Wealth


There 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 collective 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. In this 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. Everywhere 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 memory of the past (although certainly there are also plenty of scholars at the University of Guanajuato who read and produce such histories).2 Although those 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 anthropology: 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, focusing 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 commodities 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 proposed other 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 aftermath, scholars have proposed a variety of ways to describe the relation between the dichotomous terms and their referent concepts: as ideal types wielded for analytic 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 history, 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 in peoples 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 discussed at the constitutional congress in 191617 when the Constitution of 1917 was drafted (Niemeyer 1974). Indeed, the silver market continued to decline throughout the 20th century, although at moments the mining economy 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. These efforts 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 nearby Aeropuerto 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 agricultural 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).4 The activities of migrants were not captured in the census. Guanajuatos citizens demonstrate a strong sense of place based on the practices 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 indigenous) 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 history that abajeos call 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 Institucional (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 conflict 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 backing a successful attempt to dynamite the statue of Cristo Rey (Christ the King) that adorns the top of a mountain outside La Luz, Guanajuato, at the geographical 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 centers of 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 formative 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 controlled all of the most important mines of the colonial period. As elsewhere in Latin America, the Mexican subsoil is constitutionally defined as national patrimony. Therefore, the Santa Fe Cooperative does not own these mines, but leases concessions to exploit them from the central government.5 These 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 exploring understandings 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 generations. 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 restaurant, 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 division 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 private companies 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 economic 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 important, 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 trinkets 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 partnership 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).7 To 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 certain kinds 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 19thcentury 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. Citizens of Guanajuato, when talking about their city often emphasize these earthy, rocky characteristics including the walls, houses, mines, and streets, and the natural 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 nostalgia 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 formations, 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 for centuries, 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 monograph 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 exemplified 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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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]).

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 native Guanajuatense said to me mining empties the mines and fills the panten, thus making explicit the parallelism between the two underground spaces. Underground 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 skulls carved 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

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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 the pilgrimage 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 nonminers (Ferry 2003). Kevin Yelvington has rightly pointed out a tendency among anthropologists to see memory as an unproblematic, possessable recollection 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 Cooperative 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 workforce were women and perhaps 60 percent did not work in the mines themselves. Similarly, during years of bonanza, Guanajuato has been a city of shopkeepers, moneylenders, chemists, bartenders, university professors, artisans, 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 honoring her, 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 the selective list of world monuments with this characteristic. . . . The city of Guanajuato offers to humanity its architectonic wealth and its notably sublime and beautiful singularity; but not as a complex of walls, ramparts, arches, doors, and buildings [that are] well constructed and surprising but empty and static, but rather as a propitious and optimal environment for the development of aspirations and creative and artistic qualities of its inhabitants, above all those who were born here and who have left their bones here. . . . We Guanajuatenses, men and women who are well born and better raised, feel honorably committed in the presence of humanity to 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 memory 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 term patrimonio. In 1987, (before UNESCOs naming of Guanajuato as Ciudad de Patrimonio Mundial), for many of the listeners to this speech, the word patrimonio would have connoted the inalienable resources of the nation established in the constitution 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 somewhat uncommon. However, the uses of patrimonio to refer to the material traces of 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 vehicles, and soda machines, in which the city is described publicly as patrimonio de la humanidad or patrimonio 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 term patrimony and its referential domain. The terms patrimonio, patrimoine, and patrimony derive from the Latin patrimonium, and originally referred to entailed, patrilineally transmitted property, especially land. During the rise of absolutism in Europe, it became closely associated 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 movement and 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 patrimony automatically converted into national patrimony. In the Mexican Constitution of 1917, subsoil resources, agricultural land, and cultural properties 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 classifying 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 particular form of patrimony based on the memory of silver embedded in the built environment has gained new force as Guanajuatenses try to attract resources based 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). Formerly 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 mediates between 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 mineshaft, which means that miners (and now visitors) enter by a staircase rather than in a mechanical hoist. This particular entrance has been closed for production 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 Cooperative 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 Cooperative strategy to exploit the burgeoning tourist industry by constructing an experience 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 intimate, embodied knowledge. Here we see that the distinction I have drawn between memory and history in Guanajuato (like that between gifts and commodities) 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 by indios working in the mine, hauling hundreds 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 happened 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 established the 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. However, in attempting to convert the inalienable wealth embodied in Guanajuatos built environment into money, Guanajuatenses have moved from one contradiction 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 Cooperative, 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 abandoned 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 economic development continually try to attract resources for developing mining patrimony and to attract tourists and investors on the basis of Guanajuatos distinctive architecture and the past it represents. Private corporations also engage 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 refurbish 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 support 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 of attempts 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 formulations 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 represented 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 converted into new memories that visitors can take away with them. It is in search of such memorable experiences that people visit Guanajuato, rather than simply reading 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 Gift and its anthropological interpretations, goes so far as to describe the essential nature of the social as the interdependence and relative autonomy of the spheres of the alienable and inalienable. He modifies Weiners formulation 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 uncomplicatedly 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 environment, the natural landscape and the bodies and bones of its citizens. In doing so, they sought to resolve the contradictions attendant on treating a nonrenewable resource as inalienable possession (Ferry 2005). By expanding the category of patrimony to include the material traces of the past and the memories 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 memories 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 alienable 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 or history 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 members 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 Psychological 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 word patrimonio 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 negotiating 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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