Women , Men , and the Legal Languages of Mining in the Colonial Andes

Histories of colonial Latin American mining have cemented the image of a scientifically backward society whose pursuit of easy wealth sacrificed the lives of indigenous and African miners in places like Potosí. By examining a midseventeenth-century mine dispute between an Andean woman and a Spanish man, this article suggests how legal archives can reveal indigenous women’s contributions to the history of colonial silver. It also provides an appendix with one hundred cases of indigenous, creole, and Spanish women miners, refiners, and managers in Alto Perú, 1559–1801, suggesting how women of different socioeconomic and technical backgrounds participated in the silver industry.

ruled in her favor, giving her the power to expel Cotesand anyone else -from the mine.Following royal command, López Ruiz de Samboa announced the ruling in Espíritu Santo on 28 July, notifying the community of Sisa's status as discoverer. 1  While the conquest of the New World has long been linked to the search for precious metals, sometimes reduced to an alliterative formula of "glory, gold, and God" (Quinn 1977), such accounts often focus on coerced labor rather than technical expertise, and they rarely mention indigenous, creole, or Spanish mining women.There is good reason to study the largescale environmental, labor, and economic impacts of colonial mining: water, soil, and air pollution, combined with massive deforestation, degraded natural resources, public health, and ancestral bonds with animating forces (Robins 2011;Studnicki-Gizbert and Schecter 2010); exploitative colonial

Ethnohistory
Published by Duke University Press systems forcibly removed indigenous, African, and mixed-race miners from their communities (Larson and Harris 1995;Bakewell 1984;Crespo Rodas 1977); and metal extracted in viceroyalties that were reorganized to promote silver production helped link America, Asia, Africa, and Europe in global trade (Brown 2012;TePaske 2010;Pérez Melero 2009;Flynn and Giráldez 1997).By focusing on such macrolevel structures, we miss the perspectives of miners for whom the silver industry was less about global economy than it was a way to provide for their families.
In this article I suggest that careful attention to the language of Sisa's story can shed light on two areas of colonial Andean history: indigenous legal strategies and gender systems in mining communities.First, new work on multiple, overlapping imperial jurisdictions (Benton 2002) and the performative rhetorics of colonial law (Quispe-Agnoli 2011;Dueñas 2010;Yannakakis 2008;Owensby 2008) has revealed how indigenous elites developed sophisticated "legal bilingualisms" (Baber 2010: 21) to position themselves within constellations of colonial, imperial, and native interests.We know far less about the strategies of nonelites.Because mining law required multiple witness testimonies, legal archives record collective voices that are often absent from the scientific historiography.We cannot overlook the networks of notaries and interpreters who shaped legal processes of meaning making (Puente Luna 2014; Burns 2010) or indigenous litigants' preferences for particular networks (Honores 2007), but by comparing similarities and differences in miners' testimonies, we can better understand their technical knowledges and material practices.
As such, Sisa's case allows insight into the history of gender and technical arts.Recent scholarship demonstrates the range of work of indigenous, African, and mixed-race women in textile plants and mining communities, revealing how native techniques converged with marketplace exigencies to embed ways of knowing in goods like silver plates and woven fabrics (Graubart 2007;Kellogg 2005;Gauderman 2003).In particular, Jane Mangan (2005) and Dana Velasco Murillo (2013) have shown how Andean market women maintained gender complementarity by controlling flows of unminted silver mined by native men and through mine ownership, property management, and food preparation for miners in Mexico.Such technical and economic overlap coheres with our current definition of colonial science: natural knowledge applied in commercialized industries with technologies that responded to and shaped religious, political, and cultural practices (Bleichmar 2009;Gordon 2009;Delbourgo and Dew 2008;Cañizares Esguerra 2006;Barrera Osorio 2006).This definition is especially helpful in studying indigenous and creole mining communities, where the scarcity of printed evidence, long bemoaned by historians of science (Sánchez Gómez 1989: 321), has encouraged promising multidisciplinary methods like archaeometallurgy, ethnohistory, and oral history (Cruz and Vacher 2008).This article expands the study of Andean literacieshybrid material, visual, spoken, and alphabetic writing systems (Rappaport and Cummins 2012) that native peoples synthesized into sophisticated ways of "writing without letters" (Mignolo 2003)-into mechanical and chemical arts, arguing for the importance of "technical literacies" in colonial scientific histories.
