Memory as Welth History as Commerce Elizabeth Ferry

8/12/2019 Memory as Welth History as Commerce Elizabeth Ferry

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

Author(s): Elizabeth Emma FerrySource: Ethos, Vol. 34, No. 2, Special Issue: The Immanent Past (Jun., 2006), pp. 297-324Published by: Wileyon behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3651908.

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MEMORYAS WEALTH,HISTORYAS COMMERCE 97 )

Memory as Wealth, Historyas Commerce: A ChangingEconomic Landscape in MexicoElizabethEmmaFerry

Abstract In hisarticle, lookathow nhabitantsfGuanajuato, exico, citywitha richmining ast,drawondifferentccountsf their ity's lorious ast,accountsthatwe might escribe s historiesnd memories.hroughnanalysis f this ase,Ipropose nanalogybetween istoryndmemory,ntheonehand,and nalienableandalienableorms f wealth, n theotherhand.IexamineGuanajuatenses'on-ceptualizationsf place, substance,and wealth from the perspective f theclassification f resources silver nd cultural roperties) s patrimonio, r patrimony.Iargue hat nthese ocalconceptualizationsuanajuatensesngagequestionsfinalienabilityndalienabilitynd hecomplex elationshipetweenhem, nd hatbylooking t thepoliticsfdesignating ealth s inalienableralienable,wecan alsolearnomethingbouthow ocalaccountsfGuanajuato'sast describednanalyticalterms s memoriesrhistories)reunderstandablesformsfwealthubjectocomplexpolitical rocesses.memory,istory,Mexico,patrimony,nalienability]

RomanceclingswithastonishingertinacityomanyoftheseGuanajuatoinestoday,ndwillneverby henatives t least,beallowedodieout.-Percy Martin, Mexico'sTreasure-House1905:85)U.S.Dept.ofRetro:WeMayBeRunningutofPast.-The Onion,November 5, 1997

At the dawn of the 19thcentury, he Germannatural cientistand miningexpertAlexander onHumboldt isited hecentralMexican ityof GuanajuatoETHOS, ol.34, No. 2, pp. 297-324, ISSN0091-2131, electronicSSN1548-1352. ?2006 bytheAmerican nthropologicalssociation. llrightseserved. leasedirect llrequestsorpermissionophotocopyorreproducerticle ontenthroughheUniversityfCalifornia ress's ightsndPermissionsebsite,http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm.

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and recorded his impressions in A PoliticalEssayon theKingdomof New Spain(1811). At that time, Guanajuato'smines produced one-sixth of the world'ssilver and Guanajuato tself was the third largest city in SpanishAmerica, sur-passed only by Mexico City and Havana. Humboldt marveled at the city'sgracious European-style structures,saying:

One is astonished o see in thiswildspot largeandbeautiful difices n themidst of miserable Indian huts. The house of Colonel Don Diego Rulwho is one of the proprietorsof the mine of Valenciana,would be anornamenton the finest streets of Parisor Naples. [1811:171]

Humboldt's reflections echo an aspectof the city'sself-presentationeven today,as an elegant enclave of world-class baroquearchitecturethat nonetheless pre-serves a quintessentiallyMexican and Guanajuatensecharacter and that owesits beauty and distinctiveness to the extraction of silver from the local mines.Inhabitantsdescribe Guanajuatoas a city born of silver, a phrasethat under-scores both the causal connection between the mines and the city and thegenerative quality of the mines and the earthy, muddy ore that is taken fromthem. They also often describe the physicalstructuresof the city as being madeof silver, emphasizing that the roads and walls of churches, plazas,and houseshave a high silvercontent becausethe stone and clayto make them were minedin the area.As one Guanajuatensesaid to me, When you walk on the roads,you arewalking on silver.If silver is present in the structures of their city,Guanajuatensesalso know thatfor these structures to be built in the first place, silver had to taken from themines and sold on the world market. In this sense, it is silver'sdeparturethatmade Guanajuato; he built environment of the city embodies silver'sabsence.In its departure,silver has left behind a memory of itself, and the memory ofsilver and the past glories it made possible is embedded in the city's walls.Although characterizing the built environment of the city as the embodiedmemory of silverconflatesthe substance tself (walls,rock,and adobe),with themental processesthat Guanajuatenses ngage in with respect to that substance,doing so coincideswith local conceptions of the city and its substance.Many ofmy informantssimilarlyconflatedthe city'sgloriouspast,theirown individualandcollectivememoriesconcerningthatpast,andtheirmaterialurbanembodiment.Furthermore, in describing the city's material forms in this way, many ofGuanajuato'scitizens drawon a version of memory that articulateswell with a



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MEMORYAS WEALTH,HISTORYAS COMMERCE 99

scholarly tradition emphasizing memory's sensuous, embodied, and materialaspects (Connerton 1989; Csordas 1990; Feeley-Harnik 1991; Halbwachs1925, 1950; Stoler and Strassler2000). That is to say, they vividly experiencethe relationshipbetween the interior cognitive facultyof memory and the pastas immanent n the structuressurroundingthem, which evoke memories ofGuanajuato'sglorious past and of their own distinctive claim on that past byvirtue of their Guanajuatanness see The Immanent Past Birththis issue;seealso Cole 2001, White 1999).In this article, I examine the implications of Guanajuatenses'conceptualiza-tions of place, substance,and wealth from the perspective of the classificationof resources (silverand culturalproperties)aspatrimonio, r patrimony.I arguethat in these local conceptualizations Guanajuatenses engage questions ofinalienabilityand alienabilityand the complex relationshipbetween them, andthat by looking at the politics of designatingwealth as inalienable or alienable,we can also learn something about how local accounts of Guanajuato'spast(described as memories or histories) are similarlyunderstandable as forms ofwealth and similarlysubjectto complex political processes.How do Guanajuatenses xperienceanduse their memoriesof pastprosperity nthe context of a decliningsilvermining economy?Silvermining is no longer ter-ribly lucrativeeither in Guanajuatoor anywhereelse in the world. The price ofsilver has fallensteadily n the last severaldecades(withthe spectacular xceptionof the Hunt Brothers'attempt to corer the market in 1980, which drove theprice from $7 to $50 per ounce in one month). The development of video anddigitalcameratechnologiesmayhavedelivered he fatalblow,for one of the mainindustrialuses of silver has been for black-and-whitefilm. Deprived of a solidmarket for silver and faced with declining ore grades, the local economy hasshifted more and more from mining to services,especiallytourism. As this hap-pens, manyin Guanajuatoaredrawingon the city'sgloriouspastand its materialtracesas analternativeeconomic resource,one thatis not so exhaustibleas silver.

