ABSTRACT
T he city of Potosí in South America was so rich in silver that the early-modern world came to use its name as a synonym of wealth, regardless that few people ever even visited the region. During a break from my research on a June afternoon in the 1990s I walked from the archive at the Casa de la Moneda, a building that used to be the Spanish colonial mint, and returned to my apartment to eat lunch and do laundry. The Cerro Rico, the “rich hill” and ubiquitous symbol of this southwestern Bolivian city, stood tall in the distance. The midday sun beamed down on the city from a bright, blue Andean sky. Yet even on the sunniest day Potosí is a cold place to be, and its barren landscape and high altitude can make it feel like it is in the middle of nowhere. Potosí sits at thirteen thousand feet above sea level and is far from any major rivers or bodies of water. As I scrubbed my clothes in the freezing water I wondered—and not for the first time—how did more than one hundred thousand people create a thriving city … here … in this location high in the Andean altiplano during the 1500s?