There are few studies of women miners in the colonial Andes, perhaps because the industry is now dominated by a masculine image said to explain colonial patriarchy, even though historians have revealed the "methodological and analytical inconsistencies" of such interpretations (Gauderman 2003: 6).Another possibility is more troubling: because twentieth-century Andean miners cite ancestral beliefs prohibiting women from entering mines, which are animated by feminine spirits that they seduce when requesting permission to extract metals (Absi 2005: 290-96), historians believe that contemporary explanations map neatly onto the past.Andean mining communities, like all human communities, negotiate change and continuity over time, with traditions that are deeply rooted and ever evolving; however, these dynamics are sometimes flattened into an essential Andean timelessness (see Jamieson 2005 for a discussion of this problematic historiography).A third possibility, one I explore here, is that the language of colonial mining has obscured women's technical knowledge and labor.
García de Llanos (1983: 98) argued that sorting and writing were interchangeable "porque en acabando de tomarles cuenta, recoge cada uno al buhío el metal que sacó, cogiéndolo del suelo (que es pallar), aplicándolo los españoles a lo que precede, y así se dice pallar los indios al tomarles cuenta y asentarles lo que han trabajado, lo cual asimismo se dice quilcar, como se dirá en su lugar y por qué razon en la palabra quilcar" (because on taking account of them, each one brings to the hut where he lives the metal he extracted, and gathering it on the floor [which is pallar] assigns it to Spaniards as is precedent.And so they say that to "pallar the Indians" means "to take count of them" and set down before them what they have worked, which is the same as quilcar, as will be said in its place, and for what reason, under the word quilcar).Quilcar, derived from the Quechua term quellccani (González Holguín 1989: 301) and quellcatha in Aymara, did not just connote lettered writing but referred to all manner of writing, drawing, or etching "al modo de indios, que pintan los c ataros y otros vasos" (in the mode of the Indians, who paint pitchers and other cups) (Bertonio 1984: 286).Such terms underscore the intersections of lettered writing, visual scripts, and technical knowledges in colonial Andean mining communities.
They also suggest why the gendered register of pallar requires careful translation.While it was common to define women by gender and legal status ("mujer") rather than gender and ethnicity ("india"), as in "se ocupan más mujeres que indios," it was even more common not to mention women at all.The mita took many forms, but it only counted men (Solórzano Pereira 1972, vol.2), even though women and children often worked alongside husbands and fathers (Premo 2000;Tandeter 1992).Legal texts document mining women's work, but their subordination of indigenous identity to married status requires some unpacking.
A few examples from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth century demonstrate this tendency.In 1569 Hernán García, mulato, and Mari Flores, "su muger," petitioned to form a mining company to unearth precious metals and stones from the guaca (sacred mountain with buried treasure) of Manducalla, located between the Sica-Sica and Churuquella Mountains near La Plata (Langue and Salazar-Soler 1993: 251-52).Although early moderns analogized Andean ancestor worship of guacas to their own veneration of the saints, not many sixteenth-century Spanish women could have located one in Chuquisaca (Brosseder 2012).Flores was identified as mujer, but her knowledge of sacred spaces suggests deep ties to Andean communities. 2Sometimes, women were identified both as yndias and mujeres, as when Father Miguel de Agia (1946: 91-92, 54) complained that pregnant Indian women ("delas indias algunas estauan preñadas") should be prohibited from transporting metals, like all women/wives ("mugeres"), children, the sick, and the elderly.In 1643, when cacique Don Fernando García Surco learned that a resident of his town of Santiago de Yanaoca, in the province of Canas y Canches, had changed his name from Pedro Alata Arusi to Pedro Hualpa to evade mita service, Surco denounced Alata Arusi before colonial officials, who sent him to Potosí "semejante que con su muger" (along with his wife). 3Finally, in 1699 Juan Galea de Mercado, a priest in the asiento (contract mine) of San Cristóbal, in the province of Los Lipes, accused fellow priest-azogueros, a term that signified refinery owners and refiners who amalgamated silver with mercury (Langue and Salazar-Soler 1993: 61), of condoning violence against married women ("mugeres casadas") who traveled with mitayos. 4Such migrations allowed for the preservation of family structures and technical traditions in which husbands and wives had mined gold and silver jointly for the Inca (Absi 2005: 294), and they represented one of indigenous peoples' many strategies to negotiate changing mining laws and methods.But the language in which they were expressed consistently subordinated ethnic, linguistic, and cultural identity to civil status.