Along with these changes, the idiom of patrimony has been used increasinglyby actorswithin andoutside Guanajuatoto refer to the material remainsof thepast, especially the glorious past of the silver city (ciudaddeplata).These usescontribute to strategies to marketthat past as a tourist attraction.By no meansunique to Guanajuato,this shift allows us to see transformationsof inalienableandalienablewealth in a new light. Patrimony,which used to characterize ilver,



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the substancethatleavesGuanajuato, n terms of inalienability,now refersto thesubstancesthat havestayedin place-the landscape,built environment,and thebones of Guanajuatenses-in terms of marketability.As acity bornof the extractionofnonrenewable resources hat alsoplacesgreatstore in the distinctivenessand continuity of its built environment, Guanajuatois an ideal place to examine the complex relationship between those forms ofwealth that enrich the collectivity by staying put (and that are supposed tostay put) and those that enrich the collectivity by leaving(andthat aresupposedto leave). Since at least the 18th century,when the bonanza of the Valencianamine made Guanajuatointo a world-class city (at least in the estimation of itsinhabitants), the relation between these different kinds of wealth has beenfraughtwith questions and contradictions.In other writings, I have explored these contradictionsfrom the perspective ofthe anthropologicalliteratureon value, arguingthat this case, lying at the heartof global commodity exchange,sheds light on the hybridnature of value andthecomplextransactionsbywhich formsof wealth are transformed nto one anotherin different societies. These transactionsare encapsulatedwithin an idiom ofpatrimony that Guanajuatenseshave used to classify resources as inalienablepossessions,even asthey areextractedand sold on the world market.In this arti-cle, I turn attentionto the question of memory andhistoryin Guanajuato n thewakeof silver'sdecline andtourism'srise.On the basisof participant-observationamongmembers of the SantaFe silvermining cooperative SociedadCooperativeMinero-Metalurgica SantaFe de Guanajuato;hereafterSantaFe Cooperative)in Guanajuatofrom 1996 to 1998 and on numerous subsequent visits to thefield, this articlegrows out of a largerprojectinvestigatingthe intersections ofinalienability and commodification as they are understood by cooperativemembers, their families, and as they are played out in a Mexican idiom of

patrimonio Ferry2002, 2005). This article incorporatesideas of hybridandtransformational orms of value into a consideration of memory and history.

Memory and History as Alternative Forms of WealthThere has been a great deal of debate over what exactly separates thoseaccounts 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 drawnhave then been criticizedas either ethnocentric



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or romanticizing in one way or another. Agreeing strongly with KevinYelvington's 2002)assertion hat the designationof distinctrepresentations f thepast as memories or histories s itself a politicalprocess, I borrow from theliteratureon the anthropologyof exchangeto proposea distinction thatmayhelpus in this analysisof memories and histories n Guanajuatoandmayeven providesome tools forexamining he politicssurrounding heirseparationand interaction.One difference between memory and history lies, I suggest, in their differingclaims of inalienabilityandalienability.Memories, on the one hand, are seen asbelonging to particular ndividualsor to particulargroups in the case of collec-tive or social memory. Integral to memories is a claim that they cannot betransferredwithout fundamentallychanging their characterand they will neverbecome memories of some other person or group in the same way. Forinstance, many Guanajuatensesstress that their relationship to the city and itsmaterial forms and to the past inhabiting those forms is inalienable; no onefromoutside can partake n that relationshipin the same way.1 n the eyes ofthese citizens, the memory of silver and the city's great past has a particularvalue for its native citizens that cannot be told or transferred to outsiders. Inthis sense, the memories of the past embodied in the city'sbuilt environmentmight be productivelycharacterized sthe inalienablepossessions(Weiner 1992)of the collective. To characterize them this way suggests that memory can beseen as a kind of wealth, embodied in substance and place, whose dispersalordecaywould lead to a dispersalor decay of the collective itself.

Histories, on the other hand, claim to be alienable andtransferable.They areaform of representation that posits a transitive relationship among differentrecipients. That is, to describe an account of the past as a history s to makethe claim that it is the same history for all listeners (whether or not this is infact the case). Such a claim is not made when describing a memory. Every-where in Guanajuatoone finds histories-in the newspapers,in the rehearsedspeeches of tourist guides, on glazed tile plaquesaffixedto plazasandchurches.These arelargelyaimed at outsiders,those who cannot participate n the mem-ory of the past (although certainly there are also plenty of scholars at theUniversity of Guanajuato who read and produce such histories).2Althoughthose histories that describe Guanajuatoand its former glories draw on formsof embodied memory significant for residents, they are seen by these residentsthemselves as qualitativelydifferent.In particular, hey are seen as producedforand transferable o outsiders.



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Certain aspects of anthropological theory further suggest the applicabilityofconcepts of value and wealth to the question of memory and history.Considerthese two distinctionsthat have generateda greatdeal of debate within anthro-pology: between gifts and commodities, on the one hand, and memoryand history, on the other hand.3 Both distinctions (gift-commodity andmemory-history)were firstestablishedas more or less strictdichotomies, focus-ing on fixed categories defined in opposition to each other. Both distinctionswere further used as diacritics between moder and traditional and morerecently Western nd non-Western ocieties.In bothcases, hesedichotomousand diacriticalaspects have been roundly criticized over the past two decades,and for the same reasons-that they reify differences between West andnon-West andconsignthe latter to a timeless,unreflectivedomain: he peoplewithout history.So for instance,C. A. Gregory (1982) created a typology between gifts and com-modities and then extrapolated this to a typology of gift societies and

commodity societies. In recent years, scholars such as Arjun Appadurai,AnnetteWeiner,andNicholas Thomas haveupset this dichotomy andproposedother possible relationships between gifts and commodities and especiallybetween inalienabilityand alienability(Appadurai1986;Thomas 1991;Weiner1992). Compare this to the differencesbetween hot societies and cold societies(Levi-Strauss1966) or lieuxdememoire ndmilieuxdememoire Nora 1989) andthe waysthese have been critiquedby anumberof scholarswhose positionshavebeen largely accepted(Cole 2001; Geary 1994;Yelvington2002). In their after-math, scholars have proposed a varietyof ways to describe the relationbetweenthe dichotomous terms and their referentconcepts:as idealtypes wielded foranalyticpurposes,as a continuum,as an assemblageof featuresthat can occur indifferentcombinations,andso on. If we applythe analyticalconcepts developedin the anthropologyof exchangeandvalue to the question of memory and his-tory, we may be able to examine the politics of their interaction from a freshperspective.Before examiningthis questionin ethnographiccontext, let me givesome backgroundon the city of Guanajuatoand its surroundingmines.

