1934 BOLIVIA magazine article, tin mines, natives, Fiestas etc

Description

Selling is a 1934 magazine article about:
BOLIVIA
Title: BOLIVIA, LAND OF FIESTAS
Author: Alicia O’Reardon Overbeck
Quoting the first page “Fiestas are the very heartbeat of Bolivia, that South American land of contrasts, where in a few hours a mule can carry you from perpetual snow to perpetual summer, from arid sand wastes to steaming tropical forests, from modern cities to primitive farm communities whose organization goes back to the dim pre-Inca days.
When the Spaniards, headed by Pizarro, climbed over the Andean wall and dropped down into the heart of the Inca country, they found a highly developed nation, with its own elaborate religious observances. The conquerors superimposed on these pagan rites Christian ceremonies, and it is interesting now to trace the curious combination of pagan survival and rather warped Christian ritual that has emerged in the form of fiestas; for practically all Bolivian fiestas, save the Seis de Agosto (Sixth of August), the country's Fourth of July, are of religious origin.
I had opportunity to watch these fiestas, because for nearly six years I lived, with some twenty other "gringos," in a lofty, isolated mining camp (base for a large tin mine), situated in one of those deep, narrow valleys that gash the eastern side of the Cordillera Real, or principal range of the Andes.
To the west lay a mountain wall 15,000 to 19,000 feet high; to the east was the impenetrable jungle of the Amazon Valley-barriers which cut us off from our own world and shut us in a strange and primitive world of people whose thin veneer of European culture belonged to a civilization long dead.
My introduction to the fiesta of Carnaval (Carnival), which precedes Lent, occurred shortly after my arrival in Bolivia. We gringos were invited to spend fiesta at the mine camp, which lay more than 15,000 feet up in the mountains, close to the line of perpetual snow.
To get there, we had to "change cars" several times. We started on muleback (mules are used in the altitudes rather than horses because of their greater endurance) over a narrow trail that climbed steplike up glacial terminal moraines, beside a stream that hurtled down to join the Amazon.
Sheep, guarded by dirty children, grazed on the stubby grass that grew on the rare level stretches. Potatoes and okra flourished in the small fields, surrounded by stone walls.
Occasional thatched huts, each topped by a canting cross, stood close to the trail, and from their doors, through which seeped that curious Indian smell of smoke and grease and dampness and unwashed bodies, people watched us pass.
Three or four black dogs ceased worrying the carcass of a fallen llama and ran snarling at the heels of our mules.
After less than an hour we arrived at the company mill. Here ore from the tin mines was brought by an aerial tramway five miles long, and here it was concentrated to 60 per cent tin before starting on its long journey to Liverpool, there to be converted from oxide of tin to the metal tin which coats our so-called tin cans. .
From the mill the men were accustomed to traveling to the mine in the open buckets of this ropeway, but we women were stowed in the official automobile for the next few miles, while the mule drivers took our animals cross-country.
Motoring in the high Andes is not fun. The road from the mill wound round and round an almost perpendicular mountain. Water splattered down walls of glistening black slate and spumed across our path. Below us lay giddy, shadowed drops, and in February, the equivalent of our August, the mud was deep and slippery.
Mules are better for this kind of travel; so I was glad when the road dwindled to a thread of a trail and I was again on my mule and jogging upward.
We stopped at the pass which led from our valley to the one in which lay the mine camp to breathe the mules and to hammer life back into cold-stiffened fingers. Even close to the Equator, at 16,000 feet the cold cuts into one's vitals like a keen rapier; but aside from this discomfort, none of us was affected by the altitude.
Over our heads the aerial ropeway buckets passed, the ascending ones empty, the descending ones brimful of ore. Up from the Choquetanga Valley, which spread below us, rolled giant masses of wind-torn…"
7” x 10”, 16 pages, 16 B&W photos plus map
These are pages carefully removed from an actual 1934 magazine.
34K2
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