In the transition from the Incan to the Spanish Empire, technical, labor, and legal changes were interrelated.Andean refiners typically processed high-grade silver-lead alloys, called suruxchi in Aymara and suruchiq in Quechua, meaning "to drip," after the metal's low melting point (Cerrón Palomino 2008: 111-19;Langue and Salazar-Soler 1993: 557;Van Buren and Cohen 2010).Unlike traditional smelting methods, colonial amalgamation technologies worked on almost all silver mineralogies, even lowgrade mixtures like the mixed metals ("castas de metales") that Spanish speakers called pacos (derived from the Quechua ppaqu, or "reddish"), metales mulatos, and negrillos (Barba 1640: 39v).In addition to providing coherence to an emerging racialized colonial scientific discourse, amalgamation methods allowed for a wider variety of silver metals to be refined 356 Allison Margaret Bigelow

Ethnohistory
Published by Duke University Press economically on a large scale (Bargalló 1955: 127-29).While sciences like astronomy and cartography held highly literary, closely guarded secrets (Portuondo 2009), technical knowledge of mining and refining was transmitted through family and guild networks.In the Andes, workshops were organized to teach amalgamation in rancherías, indigenous communities surrounding Potosí, as early as March 1573, one year after the technology was transferred from Mexico (Sánchez Gómez, Dobado, and Mira Delli-Zotti 1997: 143-44).
The major languages of the colonial Andes, Aymara, Quechua, and Spanish, converged with multiple technical, symbolic, and legal registers in mining communities, resulting in both linguistic restriction (wherein women of different ethnicities were reduced to a single category of "woman/ wife") and polysemy (wherein the same word described women who worked in different capacities).For example, in negotiations over providers' contracts at Huancavelica, Doña Inés de Villalobos, Inés de Robles, and Isabel Asto ("yndia") were listed as "descubridores Pobladores y Posehedores" (discoverers, operators, and possessors), even though they had never mined, and minas pobladas were, by legal definition, operational (Oñate 1625). 5At other times, dueñas (female owners) worked hands-on in mines or refineries, but their titles privileged possession over labor.On paper, Juan de Ávila owned the Ingenio de Santa Rosa in Ocurí, in the province of Chayanta; from the testimonies of religious officials, we know that she paid her late husband's debts by working in her refinery ("trabajando en dho su yngenio," "retirada y trabajando en su yngenio Para sustentarçe y pagar algunas deudas que dejo su marido"). 6If titles like dueña obscure women's work, the problem of identification is compounded for Andean women, because honorifics like doña reflected social perceptions more than ethnicity (Johnson and Lipsett-Rivera 1998), and indigenous naming patterns remain a site of archival challenges; "Spanish" names do not exclude people of Andean ancestry (Pease and Robinson 1977: lxxvi-lxxviii).