Guanajuato City and Mining DistrictThe Guanajuatomining district has been in continuous production for 450years.The first of the mines directly on the main vein system, the VetaMadre,began to be worked in 1550, and the outpouring of these mines created the



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glory of the city of Guanajuato,capitalof Guanajuatostate. The city reachedits apogee at the turn of the 19th century,justat the time that Humboldt visitedthe mines. Guanajuatowas a focal point of the War of Independence fromSpain,which broke out in 1810, and it took decades for the mining industrytorecover from the damages incurred in fighting and from the neglect of themines. As elsewhere in Mexico (Randall 1972), the British experimentedunsuccessfully 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 the1850s helped spur a return to economic prosperity for Guanajuato.Much ofthe more ornate, frenchified architecture in the city, although associated inpeople's minds with the Spanishand with colonialism, actuallydates from thesecond half of the 19th century.After a strong start before the revolution of 1910, when U.S. companiesbrought electricity and the cyanide method of ore processing to Guanajuato(Meyer Cosio 1999), the mines were againhit hardby the revolution, so muchso that the plight of the miners of Guanajuatobecame one of the topics dis-cussed at the constitutional congress in 1916-17 when the Constitution of1917 was drafted (Niemeyer 1974). Indeed, the silver market continued todecline throughout the 20th century, although at moments the mining econ-omy has revived becauseof technological changes in ore processing,vagariesofthe world market,or new discoveries.Although silver is still a commodity to bereckoned with in global markets,it has lost much of its power and cachet overthe course of the 20th century.Faced with declining yields andprices in recentyears, mining companies and the city as a whole have sought alternativesin anumber of areas,not least thatof miningheritage patrimoniominero) ourism.In doing so, they follow a general shift in the area'seconomy. Tourism toGuanajuato began to rise during World War II, when many U.S. citizensforewent their European travels in favor of Mexico. As elsewhere in Mexico,tourismhas ncreasedexponentiallyn thepasttwodecades,becomingGuanajuato'smost important economic sector by the mid-1990s. This means that at thesame time that the mines of Guanajuatoareproducingless and less silver,moreand more efforts and resources are invested in tourism and services. Theseeffortsincludethe opening of hotels, the promotionof the FestivalIntemacionalCervantino, a performing arts festival that largely caters to Mexican tourists,and the marketing of the distinctive beauty of Guanajuato'splazas, churches,and architecture.Although the winding alleys(callejones)f Guanajuatobecame



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an emblem of old Mexico and a draw for tourists as early as the 1930s(Saragoza2001:100), the push to promote Guanajuatoas the most accessible(because of the nearby Aeropuertodel Bajio, opened in 1992) and quaint ofMexico's silver cities has intensified tremendously in the past 20 years.Today,Guanajuatos a cityof about75,000 people. It is the capitalof Guanajuatostate and the cabecera(municipalseat) of the municipalityof Guanajuato,whichhas approximately 140,000 inhabitants (Instituto Nacional de Estadistica,Geografia e Informacion [INEGI] 2000). It is the site of the stateUniversity ofGuanajuatoand of the state government, which together provide many of thelocal jobs. Other jobs areprovided by the remainingmining companies and byvariousactivities relatedto tourism.The nearbyGM plant in the town of Silaoalso provides some jobs. Many of these, however, are short-term contracts, inkeeping with the neoliberal vision promoted by former governor Vicente FoxQuesada(presidentof Mexico from 2001-2007).The state of Guanajuatohas for decadesbeen one of the biggest senderstatesof migrant labor to the United States. In the past, those communities wheremany 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 agricul-tural communities, but this seems to be changing as the mining economydeclines.In 1998, the four most importanteconomic sectorsfor 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 restaurantwork(2,351 PE; INEGI 2000).4 The activities of migrants were not captured inthe census.Guanajuato'scitizens demonstrate a strong sense of place based on the prac-tices associated with mining, the local landscape and built environment, andCatholic devotionalism. The city is located in the northern part of the Bajioregion. It was in the Bajiothat indigenous people, displacedfrom their villagesfurthersouth, moved to work in the mines, haciendas,and textileworkshopsinthe early and middle colonial period. As Eric Wolf has noted, these processesgave rise to a more rapidemergence of a mestizo (mixed Europeanand indige-nous) class, one that tended to favor class and national over ethnic and localinterests(Tutino 1986;Wolf 1955).Thus, the Bajioandthe stateof Guanajuato,not surprisingly,became the center for the independence movement in theearly 19th century.Indeed, Guanajuatocity was the site of the firstmajordefeat



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of the Spaniards Brading1971, RiondaArreguin 1993). It is based on this his-tory that abajenosall their region thecradleof the Mexican nation.Some yearslater,after the Revolution of 1910-which hasoften been presented,especiallyby those supportingthe stateandrulingPartido RevolucionarioInsti-tucional (PRI)party,as the true birthof the Mexicannation-many in this area,especiallythe landed elite and those who were stronglyCatholic,cameinto con-flict with the national state. President Plutarco Calles, who governed Mexicofrom 1924-28, imposed a series of anticlericalpolicies that were deeplyresentedby many in the Bajioandin Guanajuato.The government is suspectedof back-ing a successfulattempt to dynamite the statue of CristoRey(Christ the King)thatadorns the top of a mountainoutsideLa Luz, Guanajuato,at the geograph-ical center of Mexico. One informant,in his late eighties in 1997, told me of anattempthe and his brothers made to retaliateby plantinga bomb in theJuarezTheater duringameeting of governmentsupporters.The planfailed andhe wasforced to flee the city. These events formed part of what has been called theCristeroWar, one of the most formidablechallengesto the postrevolutionarystateuntil the Zapatistas n the 1990s. Indeed, Guanajuato s one of the centersof the PartidoAcci6n Nacional (PAN) party,which grew out of the ashesof theCristero movement andnow controls the presidency.And the areacontinues tobe strongly Catholic; in the town where I lived during my fieldwork, manyhouses have a sign posted outside the door saying: thishome is Catholic-wedo not acceptProtestantsor members of other sects.In the city of Guanajuatoand its surroundingtowns, historical memory, localpride, and Catholic devotionalism are strongly imbued with a sense of placeand substance located in rocks and mountains the soil and the minerals itcontains. Nearly all of the importantpublicand sacredbuildings (includingthestatueof Cristo Rey and theJuarezTheater mentioned above) are carvedfromlocal green and red porphyry(cantera erdeyrosa),while the adornmentsof thepatron saint Santa Fe are made from local silver. In the mines and in miners'houses, mineral specimens adorn altars in a more personalizedversion of thispractice.And these facts are often referredto by Guanajuatenses.As we'll see,the substancesof the city are continually put forward as distinctive and forma-tive aspectsof local knowledge and pride.This aspect of local ideology is demonstratedespecially clearlyamong miners,who are seen as most closely tied to the city'shistory and reason for being over



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the past 200 years. In this project, I have focused especiallyon members of theSanta Fe Cooperative, which has been in operation since the late 1930s.

