Paid by the line with money printed by their bosses to work in hot airless tunnels

 

The landscape en route to San Sebastián del Oeste from Puerto Vallarta

 

Visitors to the Museo Conchita Encarnación in San Sebastián del Oeste, in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, ring a bell and wait for Conchita’s daughter and granddaughter to appear. The granddaughter collects the entrance fee (20 pesos, equivalent to one US dollar). The daughter conducts the tour of the one room museum, a profusion of old photos, assorted memorabilia and curiosities. In fact, the display is a memorial to three closely intermarried families, the Encarnación, Sánchez and Aguirre, who, so the story goes, agreed to marry only members of their three families so that their Spanish blood should not be mixed with Mexican. The house is built of adobe (mud brick) and is about three hundred years old

 

One of the objects on display is a 19^th-century Libro de Raya (literally “Line Book”), used to record the days worked by labourers in the families’ silver mines. Against the name of each mineworker (such as José de Jesús Tovar and Juan Bernal, who have many lines against their names, or José Ancola and José María Velasquez, who seem to have worked in the mine shafts only occasionally) are the Rayas (“Lines”). Once the mine owner had totted up the days worked, he printed on a small hand-operated wooden printing press a simple paper token representing the number of reales (the currency of the day) earned. The miner could spend these tokens only in the shops (the Tiendas de Raya, literally “Line Shops”) in the town, one of which apparently belonged to a branch of the Sánchez family. The shop owners could then exchange the tokens for silver coins. Thus, the only people involved in these transactions who received real money were the mine owners and the merchants. The closest the mine workers came to handling silver was when they dug it out of the hills above San Sebastián.

 

The Libro de Raya

I know a good deal about Mexican silver mining from my sudy of mining in Taxco, a somewhat similar mining town in the state of Guerrero. My studies had told me that mine work was hard and dangerous, but I had not truly realized how miserable must have been the life of a Mexican mineworker until we followed the camino de las minas to the grandly named Mina de Santa Gertrudis (Santa Gertrudis was a 13^th-century German mystic; presumably the mine owner was a devout admirer of her). The path took us up into the hills to the north of the town. The vegetation was lush and watered by numerous rapidly flowing streams. We passed several houses, most built of adobe and corrugated iron, some of breeze blocks. 

The Camino a las Minas

 

 

Entrance to the Mina Santa Gertrudis

The mine is a damp, dank, narrow tunnel, which according to a local lady we met on our way down to the town runs for100 metres into the hillside and is accessible only in the dry season. The only ventilation seems to have been the narrow opening. To imagine working conditions, one must conjure up the image of men working bent low in a narrow, hot, sweaty, airless tunnel in the 16^th- and 17^th-century early days of mining by the light of candles made of beeswax or tallow, and by the 19^th-century by the flame of a carborundum lamp like one displayed in the museum. We passed several such shafts on our way up to the Santa Gertrudis mine. Rock from the face of the mine was carried out on the backs of labourers: there was no technology beyond the stone or iron hammer or pick used to dislodge the ore.

 

Mine entrance: note the brown water streaming from it

Mine work was not only hard and unpleasant, it was also dangerous. Silver ore generally contained toxic elements such as arsenic. The rock was carried away on mules to a hacienda de beneficio (“a refining mill:) where it was ground to a powder, mixed with salt, water and mercury (another toxic element) and then smelted to produce silver ingots. The 19^th-century mine owners of San Sebastián stored their ingots in a wooden chest in the house. Once the chest was full, the silver was carried by mule train to a railway station a five-day journey through the mountains. Bandits frequently raided the convoys of mules, but we were told, only twice succeeded in stealing the silver.

 

Museo Conchita Encarnación, general view: the press used to print tokens for the labourers is on the left, the Italian chests on the right

Life was evidently not so hard for the mine owners. The objects on display include a hat made in Paris in the 19^th century and a Chinese silk and lace baptism gown in which generations of the familywere baptised. We were shown a photograph of six galanes (“dandies”), elegantly dressed and sporting long Spanish-style moustaches. The galanes met for frequent banquets, at which each was given a napkin with which to wipe their mouth and another napkin specially designed to clean their magnificent moustaches. Wedding photos of couples who might be related as aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews or cousins, show elegantly dressed brides and expensively suited grooms. Items of heirloom furniture, such as two Italian chests and a baby’s cot, are on display. Between 1867 and 1910, when the Mexican Revolution brought an end to the family’s mining businesses, an Encarnación, Sánchez or Aguirre was Municipal President of San Sebastián on 21 occasions. The sign outside the house informs the visitor that Pablo Encarnación is considered the father of the town for his generosity and his service a Municipal President.

