Santa Prisca was built there to drive away thunder; the devilish soul of silver, for its part, still hovers over the town.A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the silver road runs 2,560 kilometres from Taxco, in Mexico, to Las Vegas, in the United States. Built by the colonists, it was used from the 16th to the 19th century to carry the silver mined locally to Spain. Yesterday, people travelled it with carts full of silver; today, they rush towards the United States in the hope of finding money. On this road of adventurers, strewn with pitfalls and dangers, one meets undocumented migrants dreaming of a better fate, craftsmen who work the precious metal with passion, miners toiling underground, and others still who flee the “money system” in a hermitage or within a community.
“Money is round so it can roll”, says a proverb: no doubt what the Spanish colonists told the Indigenous peoples after discovering the precious ore. It was in Taxco, five hundred years ago, that Hernán Cortés first found silver in Mexico; the Indigenous peoples then saw gold and silver as the excrement of the sun and the moon. The mines are closed, but the metal is still worked by hand. Eduardo García, a taxi driver, drives to a workshop through alleys designed for carts and mules; one day his brakes failed on a descent, he said nothing to his passengers, and faith did the rest. In the workshop, a dozen craftsmen heat, insert, set. Raúl prefers necklaces and bracelets, and at his age would not change trades now; his daughter has a real one, “less effort, more money”. Further north, at La Montesa, Don Chepito Díaz de León has founded a small museum, the Ali Baba’s cave of the road: coins found along the old way, fallen from carts and stagecoaches or lost during attacks. Thieves, a pistol to his temple, took two albums of them from him. With Tony, his neighbour, the metal detector sets hearts racing, and an old cross comes out of the ground.
Silver is bought in granules, then mixed with copper to make it malleable: it will come out as a wire or a sheet.
The first quality of a silversmith, according to Raúl: skill, above all.Beside the tracks, a young man begs so he can continue his journey by train. That very morning, cartel men slashed his eye. Out of a rehabilitation centre after seven and a half years, with no work in his village, he wants to reach the United States and find some small job there. Further on, a station of transit and trafficking, where the train never whistles: La Bestia, “the death train”. Every year, 150,000 undocumented migrants from El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and all of Central America reach out towards the north from here; between kidnappings and passage fees, this traffic is said to be the second largest in the country, after drugs. People pay for tacos, bananas and cardboard, then climb aboard, a good thousand on the roofs of the wagons. Luis comes from Honduras. He has heard about the thugs, the kidnappings, the man whose legs the train cut off, but does not want to go home: he believes in God, will take any work, will learn English by watching lips, and will put aside ten dollars a day to support his family. A hundred and fifty kilometres in eighteen hours, and it is Zacatecas, on election day. Daniel Collins, American by birth, cooks there; he was once head chef on Place de Clichy, in Paris.
To limit the risk of being kidnapped by the cartels, the crew left their passports behind and brought a rope to tie themselves to the train.
Without stopping, it takes a month to reach the United States; working along the way, six months, a year.
“Tentacular, unexpected”: on arrival in the city, the train has lost its migrants.Following a horseman, one comes upon a garden of Eden in the middle of the desert: a Mennonite community governed by precepts five centuries old. 40,000 of them have taken refuge in Mexico, for God and for the cows. Jacobo Neufeld, one of the few who speak a language other than Old German, milks his with his two sons: the cow knows no Sundays. “Money is bad”, he says; when there is a lot of it, there is a lot of destruction, and always someone claiming to be king of the world. The Mennonites have nevertheless chosen to move forward, but still without telephone or television. Near the border, in one of the most dangerous regions of the country, a hermit has lived for ten years in the mountains, three hours from the village. Nancy arrived with a suitcase, knew hunger, made pottery from mud, then was given a goat. “The mountain gives us everything”; God, whom she sought in monasteries, was within her. One night, Rodolfo García, known as the king of the desert, leads city dwellers to a cave, “the devil’s mouth”, in search of peyote. A goat farmer ruined by three years of drought, he does not call himself a guide, but simply a ferryman who opens the doors of the desert.
Among the Mennonites, hospitality is a duty: in the evening, cookies at sunset and a silent prayer.
Next project: a greenhouse, to plant in winter and harvest all year round.
Peyote is said to allow the Huichol to communicate with the gods.Eight hours’ drive to the La Encantada silver mine: a slag heap, a chimney, 150 workers, a few revolvers for security, and nearly a hundred kilometres of tunnels. The silver road is above all underground. Rogelio Galicia Ovalle, the geologist, does the sums: 2,200 tonnes extracted per day, for 300 to 310 grams of silver per tonne. Fear of the depths, he says, you put aside over the years. Mexico is the world’s leading silver producer, 5,000 tonnes a year, and foreigners invest no less than 8 billion dollars there every year: the poor at the bottom of the pit, the rich in the sun. In a secret hangar, the ore melts at 1,200 degrees to become ingots. A smelter turns out thirty to forty bars a day, 1,200 to 1,300 kilos; spending so much time with all this silver, he feels as though it is a little bit his. Then comes a wall, and behind it the Rio Grande, the natural border between Mexico and the United States, crossed after a good two hours at walking pace.
Silver was discovered 3,500 years before Christ; here, an ingot sells for 800 euros a kilo.
The hardest part, day to day: being in contact with the smoke.At the end of the silver road, Las Vegas, the city of every vice. Two Mexicans, Christian and Angel, play Elvis there for a few banknotes. Christian came across like all immigrants, two days and three nights in the desert, stung by a scorpion and bitten by a viper, among the corpses: “you come here to win or lose”. No money, no costume, no gel, no Elvis. In the casinos, nothing tells the time or the day, everything is designed to feed addiction, and the slot machine, that evening, displays an error. A few hours’ drive away, Kat, an old Navajo friend, shows what is being done to the land of his ancestors: behind the barbed wire, machines several storeys high extract oil, gas, uranium, coal and silver. An elder told him that they are tearing off the skin of Mother Earth to reach her liver, the coal. On the hundred-dollar bills, Benjamin Franklin, who wanted to get Native Americans drunk to take their land; on the twenties, Andrew Jackson, president when Kat’s people were massacred. In the morning, in a sweat lodge, financiers from Tokyo come to strip bare before nature.
Here, palm trees are not the only thing grown in the middle of the desert.
Originally from Mexico City, Christian has lived in the United States for thirteen years, ten of them in California.
A new regulation forbids the Navajo to keep more than twenty or so sheep and obliges them to open a bank account.
At the start of this road, there was silver; at the end, a few memories of encounters, the sand, the emptiness and the wind.“I wanted to feel the silver shine, the desire burn, the dream sparkle in the eyes of my characters… From the dirt roads of Mexico to the streets of Las Vegas, reality surpassed all my hopes…”Christophe Cousin