The Santa Fe CooperativeThe SantaFe Cooperative is a mining cooperative that, during the time of myprimaryfieldworkin the late 1990s, had approximately900 members and con-trolled all of the most important mines of the colonial period. As elsewhere inLatinAmerica,the Mexican subsoil is constitutionallydefined as nationalpat-rimony. Therefore, the SantaFe Cooperative does not own these mines, butleases concessions to exploit them from the central government.5These mineswere discoveredby the Spaniardsand became immensely profitablein the 18thcentury. Since then, they have been controlled by British, U.S., and nowMexican interests, in the form of a producers'cooperative in which membersreceive a share of the profits rather than wages. The insular structure of theSantaFe Cooperative and the links between mining cooperatives and the apexof Mexican postrevolutionarynationalism (Bernstein 1965, Ferry 2005) havemeant that the Santa Fe Cooperative is a particularlyfertile site for exploringunderstandingsof alienable and inalienable wealth. As we'll see, debates overmining and tourism as sources of wealth are also particularly charged in theSanta Fe.Many members of the SantaFe Cooperative and many observers state that thecooperative differs dramaticallyfrom other mining companies in Guanajuatobecause it has a socialgoal (fin social),that of preserving jobs for futuregen-erations. In the past,when the price of silverwas high, there was the ability toprovide jobs for miners' sons not only in mining but in the satellite businessessuch as the ceramic and silversmith workshops or in the central plant. TheSantaFe Cooperative administrationtended to give less dangerousjobs on thesurfaceto those whose fathers gavetheir lives to the mine, whether throughaccidents or silicosis. In recent years, efforts aimed at touristshave also been asite in which older miners or the sons of miners have found jobs.Because it is a producers'cooperative,the SantaFe hasno outside investors andthus no one to answer to beyond its own membership (they are even exemptfrom much government regulation, aside from safety and health codes). Thisfact promotes a sense among members that the wealth produced by the SantaFe Cooperative is for the membership. Silver may be sold, and thus leave



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Guanajuato,but the profitsremain to sustain and enrich Santa Fe Cooperativehomes and families. As one engineer said to me, If I want to eat in a restau-rant, I eat in Guanajuato.If I get my shoes shined, I do it in the Jardin de laUni6n [the city'smain plaza].It is the same with the Cooperative. The moneywe makestaysin Guanajuato.However, the fact that this is a cooperativedoes not necessarilymean that divi-sion of resources has been equitable among cooperative members. Since theSantaFe Cooperative's oundation,everypresidentof the administrative ouncil(the highest elected position) has been accused of embezzling in more or lessspectacularways.And otherswell placedin the hierarchyor production process(often from established SantaFe Cooperative families) have been said to stealore concentrate or mismanage resources for their own gain. Accusations likethese were constant throughout the period of my fieldwork.I do not have thecapacity (or the inclination) to judge the validity of any one of these claims,although some at least are clearly true. However, their constancy shows twoaspectsof the Santa Fe Cooperative clearly:(1) it does not alwayslive up to itsideology of fairnessand the rightuse of patrimony,and(2) it differsfromprivatecompanies in that it is not seen as legitimate for the leaders to profit more thanthe miners, at least not beyond a certaindegree.The mines of the SantaFe, which have been worked extensivelysince the 18thcentury and have produced a significantpercentage of the New World'ssilver,are nearing exhaustion. Furthermore, the world silver market continues todiminish and the support from the government for the cooperative has driedunder recent neoliberal administrations. In response to these exogenous andendogenous factors, the SantaFe Cooperative has undergone a series of eco-nomic crises that have intensified over the past 15 years.6Cooperative members and the institution's elected leaders have tried torespond to economic crises in a number of ways, but one of the most impor-tant, and most hotly debated, has been the marketing of the Santa FeCooperative and its multiple picturesquemines and other structuresas touristsites. They have made several mines available to tourists, and cooperativemembers workafter hours as tour guides or selling mineralspecimens and trin-kets to visitors. In doing this, they have followed a more general trend inGuanajuato,and in other places where people attempt to make the shift frommining to industrialheritage tourism (Edwardsand LlurdesI Coit 1996).



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These strategies,which depend on a marketingof the built environmentof theminesasmaterial racesof the city'sglorioushistory, tandboth in tensionandpart-nershipwithnotionsof SantaFe Cooperativewealth as embodied n the substancesof the earth,the mines,and the cityand,thus,assomethingthatshould be handeddown from generationto generation.As I hope to show,the questionof whetherthe Santa Fe Cooperative should shift to tourism restates old questions-concerningwhathappenswhen thewealth of the cityleaves he city-in newways.A defining moment in the shift from mining to tourism came in 1988, whenthe city of Guanajuato and its surrounding mines was included on the UNEducational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) list of WorldHeritage Cities (in Spanish Ciudadesde PatrimonioMundial).7To understandthe significance of this event, let me first turn to a discussion of two faces ofGuanajuato: he city as substanceand the city as patrimony.The City as SubstanceIn the case of Guanajuato, he immanentpast ncludes all manner of things-linguistic and bodily practices,foods, aesthetic norms, and so on-but certainkindsof things are more stronglyvaluedthan othersas embodimentsof the past.The mines, the silver and gold emerging from these mines, the 18th- and 19th-century architectureof the city, the tunnels that run beneath it, the locallyquarriedgreen andpinkporphyrystone (cantera erdeyrosa), he rocky landscapearoundthe city,andthe bones of native citizens areallspeciallymarkedcategoriesof Guanajuatanness.Except the bones, these kindsof things all have an obviousconnection:they are all partof what could be called the mineralpatrimony ofGuanajuato, he rocks and earth on which and out of which the city is built. Citi-zens of Guanajuato,when talkingabout their city often emphasizethese earthy,rockycharacteristicsincludingthe walls,houses, mines,andstreets,and the natu-rallandscape urrounding he city,which lies nestledin acanyoncrownedbyrockformations.One cooperativemember, for instance, told me that becausemanyGuanajuatenseseat from dishes made out of local clay, they have probablyingested a good deal of silver, and could now be thought of as partsilver(unaparteplata).Sometimes local residentsexpressa sense of regret and nostal-gia for lost features of the landscape;another cooperativemember told me thatthe landscape o the east of Guanajuatowas prettyas could be (bonito onganas)before the mining companyLas Torrescame in the 1970s and began to blast inthe hills.



