El Amparo is located 65 kilometers due west of Guadalajara and for many years its silver mines were the richest in Jalisco. Engineer Salvador Landeros grew up at the mines and eventually became General Manager of all the operations.)
I was born in what was then called the Villa of Etzatlán in the state of Jalisco on December 31, 1905. At the age of three months, I went to live in a remote place called Amparo where my mother had been hired to wet-nurse Fany, the newly born daughter of Mr. Santiago Howard, Manager of the Amparo Mining Company. And that’s where I grew up.
One of the people from my childhood I could never forget was a man with only one leg whom everybody called No Ambition (Poca Lucha). This man couldn’t work, but he had a special talent: he knew by heart all the stories of the Thousand and One Nights. We children all loved to get together with him at night to listen to his stories. Sometimes the grown-ups would come join us kids and everyone would give ten or fifteen centavos to our fascinating story-teller. And that’s how I passed my time before I reached school age, listening to those stories and playing. It was a peaceful time.
I fell in love with music at a tender age. Every time I heard music playing near the main office, I would go listen. The waltzes from that period were so exquisite I felt I was in heaven and when a string quintet would play them at sunrise, why, even the dogs stopped barking and perked up their ears to listen attentively.
It was the period of Romanticism, which ended in the 1940’s. I would say that never in my long life have I heard more beautiful pieces. Eventually, I studied violin and in the orchestra I played many of those old waltzes and much more, including classical music…and I think I was not bad.When I finished fifth grade at school, we were told, “That’s it. That’s all we do at Amparo.” However, our teacher, Miss Rosario Renteria, had recently come to Amparo from Guadalajara and asked the authorities for permission to add a sixth year, since there were eight of us in the class and we all had good marks. So, I completed sixth grade, attending school in the morning and studying music in the afternoon. No more children’s games!
Once I completed sixth grade, it marked the end of my career of studies. I couldn’t apply to a college in Guadalajara because my mother didn’t have enough money and besides, in the time of Porfirio Díaz, poor kids could not go to a college and mix with the rich, the children of hacienda owners.
From 1918 to 1928 was the period of the mine’s bonanza. It was a sort of paradise on earth. Because overland transportation was so poor, we had everything at El Amparo. The company store carried all kinds of meat and vegetables, clothing, liquor, shoes and even freshly baked bread. And nothing was expensive. A family of eight could live for a week on 15 pesos.
Of course, on Saturdays the miners wanted to do something different after working all week under the ground, so there would be dances in three or four houses at the same time. At Amparo there were always more than enough musicians to go around. We had a real symphony orchestra with 36 elements and it was just as good as the Guadalajara Symphonic of those days. In addition, we had two bands that played popular music and there was even an opera house.
On a Sunday, after eating, there were games. One of them was called Little Jars (Los Cantaritos). We would have about 50 tiny baked-clay pots made at a time. To play the game, we would form a big circle and each person had a cantarito. The idea was to throw yours to someone else who had to catch it without breaking it. Finally, there would be only one jar left and everybody had to be very careful because if it broke, the person who should have caught it was obliged to pay for the musicians and another set of cantaritos for the next game. Instead of getting drunk Sunday evenings, we used to play games like this until it was finally time to go to the cinema. And from there it was off to bed because a lot of the men had to get up early the next morning to work.
The Treacherous Tramway
We have an old saying: La confianza mata al hombre (Taking things for granted will kill you) and I have a story to back that up.
When mining was at its peak at Amparo, we had an aerial tramway which transported the raw ore down to Las Jiménez in big containers suspended from steel cables strung between four towers. To avoid accidents, riding in the ore buckets was forbidden, but there were always a few characters willing to take a chance. Now, on various occasions, the electricity would go off, but usually for less than five minutes. If the men running the tramway were going to cut off the power for a longer time, they would send word up and down the system by telephone, warning people not to ride in the containers.
Of course — even though it was prohibited — It was mighty convenient to get a ride uphill from Jiménez to Amparo and even people not working for the company used to take advantage. One of these outsiders was doing exactly that one day when the bucket he was riding in suddenly came to a halt 15 meters from the tallest tower. Now, by chance, there was a deep arroyo right at the foot of that tower, so the distance down to the ground was about 40 meters. Well, this fellow was sitting in the container, hanging in the air and he waited a long time and nothing happened. And he waited some more — and some more. And finally he just had to get down from that ore bucket and he looked at that distance, only fifteen meters, and must have thought it would be easy to get to the tower just by holding on to the thick cable with his hands and walking along the thin cable below it with his feet. So he went for it and got about six meters when suddenly the power came back on and the containers started moving. Well, the very bucket he had been in came straight at him and cut his hands right off and he gave a shout which was heard by a passerby who saw him fall to his death. When they found his broken body at the bottom of the arroyo, they discovered he wasn’t even a miner. The poor guy was living all along in Las Jiménez and no one had any idea where he had been going or why he had climbed into that container.
The Purloined Ingot
The silver produced at Amparo was melted down into ingots weighing 35 kilos each, which were then transported to the bank of London in Mexico City. One day a policeman was watching over a pile of these silver bars outside the foundry, waiting for a truck to come pick them up. Well, the guard walked away for a moment and some wise guy who had been watching ran up, grabbed a bar and threw it down into a deep canyon just next to the building.
When the truck arrived, they counted the bars as they loaded them and found one missing. Well they all went crazy looking for that silver ingot and because there was no way to account for what had happened to it, they naturally blamed the guard and Antonio Leal, the head of security, arrested him.
Now they were all set to send the guard to Etzatlán when along came a common laborer who said he had been walking in the arroyo and had come upon a little house and just inside the door he had spotted something white and shiny lying on a brick.
Antonio Leal — with his entire Police Force — went straight to the house in question and sure enough, there was the missing bar of silver. Antonio then began hunting high and low for the owner of the house and finally found him planting corn. So they arrested him and took him to the office where Antonio Leal was all set to hang him from a pole.
At this moment, however, one of the doctors came along and asked what had happened. After hearing the whole story, he declared that Antonio Leal had no legal right to execute anyone and how could the accused have stolen the ingot without being seen. “And where did you find that ingot hidden?” he asked.
“We could see it because the door was open,” someone said.
“No,” said someone else. “It’s a shack and has no door at all.”
“OK,” said the doctor. “Bring the man here and let me talk to him alone.” Then he said to the man. ”Alright, how did you steal that silver bar?”
And the man said, “Sir, I didn’t steal no silver bar. I just found that heavy thing down in the arroyo when I was looking for kindling wood and it looked awfully pretty, so I brought it home and put it on top of a brick to make a chair, ‘cause I don’t have anything to sit on in my little shack.”
By now Don Guillermo Howard, the head man at Las Jiménez, had arrived. “This man is telling the truth,” said the doctor to Don Guillermo. “If he had known what he had in his possession, he wouldn’t be here now.”
“You’re right,” replied Don Guillermo. “We can’t blame him for anything. Look, not even the President of Mexico has had the privilege of resting his butt on an ingot of pure silver, as this man has so innocently done. He is guilty of nothing.”
He sent the man home but the poor fellow was so frightened, he simply vanished and was never seen around Amparo again.
(My thanks to geologist Justus Mohl who somehow managed to locate a copy of Salavador Landeros’ 220-page manuscript, containing memoirs, diagrams, maps and photographs of a mining community and lifestyle about which we previously knew precious little.)