While working in three archives as part of a larger study of indigenous and European mining systems, I located more than one hundred disputes involving mining women in Alto Perú-none of which I was looking for or, as a literary scholar, expected to find (app.1).Colonists claimed indigenous peoples' goods and knowledges eagerly and with frequency, 7 but the only scholar to write about Sisa characterized her story as "unusual."By way of concluding her fine study of women's commercial practices in urban spaces, Ann Zulawski (1994: 163-64) noted that the court did not address the legality of women's mine ownership (except to rule for Sisa) and that the case is "unusual in two respects": we know little of indigenous mining women, especially women who petitioned for rights to mines that they discovered. 8If the prevalence of "Spanish" names in the appendix makes this case seem unrepresentative, Sisa's story nevertheless represents legal strategies that many Andean people used to resist colonial appropriations of their technical knowledge and labor.It also shows how a literary approach to legal archives can help us better understand the technical expertise of indigenous miners whose voices are often absent from the historiography of colonial science.
To make her case, Sisa presented multiple evidentiary forms that proved her technical skills in mineral detection, extraction, and assay, as well as careful negotiations with Andean miners and colonial officials.Although verbal declarations were legal, her unlettered statement was vulnerable to the competing claims of Cristóbal Cotes.According to Don Diego Benítez de Maqueda y Villalón, the protector of the Indians who organized Sisa's appeal, Cotes took advantage of Sisa's vulnerable status, "por berse sola y ser miserable" (seeing her alone and wretched) and used 358 Allison Margaret Bigelow

Ethnohistory
Published by Duke University Press her knowledge to stake illegal claims in words and physical space: "hizo registro de dicha mina con titulo de descubridor de ella y a señallado estacas como que el suso dho la ubiera descubierto pero ni la uio ni tubo noticia de ella hasta que la dha yndia le dio abiso de lo que auia descubierto" (he registered the aforementioned mine with the title of mine discoverer and indicated stakes as if he, the aforesaid man, had discovered it, but he had no notice of the mine until she, the aforementioned Indian woman, gave him notice of what she had discovered). 9Benítez de Maqueda y Villalón went on to cite the ninth ordinance of imperial mining law, which outlined registration protocols for mine sizes (160 yards [varas] long and 80 yards wide) and taxation (20 percent) (González 1996: 37-38;Molina Martínez 2000: 1020).Repeating four times the word discovery, he affirmed that "debe ser anparado el descubridor en sesenta baras de la beta en la parte que se descubre que llaman la mina descubridora y la dha yndia fue la que la descubrio" (the discoverer should be supported with seventy yards in the vein where he discovered it, which they call the discovered mine, and the aforementioned Indian woman was she who discovered it). 10 With this phrase, he translated the legal term descubridor ("discoverer" + masculine ending) into gendered and ethnic terms to suit Sisa's case.
Of equal importance, Benítez de Maqueda y Villalón also documented the procedural nature of Sisa's work, enacting through language the steps that she had taken: in "buscando minas y andando cateando descubrio una veta" (searching for mines and going prospecting, she discovered a vein). 11Having noted that she spent all she had to discover the site ("para descubrirla se empeño y gasto lo que tenia"), he then explained how she had borrowed three hundred pesos from Juan Choque, "yndio," who "ayudo a catearla y descubrirla" (helped prospect and discover the mine). 12In conclusion, he asked the court to take mercy on Sisa, "persona miserable y que como a tal se le a despojado de su mina" (a wretched person who has been dispossessed of her mine as such). 13It was not always clear what miserable meant in the colonial Andes, where the term connoted a range of socioeconomic positions, ethnic identities, and legal statuses (Milton 2007: 5-11).Even Cotes learned to use the word for his own purposes after a long residence in Espíritu Santo.In 1664 he joined Doña Sebastiana de Estrada, wife of prominent mine and refinery owner Sebastián de Cabezudo de Velasco, and four other azogueros to argue that corregidor Nicolás Ávalos de Ribera had put the mining district "en miserable estado" (in a miserable state), promising that "el estado miserable en que se halla esta ribera por culpa del coregidor se bera en el enbio que hisieren en la armada por quenta de VA" (the wretched state in which this riverbank finds itself is the fault of the magistrate, as will be seen in the dispatch that was sent with the navy at Y[our] M[ajesty's] expense). 14In Sisa's case, the double invocation of miserable linked mine dispossession in Carangas with a four-hundredyear-old Iberian legal tradition that required the extension of summary judgments and representation to widows, orphans, and miserables, or the economically wretched (Benton 2002: 44).