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Festivitieson the Dayof the Cave (August31), which honors one of the city'spatron saints, San Ignacio, take place in a cave near the largest of the rock for-mations, called La Bufa. On this day,hundreds of Guanajuatenseshike (oftenin dress shoes or high heels) to the top of this hill overlooking the city to attendmass and to picnic. A local legend tells of an enchanted city made of silverburied within La Bufa. Although this story is now mostly used as a tale fortourists, the image it evokes remains at least somewhat compelling. As oneshopkeeperonce saidto me, beneathGuanajuato ie many Guanajuatos. Theintimatepresence of the mines so close to the city and of the innumerablesmallcrevices whereby prospectors have entered working and abandonedmines forcenturies, may in part account for the notion of many Guanajuatos. Andwhen one goes down in the mines themselves, one is struck by the citylikequality of the underground space. One walks along tunnels like streets andalleys, climbs stairs and ladders and crosses bridges. Now and then the closewalls open out into cavernous atria with huge arches and ramparts. It doesseem, at least to me, like a vast complex of city streets and spaces, unpeopledexcept for the miners who trampthrough in pairsor small groups, whistling toeach other.Figure 1 shows a cross-section of the Valencianamine as depicted in a mono-graph of the Guanajuato mining district published in the 1960s. Itdemonstratesboth the circuitousalleysandpathsof the workingsundergroundandshows a few of the churchesand mine structureson the surface.This figuregives a nice image of the ways the city on the surface is thought by manyGuanajuatenseso emergeout of andeven to be bornfromthe city underground.The constitutive nature of stone and earth for Guanajuatanness s also exem-plified in the green and pink cantera that comes from the tiny mining townCalderones in the heart of the Veta Madre (in the municipalityof Guanajuatojustoutside the city).This green andpinkstone adornsall importantstructuresin Guanajuato, and many other commercial and residential buildings arepainted pink and green in an evocation of cantera.Cantera verde in particularis important enough to the self-presentation of the city that it is depicted onthe city seal.Although bones may seem to be one of those things not like the others, bonesthemselves may also qualify as mineral patrimony. Many Guanajuatensesemphasizethe intimate connections between the material forms of the city and



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Figure 1. VerticalProjection of the Workings of the ValencianaMine, 1806 (reproducedwithpermissionfrom AntufiezEchegaray 1964, p. 287 [copyright Consejo de RecursosMinerales]).

mines and the bones of its citizens. There are stories of skeletons in the minesof miners who lost their lives there, and comparisons are made between themines and cemeteries (panteones) f the city. One former engineer and nativeGuanajuatense aid to me mining emptiesthe mines andfills the pante6n, husmaking explicit the parallelismbetween the two undergroundspaces. Under-ground altars and sacred onomastics in the mines further sacralize theundergroundrealm and likenit to othersacredspaces n the citysuch aschurchesand cemeteries. There is even a mummymuseum n Guanajuato hat displaysthe bodiesof former citizens who havepurportedlybeen naturallymummifiedbythe soil'shigh mineral content (Ferry2003). And to make the circlecomplete, thewalls of the Santa PaulaMunicipal Cemetery are topped with a line of skullscarvedfrom the canteraverde so emblematic of the city assubstance.Part of the significance of these types of substancesfor Guanajuatenses s notonly the natural environment surroundingandunderlying Guanajuatobut also



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the labor that went into producing the city's mines, tunnels, and buildings.Becausemost Guanajuatenses ount currentor pastminersaspartof theirfamily,they tend to identify strongly with the labor that went into producing thesestructures.Although the earth and rocks of the city are theirs by virtue oftheir birth in Guanajuato,the buildings are theirs by virtue of the labor thatthey or their forefathers put into constructing them. Their commemorationof this former labor is mademanifestin one of the city'smost importantfestivals(and one of the few that is not strongly marketed for tourists), the Miners'Pilgrimage to the Basilica of Santa Fe de Guanajuato,which takesplace at theend of May.As one Guanajuatensetold me, People don't come out to see thepilgrimage so much because they themselves are miners, but because theirfathers and grandfatherswere miners and for the importance that mining hashad in the city.Of course, this presentation of the city as produced through the labor of maleminers obscureslots of other forms of labor,especiallythat of women andnon-miners (Ferry 2003). Kevin Yelvington has rightly pointed out a tendencyamong anthropologists to see memory as an unproblematic,possessablerec-ollection of an authenticpast (2002:234).The erasureof female andnonminerlaboris justone indication that Guanajuatensememories arehighly susceptibleto the processes of reconstruction that legitimate past and prevailingrelationsof power. For instance, duringmy time in Guanajuato,the SantaFe Coopera-tive was alwaysreferredto exclusivelyas an enterprisemadeup of men workingunderground extracting ore, in spite of the fact that ten percent of the work-force were women and perhaps 60 percent did not work in the minesthemselves. Similarly,during years of bonanza, Guanajuatohas been a city ofshopkeepers, moneylenders, chemists, bartenders,university professors, arti-sans, and bureaucrats, o name just a few occupations supported by the miningboom. But these arerarelyreferred to in accounts of the city's past.The City as PatrimonyAnotherinstancefurtheremphasizes he substantialinksbetweenGuanajuatensebones, earth,andstones andalso introduces the theme of the city aspatrimony.In 1991, on the 200th anniversaryof the year in which Guanajuatoreceived thetitle of city from the Spanish king, Isauro Rionda Arreguin, the officialchronicler or cronista,made a speech that echoed many of the sentiments of hisfellow 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 city'shistoryfor outsiders.He said:Guanajuato as neverfailed to surpriseus withnew motivesforhonoringher,ashas now happenedwith the designationbyUNESCO of [thetitle]of City of World Patrimonyand its inscription,by virtue of this, in theselective ist of worldmonumentswith this characteristic.... The cityofGuanajuatooffers to humanityits architectonicwealth and its notablysublimeandbeautifulsingularity; utnot asa complexof walls,ramparts,arches,doors,andbuildings[thatare]well constructedandsurprisingbutemptyandstatic,but ratheras a propitiousandoptimalenvironment orthe developmentof aspirationsand creative and artisticqualitiesof itsinhabitants,above all those who were born here and who haveleft theirbones here .... We Guanajuatenses,men andwomen who arewell bornand betterraised,feel honorablycommittedin the presenceof humanityto preserve,augment,andenrich this patrimony,which is not ours alone[queno essolonuestro].

