The Tempter

Several of the recurring themes in the collection Stones from the Creek were initially surprises to me.  I had not set out, for example, to discuss the persistence of evil, yet there is the devil: in "Turning Water Into Gold," in "Passion Flower" and ""The Sun Shone So Brightly," in "Warrior Princess," and in "Who Could Have Foreseen It."

In the two stories that reference the fictional Cerrillos Strike, he materializes as el tío, a figure to whom the Bolivian miners offer tobacco and liquor in return for their safe return to the surface after the shift.  He is a kind of master of the underworld who they have to propitiate.  But his presence here is more than a nod to a truth about Bolivian miners that was too good to ignore.  It was  a way of referring to a much larger point made by Michael Taussig in his The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America.

The title already suggests that there is more here than the magic of petition.  As Taussig explains: "Magical beliefs are revelatory and fascinating not because they are ill-conceived instruments of utility but because they are poetic echoes of the cadences that guide the innermost course of the world."  Much of his book addresses the challenge that has faced capitalists everywhere in trying to motivate people to do as much wage work as possible.  He points out, for example, that doubling wages was tried in some places to put a greater value on this paid work than on other work.  But the result (paradoxical only in the eyes of economists) was to halve the amount of time people put in!  They simply needed less time to gain what the money they wanted.

Taussig points out that the devil (or "uncle") of the Bolivian mines has European features.  He opposes both the Pachamama (earth mother) and the Virgin (if they are, indeed, separate entities) in his insistence on plunder and in his threat to remove the resource that is now keeping the people alive!  If he is not propitiated, the mineral will disappear from the rock.

There is more to this argument, and I recommend his book highly.  I have been preoccupied now for decades about the mechanisms that impoverish independent and autonomous people and drive them into wage work.  In Stones from the Creek there is a repeated theme about the seizure of the common lands from the communities of New Mexico.  It is an obvious violation of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which secured property rights to the people of the northern half of Mexico when it was taken by the United States.  But it may be less obvious to people who believe that land and labor are commodities and who take those ideas for granted.  In "The Giant Believed Her," the genius of Alchesay is to recognize that this is the entire intent of the Dawes Act and to find a way to trick the Giant into allowing the people to retain their communal work and identity.  "Scars" addresses the same question about compelling people to do dangerous work, but shows how the industrialists of the "New" South solved it by enslaving young men by charging them with specious crimes and sentencing them to open-ended, unpaid work for the capitalist fertilizer mines.

I have tried as hard as I know how to strip the actual stories of all this didactic stuff.  I was not interested in presenting one-dimensional characters spouting social-studies speeches.  But I also hoped that the reader would discover these ideas at the same time as being moved by the struggles of fully human characters.  My success remains to be seen.