The written statement of the fiscal administrator established the main themes of gendered, indigenist, and economic justice and procedural labor under-and aboveground, all of which male miners confirmed and expanded on.On 23 July 1644 Francisco de Corto, Francisco Quispe, and Pedro Achatta unanimously affirmed the legitimacy of Sisa's discovery, but small testimonial differences show how they conveyed their own stories despite standardizing influences of notaries, legal shorthand, and the interrogatorio, a list of questions submitted to witnesses.For example, nineteenyear-old Francisco de Corto of Potosí testified in Spanish that he was in Carangas with another miner, Pedro Mateos, when Cotes, whom he knew, announced that he had "una grandiossa mina" (a great mine) in Espíritu Santo. 15Mateos replied flatly, "Pues la yndia llamada barbola ssia que ela descubrio" and "es suya Pues ella la descubrio" (Well, the Indian woman named Bartola Sisa discovered it; it's hers because she discovered it). 16 Cotes immediately backtracked, stating that she was the discoverer ("rrespondio el dho xprobal de cotes la berdad que ella la descubrio"), he could not locate the mine ("no sse donde esta si en potossi o adonde fue"), and he had approached her to ensure that she received due compensation for her work but somehow had ended up with the title ("Y a estas platicas se hallo como dho tiene el reg o ").Cotes affirmed that it was "publico y notorio" (public knowledge) that Sisa discovered a mine in Espíritu Santo, where everyone "se admiraban del animo de la dha Yndia" (admired the spirit of the aforesaid Indian woman). 17This reported speech suggests how miners circulated news and opinions between Potosí and surrounding provinces and how pressure from Spanish-speaking miners led Cotes to recognize Sisa's knowledge and labor.
Two other miners, Quispe, born in Potosí and residing in the parish of San Lorenzo, and Achatta, born in Carangas and residing in the parish of San Bernardo, spoke through interpreter Juan de Miranda, confirming that they worked for Sisa in Espíritu Santo and that Cotes took her mine.Like de Corto, their experiences emerged amid written genres, legal interpretation, and notarial conventions that gave form to their testimonies.Benítez de Maqueda y Villalón referenced the procedural nature of mine work in his statement, while the three main stages of discovery -prospecting,

Ethnohistory
Published by Duke University Press extraction, and assaystructured the order of questions in the interrogatorio and thus the testimonies.(Unfortunately, the interrogatorio is not included in the file; I deduce the questions based on strikingly similar phrases in the testimonies.)This three-stage sequence was adapted from mining practice, but it also drew from the language of imperial law, following viceroy Don Luis de Toledo's instructions on testing (dar catas), searching for metals (buscar minas y metales), and staking a claim (estancar las minas) (Vergara Blanco 1989: 32).Quispe and Achatta replaced the viceroy's verbs with synonyms, prospecting (cateando), discovering (descubriendo), and working (trabajando), and they incorporated their own experiences.For example, Quispe contrasted Sisa's technical procedures with Cotes's abrupt entrance, mistreatment ("maltrato"), and false words, "diziendole muchas cossas conque se la quito" (saying many things with which he took the mine). 18Technical knowledge of silver mining provided the organizing interrogative framework, but miners like Quispe, who knew these procedures firsthand, followed and interrupted this structure to include observations that mattered to them, including nontechnical aspects of professional practice and true speech.These were the terms that appeared twice in the court's decision, as judges recognized Sisa's having "cateado descubierto y labradola" (prospected, discovered, and worked the mine) and "descubierto cateado y labrado" (discovered, prospected, and worked). 19The tribunal replaced Quispe's spoken verb, trabajar (work), with a more formal register, labrar (labor), and inverted the verbs prospected and discovered, signaling their inexperience in mining.By describing in detail the stages of discovery that also organized the interrogatorio, Andean miners allowed the tribunal to evaluate the technical and legal merits of Sisa's work and to convert firsthand observations into determinative evidentiary forms.