Rionda Arreguin'sstatement posits a distinctive relationship between nativeGuanajuatenses(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 creativepersons who in turn guard these very structures and forms to be visited andmarveled at by outsiders.These materialforms, then, both embody the mem-ory intrinsic to Guanajuatoand inalienable from the collective it representswhile also narratinga history for visitors from outside.In this characterizationof the built environment of the city as both inalienablememory and alienablehistory,much hinges on the use of the term patrimonio.In 1987, (before UNESCO's naming of Guanajuatoas Ciudad de PatrimonioMundial), for many of the listeners to this speech, the wordpatrimoniowouldhave connoted the inalienableresources of the nation establishedin the consti-tution of 1917, and foremost among these, subsoil resources. Using the termpatrimonioo refer to the memory of silverembodied in the city rather than thesilver itself would have been comprehensible to the audience, but still some-what uncommon. However, the uses ofpatrimonio o refer to the material tracesof the past have proliferatedin Guanajuatotremendously since the late 1980s.Examples of this trend include a competition held in 1996 by the Institute forCulture of the Stateof Guanajuato hat included a recently introducedcategoryfor historians, architects, and archaeologists called Diffusion of Patrimony;



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an international UNESCO-sponsored conference held in Guanajuato inFebruary 1997 for universityrectors, bishops, and mayors of World HeritageCities (ciudadesde patrimoniomundial); and numerous instances, includingplaques,civic speeches and proclamations,newspaperarticles,municipalvehi-cles, and soda machines, in which the city is describedpublicly aspatrimoniodela humanidad rpatrimoniomundial.This shift from patrimony as material, nonrenewable resources to a kind ofmnemonic patrimonyis of course not unique to Guanajuatobut can be foundall over sites of former industrialglory in Europe, the United States,and LatinAmerica. Nestor Garcia Canclini (1995), Richard Handler (1988), FranqoisHartog (1998), Pierre Nora (1989), and others interested in the connectionsbetween memory, commemoration, and patrimony describe an extension andintensification in the uses of the term over the past 25 years, especially in theareas of naturalparks,genetics, culturalproperties, and so on. This shift is thelatest in a series of transformations n the uses of the termpatrimony nd its ref-erential domain.The termspatrimonio, atrimoine,andpatrimonyderive from the Latinpatrimo-nium, and originally referred to entailed, patrilineally transmitted property,especiallyland.During the rise of absolutismin Europe, it became closely asso-ciated with the holdings of royal lineages, and after the French Revolution,these properties became reclassifiedjuridicallyas the patrimonyof the nation.Patrimony has had a particularly ntense history in Mexico, which like the restof Spanish America was itself defined as royal patrimony during the colonialperiod.As in France, the protagonistsof the Mexicanindependence movementand laterthe revolutioninsisted at the moment when the juridicalpersonalityof the king ceased to exist, that is, the moment of independence, the king'spat-rimony automatically converted into national patrimony. In the MexicanConstitution of 1917, subsoil resources, agricultural and, and culturalproper-ties received special consideration as national patrimony and this formulationbecame an ideological cornerstone of the postrevolutionarystate andthe rulingpolitical party.This has made uses of a languageof patrimony particularlychargedin Mexico.In recent years, in keeping with the decline of Mexican postrevolutionarynationalism and the authoritarianpolitics that went along with it, patrimony



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has been increasinglyappliedin areasoutside that of national resources.RiondaArreguin's speech, which emphasized both local and universal collectivities( humanity )but did not mention the nation, is typicalof this trend.8However,in all casesin which it is used, patrimonyentails notions of inalienable,intrinsicvalue,a form of wealth that is intendedto be handed down intact fromgenerationto generation, usuallythrough the agnaticline.The intrinsic, inalienable characterof patrimonyhas been a big problem in thecase of subsoil resources. How do you deal with the contradictions of classify-ing exhaustible, nonrenewable resources as inalienable? It is all very well toclassify land as patrimony,because with land-at least agricultural and-youcan separateuse rights from rights of alienation;you can say,for instance, thatthe land is inalienable but its fruits are not (andthis is the origin of the termusufruct).But in the case of mining, use equalsalienation. Guanajuato's itizenshave sought to reconcile this contradiction by focusing on the ways that silverreturnsin other forms, especially in the material forms of the city.This partic-ular form of patrimony based on the memory of silver embedded in the builtenvironment has gained new force as Guanajuatenses try to attractresourcesbased on the beauty and distinctiveness of these places. In the process, theidiom of patrimony as deployed in Guanajuatocontinues to encapsulate thetensions between forms of inalienable and alienable wealth (Ferry2005). For-merly Guanajuato'scitizens struggled to iterate the inalienability of thosesubstances that left the city (above all silver) and did so in part through thememory of silver retained in the city's material forms. Now they struggle tomake a living from those forms by telling histories of the substances thatremain (buildings, rocks, and bones). In each case, patrimony mediatesbetween these forms of wealth without ever resolving their contradictions.Tensions over the uses of patrimony in the Santa Fe Cooperative in the late1990s and early2000s revealthese uneasymediations.Patrimony in the Santa Fe CooperativeThe Bocamina San Cayetano is a converted entrance to the Valenciana minenow open to tourists. The Bocamina is an adit entrance rather than a mine-shaft, which means that miners (and now visitors) enter by a staircase ratherthan in a mechanical hoist. This particularentrance has been closed for pro-duction since the 19th century and used as a showpiece for occasional visitorssince that time. The site is currently managed by the Santa Fe Cooperative.



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In the 1990s,the SantaFe Cooperativerefurbished he groundsof the Bocamina,which lies on one side of the magnificentValencianaChurch several kilometersoutside of Guanajuato proper. They installed bathrooms and hung old photosdepicting the mines and mining activities from the last century in Guanajuato.Samples from the Santa Fe Cooperative affiliated ceramic and silversmithworkshops are also displayed.Several older miners and widows and daughtersof cooperative members workat the Bocamina selling tickets, dispensing hard hats and leading visitors 50meters down the staircaseinto the mine. In 1997, 58,770 tickets were sold tothe Bocamina(ateight pesos or about 90 cents each),mostly duringthe periodsof Mexican school vacations.The site appears o be more heavilyfrequentedbyMexican touriststhan by foreigners.The Bocamina'smain benefit for the SantaFe Cooperative comes from the fact that it provides a job for a number ofcooperative members unfit for more strenuous work (because SantaFe Coop-erative members cannot be fired).This is an exampleof the efforts by Santa FeCooperative leadership to maintain the source of jobs. Nevertheless, theexistence of the Bocamina forms part of a concerted Santa Fe Cooperativestrategy to exploit the burgeoning tourist industry by constructing an experi-ence of Guanajuato'spast for those from outside.The appealof places like the Bocamina lies in their ability to tell a story of thepastto visitors,but also to give these visitorsa unique experience thatwill leavethem with their own memories. Here, the unfinished business of the pastmakes possible emergent forms of collectivity and agency (Murakami andMiddleton 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 ofaction and remembrance(see The Immanent Past this issue).The emphasis is on the knowledge that comes from direct experience; oneleaflet advertisingthe Bocaminaexhorts the visitor to know the interior of themine. It is the physical passagefrom surface to the interior space of the minesurroundedby the walls, stones, and silverof Guanajuatothat creates this inti-mate, embodied knowledge. Here we see that the distinction I have drawnbetween memory and history in Guanajuato(like that between gifts and com-modities) does not hold firm, for it is clearly the ideas of those who set up theBocamina about what is quintessentially representative of Guanajuato'spastthat inform organizationaland design decisions. Nevertheless the site is meant



