College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Women in the mines

Kathy Leonard hopes to spend several months in Bolivia chronicling that nation's "women of silver and tin."

Unimaginable.

That's how Kathy Leonard, professor of Spanish and Hispanic linguistics in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures and director of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences' Latin American Studies Program, describes the working conditions facing Bolivian miners.

"Men, as well as women, have worked, and continue to work, under the most precarious conditions," she said. "There is no safety equipment of any kind – no breathing apparatuses, no barricades to keep people from falling into pits 50 to 100 feet deep, no modern equipment, only picks and shovels.

"I have seen children as young as five years old working in the mines alongside their fathers."

Bolivian women who work in the mines, called "palliris" in the native language of Quechua, are typically widows of miners. They sit just outside the mine entrances 10-12 hours a day, breaking up rocks to extract any minerals left there. They sell what they have extracted, earning, if they are lucky, about $20 per month.

Because of economic considerations and superstitions women are not allowed to formally work inside the mines where they could earn considerably more.

"It's back-breaking work that often takes place at extremely high altitudes and in adverse climactic conditions," says Leonard, who has visited the mines several times.

The lives of Bolivian miners have been well documented in Bolivia's realistic fiction, called "literatura minera," or "mining literature." The genre typically portrays the miners as a group oppressed by cruel Bolivian and foreign mining administrators.

Leonard, whose past research has focused on contemporary Bolivian women authors, first became aware of the women in the mines through this literature. Women included in these works are often portrayed as "stoic partners, passive yet supportive of their husbands or companions."

However, in the mining literature written by men, these women miners have been more traditionally portrayed as prostitutes, the bearers of bad luck in the mines, or even as a source of torment to the men who are close to them.

Beginning this summer, Leonard plans to travel back to the mines to see if this widespread negative portrayal in the mining literature derives from fact or superstition. She is scheduled to be on faculty professional development assignment next academic year and plans to spend some of her leave in Bolivia.

Leonard plans to conduct an extensive review of the mining literature from colonial times to the present and use this information to compare the portrayal of the "palliris" in the literature with the oral histories she compiles. She also plans to speak with the miners.

"I want to learn about the lives of women miners directly from them," she said. "I plan to document their current living and working conditions by conducting personal interviews with the ‘palliris' and male miners and photographing them in their homes and at work."

But getting to that point might prove to be difficult.

"I know that the miners won't immediately accept me and talk with me," Leonard said. "It will take some effort to gain their trust and I will have to carefully prepare the groundwork."

The result of Leonard's research will be a book with the tentative title: Women of Silver and Tin: the Forgotten Miners of Bolivia, and a possible photography exhibit.