The third witness, Achatta, an ore picker (barretero), used a language and spirit closer to that of the protector of the Indians rather than the technical mining vocabulary of his peers, although there are important differences between the fiscal's statement and Achatta's testimony.Benítez de Maqueda y Villalón focused on an axis of gender and poverty ("sola y ser miserable," "persona miserable"), affirming that Cotes told Sisa that she could not register the mine as a woman ("por ser muger").Achatta was much more specific.He testified that Cotes told Sisa, "que aquel metal era bueno y q-la mina prometia que lo auia de ser Y que asi ymportancia que se huuesse Registro de ella y que este no le podia hacer ella por ser yndia . . .y que no lo consintia la ordenanza" (that the metal was good and that the mine promised the same, so it was important to register it and that she could not do this because she is an Indian woman . . .and the law would not allow it). 20Then he explained how Sisa understood the lie: "la qual engañada bino en ello entiendo que por ser yndia no podria hacer el dho reg-o como le decia el dho xpanol de cottes" (she being deceived came to understand that as an Indian woman she could not make the registration as the aforesaid Spaniard Cristóbal de Cotes told her).Finally, he argued that this case formed part of an already long history of systemic injustice: "aunque se a quexado no a alcanzado Justicia por ser yndia per a miserable pobre" (although she has complained she has not reached Justice because she is an Indian woman, a wretched, poor person). 21What one official expressed as gender discrimination ("muger") and general poverty ("miserable," "pobre"), Achatta linked to systemic injustice that kept indigenous women cash-poor, even and especially when their technical knowledge of good ore, and their labor under-and aboveground, enriched others.
Achatta's testimony also differed from Quispe's, despite their shared interpreter, and de Corto's, who spoke in Spanish on his own; while they narrated facts chronologically, Achatta interpreted Cotes's motives based on his experiences.Because Sisa paid him and other Andean miners ("que estaua trauaxando este t o y los demas yndios por quenta y paga de la dha barbara ssissa"), he knew what she spent to discover the mine ("y que era suya la auia descubierto cateado y gastado mucho plata en jornales de este t o y de otros yndios"). 22Achatta skillfully integrated Sisa's commercial and technical procedures to argue that she was the true discoverer, for "la dha barbola sissa yndia mingo a este t o y le pago a el y a los demas como persona que auia descubierto la dha beta y la auia cateado y estaua dando el poco de la ordenanca y aondando la para ber si tenia ley" (the aforesaid Bartola Sisa, Indian, hired [mingó, derived from the Aymara and Quechua minkja, "to rent or to hire"] this witness and paid him and the others as someone who had discovered the vein and prospected it, and was making a shaft required by law and drilling down to see if it there was metal). 23According to Achatta, Cotes also knew that Sisa had worked the site ("saue la labrado"), and he claimed it "sin hauer querido dar nada de ella a la dha yndia ni tanpoco ningun dinero" (without wanting to give anything from it to her the aforesaid Indian woman and not even any money). 24By enacting the stages of discovery and introducing broader questions of gender, ethnicity, economics, and mineral rights, Achatta showed not only that he knew about mining law but also that he could adapt imperial legal conventions to account for his own perspective.His forceful critique of the coloniality of power helped shape the practice of justice in his native Carangas; three days after his testimony, the Real Audiencia ruled for Sisa.

Ethnohistory
Published by Duke University Press Legal archives are not the only sources that document mining women's expertise, but their generic conventions, such as polyvocal testimonies, performative structures, and evidentiary standards, make them especially helpful in recovering indigenous women's technical literacies.I conclude by comparing Sisa's case with another account of an Andean woman's mine discoveries, Luis Capoche's (1959) Relación general de la villa imperial de Potosí, to suggest why this is so.