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to be an experience for outsiders that resembles without ever replacing theexperience of those native to the city (oriundos).Like the memories embodied in the city'ssubstances,the histories told in theBocaminaalso enableprocessesof simultaneousrememberingandforgetting.Forinstance,althoughthe tourguideswho leadtourists nto the Bocaminainvariablydescribe he brutalworkengagedin by indiosworkingin the mine, haulinghun-dreds of kilogramsof ore by tumpline up hundreds of meters of narrow stonestairs.This imagecontrastsstronglywith that of the noble nonindigenousminerswhom Guanajuatensesmagineastheir forebears.The questionarises,whathap-penedto those downtroddenmasses;didthey disappear t some point,or how didthey turn into the proud workers that typify local ideas of current and formerminers?The people I spokewith, for instance,would usuallyrefer to themselvesas mestizo or even hispano (of Spanishdescent).Although the formercategorydoes emphasizeracialmixture,both arein contradistinction o indioandindigena.Indeed the verynotion of mineralwealth asnationalpatrimonymay foregroundminers'mestizo character,because nationalpatrimonybecame a salient term aspart of the same processesof postrevolutionary tate formationthat establishedthe mestizo as nationalprotagonist Lomnitz 2001).At the same time, this experience of visiting the Bocaminadoes not deplete thesite the way that other uses, especiallymining, have in the past.For this reason,some cooperative members point to marketingthe mines as tourist attractionsas a possible wayout (salida)of the economic crisis.In some ways, then, shiftsin patrimony'sreferential domain seem to resolve the problems that go alongwith describing a nonrenewable, commodified resource as inalienable. How-ever,in attemptingto convert the inalienablewealth embodied in Guanajuato'sbuilt environment nto money,Guanajuatenses ave moved from one contradic-tion to its converse.Formerlystrugglingwith the implicationsof describingsilveras inalienable, they now struggle with the implications of treating mnemonicpatrimonyas alienable, that is, by selling it as history to tourists.In marketing the substances of the city, tourism promoters in Guanajuatoandin the Santa Fe Cooperative call into question the egalitarianassumptions ofthe city as substance ideology, in which all Guanajuatensesare presumed tohaveequalaccess based on the fact that theywere bornthere and haveleft theirbones there, to quote the cronista. This ideology is based on the erasureofmanyforms of laborandmany inequalities.Butaswith the SantaFe Cooperative



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(in comparison to other mining enterprises),it claims equal access within theboundariesof the collective.Touristprojects,often based on narrowingof accessand divisionof profitsbased on legal propertyrights,tend to challengethis claim.Reactions to this challenge can be seen in debates over who (withinandoutsidethe SantaFe Cooperative)benefitsfrom effortsto marketthe pastfor tourism.In the late 1990s, during my fieldwork with members of the Santa Fe Cooper-ative, a number of local actors and constituencieswere vying to createprojectsof historicalpatrimony (patrimoniohistdrico).n many cases, these are centeredon the mines themselves; they include a tour of the surface around theValenciana'smain entrance, a restaurant and banquet hall at another aban-doned entrance, and a third entrance (the Bocamina San Cayetano) wherevisitorscan descend 50 meters into the mine itself. In 2002, anotherprojectwasproposed for the Rayasmine that includes tours into the mine, a museum and arestaurant n one complex. Municipal and state authoritiesof tourism and eco-nomic development continually try to attract resources for developing miningpatrimonyand to attracttourists and investors on the basisof Guanajuato'sdis-tinctive architecture and the past it represents. Private corporations alsoengage in these strategies;for much of the 1990s, a billboard outside the GMauto plant right next to the city of Guanajuato(the largest GM plant in thehemisphere) proclaimed InGuanajuato,GM is also makinghistory.Attempts to promote new uses of patrimony in Guanajuatoare anything butuncontested. Rather than working together to capitalize more efficiently onthe touristmarket,placeslike the BocaminaSanCayetano (owned by the SantaFe Cooperative)andthe nearbyBocamina SanRamon (anotherentrance to theValencianamine thatis privatelyowned) compete fiercelywith one another andcriticize each other's forms of management and presentation.These criticismsoften carrya moralundertone, suggesting that competitors are cheapening theexperienceor profitingfromit unfairly.Guanajuato's itizens,like otherslivinginsites of former richness n Spain,Cornwall,Arizona,andelsewhere,arewrestlingwith the contradictions and opportunities of turning memory as intrinsicwealth into currency.Sincethe entryof a new gubernatorial dministrationn early2001, the economiccrisisin the SantaFe Cooperativehas become even more acute. When I went toGuanajuato n the summers of 2001 and 2003, hundreds had left the Santa FeCooperative,so that it hadbarely400 membersin 2003. Those remainingwere



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quietly pessimisticabout the futureof the enterprise.One university professor,from an old Guanajuato amily and with many ties to the city government andintelligentsia,told me that the city government (ayuntamiento)s poised to refur-bish the ValencianaandRayasmines as tourist sites (perhapswith a luxuryhotelattachedto Rayas)as soon as the SantaFe Cooperative cedes them. They havebeen unwilling to put up the money to do this in conjunctionwith the SantaFeCooperativebecause they do not want to dealwith a general assemblyof SantaFe Cooperativemembers,which votes on allmajordecisions.9Against this backdrop,many cooperativemembers view the expressionsof sup-port by the state and local governments with considerable suspicion. And aswith all discussionsof how resourcesareto be divided,the question of personalgain over collective gain is at the forefront. In May 2005, I spoke on the phoneto a cooperative member who has worked in the Valencianamine for over adecade. I askedif it was true, as it had been reported in the newspaper,that thegovernor of Guanajuatowas looking forwaysto save the Santa Fe Cooperative.He responded with indignation, Yes,but for himself [parael mismo].That'swhat they've wanted to do for a long time. He then told me approvinglyofattempts by a local historian to get a feature into the newspaper asking thegovernor if Guanajuato exists because of mining, why won't he help theCooperative,which has the oldest andmost importantmines?As I see it, responses such as these operate on several levels: as reasonable andpredictablereactions to the decreasing governmental support for the SantaFeCooperative and to the somewhatvulturelikecirclingsof stateandcity officials;as expressionsof ongoing debates andtensionswithin the Santa Fe Cooperativeand between the SantaFe Cooperative and the state;and also as new formula-tions of anold problem n Guanajuato: ow to negotiatethe relationshipbetweeninalienable andalienablewealth, on the one hand, andmemory andhistory,onthe other hand.The notion of patrimonyas a form of inalienableresourcesthatnevertheless leaves open opportunities for commodification, and the recentexpansionof the categoryof patrimonyto includethe materialtraces of the past,make it an idealidiom forexpressing withoutnecessarilyresolving)thisproblem.Conclusion: The Dialectics of WealthLet us consideragainwhat happens-or is supposedto happen-when a touristvisits the Bocamina San Cayetano. This site, like others in Guanajuato,is, inlocal perceptions, filled with the memory of silver.Although Guanajuatenses



