To read about mine conditions, clickhere, and to read more about Julio Zambrana and the Cruz family, click here.
Martina (far left) is next to Daisy, 15, who is pregnant. Miriam Cruz, Alex’s wife, is with one of their two daughters, while Zaida and Grover Isaac Frafán Ortega (far right) have four children.
Martina and Miriam, her daughter-in-law, peel potatoes that they harvested from their plot in the field, on the outskirts of the municipality of Potosí. Every two weeks, the family stays in a small hut on their land while they grow their produce. Martina turns the potatoes into Papa Rellenas, a traditional Bolivian street food that she sells to miners returning from the hill. Miners generally do not eat inside the mountain, but instead use juice and coca leaves to calm hunger.
She is the matriarch of five children and ten grandchildren. Unlike the rest of her family, whose clothing reflects the gradual disappearance of traditional Bolivian dress in the country's urban centers, her traditional pleated skirt served as a shelter from the dry winds for the children, who hid in its folds. The bare terrace of the Cruz house is exposed to the dry winds of the altiplano, and the temperature drops several degrees compared to the sheltered streets of the historic center of Potosí. The house, built by Guillermo Cruz, Martina's husband and Julio's mining partner since he was 18 years old, is no longer his home. Thirteen members of the family inhabit the two-bedroom house, along with a litter of puppies. Julio is outside his office, wearing his alpaca coat for the cold Potosí winter. He commissioned a local craftsman to cover the building's façade with graffiti depicting miners drilling for silver and tin, serving as a reminder of the conditions and way of working he wishes to change through his foundation "A New Dawn for Children." A pile of receipts of payments to miners reflects Julio's achievements in his activism. In 2011, he paid a lawyer to reformulate a law that obliges all tourism companies in Potosí to allocate 15% of the price of the ticket to the mining cooperative they visit. Outside of this quota, the miners receive juice, coca leaves and dynamite from tourists, who buy these products at the miners' market. Julio also managed to get several tourism companies removed from the Lonely Planet guide, or the "bible" as he calls it, because of their unethical treatment of miners.