Rich in technical language, Capoche's Relación includes elaborate descriptions of Andean refining technologies and the introduction of colonial amalgamation methods.The text is structured along those metallurgical lines, as the first half (75-111) covers the region before amalgamation, while the second half (115-89) explains the technology's scientific and social consequences.Refining materials mark the distinction; the last page of book 1 records 6,497 largely abandoned sites where Andean refiners once operated hyayrachinas, now in ruins ("están arruinados gran parte de ellos"), while book 2 begins by listing materials that were in use, including silk sieves that some refinery owners purchased "porque se amañan mejor las indias que con los que están armados, con que ciernen los hombres" (because the Indian women prepare it better than the men do with mounted ones) (122).The text moves freely among mining districts, jumping over and around Potosí as material was extracted from newly discovered mines, chronicling Andean mining women as part of a broader group of miners and refiners.The catalog that organized this geographic movement was a discursive form that scientific writers in the Americas used to frame their work "as if nature were organizing and describing itself," inscribing through writing "this fragmentary, theoretically inchoate, specimen-centered quality of empiricism" (Parrish 2006: 16-18).The generic conventions and evidentiary standards of legal disputes and technical writing thus generated very different images of indigenous miners.
Capoche's lists convey the scale and speed of mine discoveries in Alto Perú, but their dizzying pace reveals little about miners or methods.For example, we learn that eighteen indigenous, Spanish, and Flemish men and one Andean woman claimed forty silver mines of different sizes, locations, and grades in late sixteenth-century Charcas (Capoche 1959: 131-32).The catalog of finds ("se halló"), discoveries ("descubrió"), and registries ("registró") specifies who did what, where, and with high-or low-grade silver, revealing that indigenous men both collaborated with Spaniards and worked independently.Mining law required discoverers to complete a three-part process of exploration, assay, and registration before working a site, but texts like Capoche's treat finding, discovering, and registering as interchangeable acts.
The differences between legal texts and prose relations become especially clear with respect to Andean women, such as Catalina Arupo, an indigenous miner from Cuzco who discovered six silver veins in four mountains, Copacoya, Chaquil, Parani, and Patipati, a few leagues outside of Potosí (Capoche 1959: 131-32).In five of her mines Arupo extracted metal that was amalgamated with mercury, suggesting that she would have dealt with Spanish metallurgists who typically controlled access to the reagent (Bakewell 1984).Unlike the collective perspective articulated in Sisa's case, Capoche does not situate Arupo within a broader mining community, nor does he have to.For Sisa, the gap between "discovery" and "registration" forced her to publicly defend her work, but Capoche's text has no such gap.The differences between mine discovery (halló, descubrió) and registration (registró) are instead flattened into a vocabulary that intermixes the three words, never clarifying whom Arupo worked with, in what capacity, or how she came from Cuzco to Potosí in the first place.
Silver mining in colonial Latin America, marked by dehumanizing labor systems and masculinist miners prone to "raucous living, to drinking, gambling, and womanizing" (Bakewell 1988: 23), is said to carry "a metaphorical value for Iberian colonization" (Bakewell 1997: xxiii).Even the preeminent imperial archive, El Escorial, was thought to derive its name from metallurgical processing. 25In its etymological early modern roots and its historiographical reception, colonial mining is bound up in questions of language, gender, and ethnicity.It is especially important, then, that we understand not just the extent to which women participated in this industry but also how they understood their experiences and convinced others to recognize the value of their work.Legal documents, such as testimonies, articles of incorporation, and inventories, represent an important avenue to access the stories of mining women who left few lettered accounts of their contributions to technical and mechanical arts.Cases from the colonial Andes reveal not only indigenous women's technical expertise, but also how they, creole, and Spanish women used technical knowledge, commercial skills, and legal savvy to make a living in one of colonial Latin America's most lucrative industries.