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might not often visit the place, they consider it partof their city andits materialforms, to which they have a unique relationship.However, its past is also rep-resented through histories produced mostly for the benefit of outsiders.Theseinclude the memorized comments of the tour guide who leadsvisitors into themine, the brochure visitors receive when they enter, the yellowed photographson the walls, and the many descriptions in tourist guides, picture books, andhistoricalmonographsof Guanajuato.These narrationsandimages of the past,taking place as they do in the places where the pastwas enacted, are then con-verted into new memories that visitors can take awaywith them. It is in searchof such memorableexperiencesthatpeople visit Guanajuato,ratherthansimplyreading about it in a book.If we see memory and history as alternative forms of wealth, then we may havesome new tools for looking at the relationshipbetween them, drawn from theanthropologyof value andexchange.MauriceGodelier, in his analysisof MarcelMauss'sTheGiftandits anthropological nterpretations, oes so far asto describethe essential nature of the social as the interdependence and relative auton-omy of the spheres of the alienable and inalienable. He modifies Weiner'sformulation of the paradox of inalienability as keeping-while-giving into

keeping-for-giving and giving-for-keeping, (Godelier 1999:35-36) a classicdialectical chiasmus. This revised version may help us think about thoseaccounts of the past that are seen as quintessentially local and those that arecreatedfor export, aswell the mediations between them.In the case of Guanajuatoand the SantaFe Cooperative, these mediations areattempted through the idiom of patrimony,which claims to stand for uncom-plicatedly rooted forms of wealth, but by means of which people have longsought to accommodate certain kinds of transactions,including the extractionand sale of silver and the marketing of mining patrimony for visitors. In thepast and especially before the late 1980s, cooperative members especiallyfocused on the ways in which the proceeds from the sale of silvermight be usedto fortify and regenerate Guanajuatensesubstances, especially the built envi-ronment, the natural landscape and the bodies and bones of its citizens. Indoing so, they sought to resolve the contradictionsattendant on treatinga non-renewable resource as inalienable possession (Ferry 2005). By expanding thecategory of patrimonyto include the materialtracesof the pastand the memo-ries embodied in them, they at firstappearto have solved this problem, becausevisits 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 memo-ries of Guanajuatensesare converted into histories that are thus accessible tooutsiders, and can then be turned into their own memories, such as a visit tothe Bocamina where they can know the interior of the mine through theirown direct experience. They thus raise questions about who has the right tohave access to these sites and about how should properly benefit from theircommodification. Thus, the uneasymediations between inalienableand alien-able wealth have not been resolved but only rephrased.Such mediations revealmuch about the relationshipbetween fixed and mobileforms of value and the circumstances under which one form of value changesinto the other. If we use them to understandmemory andhistory as alternativeforms of wealth, then the distinction between history and memory is not onethat mapsonto a distinction between West andnon-West, lieuxdememoireandmilieuxdememoire,hot societies and cold societies, or any other version of thissame dichotomy. Like other forms of wealth, memory and history exist in adialectic relation, in tension with and yet also entailing each other. Our jobthen becomes not so much to identify this or that practice as memory or

history to distinguish accurately between them but, rather, to analyze thepolitics surroundingthe continual transformationsof one into the other.

In August of 2005, the administration of the Santa Fe Cooperative agreed tosell most of its undergroundholdings and concessions to a Mexican subsidiaryof the Canadianmining corporation Great Panther Resources Limited, thusending, at least for now, the period of cooperativismin Mexican mining. As ofthis writing, it is not clearwhat will happen to the SantaFe Cooperative mem-bers or to the futureof industrialheritage tourism in Guanajuato.

ELIZABETHMMA ERRYsAssistant rofessorfAnthropologyt BrandeisUniversity.NotesAcknowledgments. This articlewaspresented as a paperat the 2003 Biennial Society for Psycho-logicalAnthropologyMeetings n SanDiego, California, spartof the sessionon HistoryandMemoryorganized yKevinBirthandmyself. amgratefulorthe comments ndsuggestions fKevinBirth,JasonJames,JanetDixonKeller,DavidMiddleton, oanneRappaport,GeoffreyWhite,CarlosVelez-Ibfiez,andananonymouseviewerorEthos.



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1. Brad Weiss has observed the converse; among the Haya in the Kegararegion of Tanzania,thedestruction 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, LaraMeza 1999, L. M. Rionda Ramirez 1997, andVillalba 1999.3. It has been noted by Trouillot (1994) and others that the English word history an refer both tothe pastitself and to representationsor accounts of thatpast.In this article,I consistentlyuse historyin this second sense.4. In presenting he censusdata,I haveextracted he numbersrelated o hotel and restaurantromthelargersector of privatenonfinancialservices,a catch-allcategory that includes everyone from automechanicsto dentiststo prieststo waiters.Althoughthe numbers of personnelemployedseem small,it shouldbe noted thatonly 19,000of the municipality's 44,000inhabitants howedup in this census.5. Elsewhere (Ferry2005), I explore the implications of this fact in detail.6. For an extended discussion of the Santa Fe Cooperative, its history,and its currentsituation, seeFerry2005.7. The Spanishwordpatrimonios often translatedas heritage, and the word heritage ends to bemore common in English. I prefer to use the word patrimonybecause it preserves the gendered,kin-inflected, and property-owning associationsof the Latinateversions.8. See Ferry2003 for a more extended discussion.9. Indeed, in 1999 the IndustrialHeritage Consultancy (IHC), a company from Cornwall, wasinvited by the city to examine the possibility of a coordinated Silver Route (Rutadela Plata)madeup of old mines open for tourists.Among the conclusions to its report,IHC pointed out thatnego-tiating with the Santa Fe Cooperative, which held most of the best sites would mean taking intoaccount 850 opinions and could result in problems in making decisions. This point was alsomade to me by severalfunctionariesof the state secretariatof tourism.

References CitedAntufiez Echegaray,Francisco1964 Monografia Hist6rica y Tecnologica del Distrito Minero de Guanajuato. MexicoD.E: Consejo de Recursos Minerales.Appadurai,Arjun1986 Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value. In The Social Life of

Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. New York:Cambridge UniversityPress.Bernstein,Marvin D.1965 The MexicanMining Industry:A Studyof the Interactionof Politics,Economics,andTechnology. Albany:State University of New YorkPress.



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Memory as Welth History as Commerce Elizabeth Ferry

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