Mexican Miners
Present Day – Guanajuato, City of Cervantes
Excerpts from my “Walking Tours of Guanajuato.”
Part II
The Mines
20. LAS MINAS, The Mines: Most of us have no idea how gold and silver end up where they’re found, but the following paragraph from my “México Adventures! Discover México’s Secrets” might help:
“Gold, silver, platinum, and other precious metals were introduced into the earth’s crust by the action of magma which forced its way upward from the much hotter and fluid strata below. The heat of the magma tended to separate and concentrate these various elements. By thrusting upwards, the magma created cracks (fissures, they’re called) in the overlying sedimentary rock. As all of this material was lifted the pressure was reduced (somewhat like taking the lid off of a pressure cooker), and streams of super hot gasses and water carried various minerals into the fissures the magma had created. As these intrusions or veins, oftentimes containing gold and silver along with the rock, cool they solidify. Deep mining operations follow these veins back down into the earth.”
Once a vein is discovered, the rock is tested for its gold or silver content in a laboratory. If the percentage of precious metal is enough to prove profitable, all the rock in the vein is extracted from the mine, and the ore is processed to remove most of the gold and silver it contains. (Even modern day extraction methods do not remove every trace of precious metal.) A really good vein is called a bonanza in Spanish as well as English.
Guanajuato is filled with many popular legends, and linked these days with Miguel de Cervantes, romantic Quixote spirits, and the Festival Cervantino (a yearly festival of music and dance).
Also present in Guanajuato—logically it has to be—is that indispensable poetical ingredient known as “fantasy”.
Late in the XVIII century a miner named Florentine Montenegro became a legend:
Florentine was a spendthrift prospector, swindler, and miner at the mine of San Juan de Rayas. It was his habit to squander any and all the gold he found with parties, drinking, gambling, and orgies. He and his friends went from opulence to misery and back again over and over.
Florentine, being an assiduous visitor of the houses of bad fame and the taverns along Robles Alley, set out, true to custom, on one of his innumerous carousels a certain night. His pockets were full of a great variety of silver coins, which were the product of the recent coinage of the active mint in the city of Guanajuato.
Money, wine, and the most extravagant excesses flowed, and diminished little by little as the pockets of our spendthrift Florentine emptied. At two o’clock sharp the friends retired, and he decided to retire too. Passing through the adjoining Alley of the Dead Dogs, he heard a feminine voice, soft and sweet, calling him from a house from which came a pleasant inviting warmth.
A woman in white showed him a table laden with food and drink. He downed a glass of liqueur which seemed to him to be a rare beverage, making him feel immediately queer such as he had never felt before.
In this state of mind Florentine tried to make love to the lady, where upon she led him by the hand towards what he believed to be a subterranean room. Florentine, an adventurous man, let himself be led through a strange red luminous vapor down what seemed to be an interminable number of steps. Down, down they went and Florentine, hearing moaning, began to shiver.
Seized by panic, Florentine tried several times to free himself from the woman’s grasp, but she encouraged him onward with a sweet glance. He felt safer in her company until finally they arrived on a landing.
He saw a closely packed procession of dehumanized beings coming by. They were beating one another with lashes full of barbs and thorns. They writhed horribly, victims of the blows that they reciprocally administered. He was alone!
From the walls of the cavern flowed thick layers of boiling lava, and from the ceiling scalding water, which burned the shoulders of the miner.
He then saw a most pitiless flagellator, a huge diabolical being, along with the lady in white, clearly a demon too, gazing at him, and coming toward him in a threatening attitude.
The horrified Florentine screamed and scrambled up the stairs in full flight, conscious of the demons chasing him. He climbed those interminable stairs faster than he thought possible, and when he came at last to the top he rushed through the outer door, and completely exhausted he fell unconscious to the ground.
Florentine was found by neighbors the next day, but remained a complete imbecile for days afterward unable to utter a coherent word. After many days he recovered, but when he told his friends his tale it was greeted with shouts and laughter.
Never the less, he reformed his life, and became one of the most honest, industrious, and generous men at the mine!
Mexican Prospector
Living and Writing in Mexico 
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