 

José Rogelio Álvarez and his encyclopedia

Other members of the family became prominent beyond their small home town. José Rogelio Álvarez was the editor of the Enciclopedia de México, published in 1977. Photos in the museum show him meeting the former President of Mexico from 1982-1988, Miguel de la Madrid. Another member of the family, Amado Aguirre Santiago (1863-1949), was a graduate in mining engineering and a general during the Revolution of 1910-1920. He fought with Generals Manuel Diéguez and Álvaro Obregón against Pancho Villa in northern Mexico. He was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1917, which wrote Mexico’s current constitution, and after the war he held various government offices, was governor of the Federal Territories of Quintana Roo and Baja California, and was interim governor of Jalisco. Another Aguirre, Agustín Aguirre Ramos (1867-1942) was a priest and bishop of Sinaloa for 20 years until his death. Yet another Aguirre, Ignacio (1900-1990) was a painter and engraver, who as a teenager also fought against Pancho Villa from 1915-1917. He was a student of Diego Rivera, and in the 1930s a member, and in the 1950s director, of the famous artists’ print collective, the Taller de Gráfica Popular (“Peoples’ Print Workshop”). However, the 1910 Revolution brought an end to the family’s mining enterprises. Doña Encarnación’s daughter and granddaughter seem to live in straitened circumstances today.

 

San Sebastián's town sign and ice cream shop

At its peak San Sebastián had a population of 20,000, now much reduced from its heyday to less than 7,000. In the 19^th century silver made the town sufficiently rich for the New York Life insurance company to open an office there: a policy on the life of one of the family was on display in the Encarnación Museum. For most of its existence San Sebastián was connected to the outside world by mule tracks. Only in 1957 was a road constructed to connect with the nearest highway to Guadalajara, the state capital. The town now lives principally off tourism from the resorts of Bahía de Banderas (“Bay of Flags), about two hours away, or from Guadalajara. There are one or two shops selling silver jewelry, but, I was told, the silver comes from elsewhere. There are several hotels (one a deluxe boutique establishment), restaurants and bars. The hills are good for growing coffee. Tropical fruits, from which a women’s cooperative makes jam, are plentiful. One jam which caused us some confusion when it was served as a complement to pan de elote (a dessert made of sweetcorn) was mermelada de faisán. In any other Spanish speaking country faisán means “pheasant”, but our helpful waiter explained that we were not eating pheasant jam, but rather one made of a local berry of the same name.

 

San Sebastián: the plaza, Portico Morelos and church

Church of Saint Sebastian Martyr

 

Many of the buildings in San Sebastián date from the colonial period, mostly from the 18^th century. The centre of the town is, as usual, the plaza with its gardens in the centre and its bandstand. The northern side is occupied by the Morelos Arcade, occupied by shops, bars and restaurants. Somewhat unusually, the church does not stand on the main square, but just off it behind the Morelos Arcade. It was built in the 18^th century, but its interior was later remodelled in neoclassical style. Our lodgings, the Hotel del Puente, is a typical 18^th century bourgeois home, constructed round an interior garden, round which a portico shelters residents from rain. Rooms, entered directly from the portico, have windows that are unglazed with their reja (bars or railings) and wooden shutters. The building lacks air conditioning and heating, but supplies its guests liberally with blankets.

 

 

The Hotel del Puente and its Garden

At the foot of the camino a las minas stands a building that would have been found in any 18^th- or 19^th-centruy town, the mesón or inn. The mainstay of the transport system was the arriero or mule driver, who travelled the mountain trails, carrying goods, including luxuries for the well to do, and transported the silver of San Sebastián to the railhead. Since journeys took days or weeks, a network of inns to rest and feed both the arrieros and their animals was essential.

 

The former mesón, now a family home

The informative signs that tell the visitor about the history of the buildings of San Sebastián, and praise the Encarnación family as one of the wealthiest in the municipality, do not name men such as José de Jesús Tovar and Juan Bernal, whose contribution to the wealth of San would be unrecorded were it not for their entries in the Libro de Raya. The visiting tourist admires the colonial architecture, visits the mines, dines and shops, but is not encouraged to ask about those on whose backs the town was built.

San Sebastián looking north