Treasure of the World by Tara Sullivan (free ebook reader txt) 📕

back to Bolivia in 2016. It was worth the risk: it was an amazing trip. I even got to visit my old elementary school!

Completely by chance, I arrived in Potosí on the first of April—the 471st anniversary of the Spaniards finding silver in the mountain. I watched the parade and listened to the speeches much like Ana does in this book.

Then I went up the mountain.

Through the generosity of the organization Voces Libres, I was able to tag along for the day to Escuela Robertitio, a tiny school for miners’ children high on the Cerro Rico. I interviewed the teachers and the school psychologist about their work, and I talked to the children about their hopes and dreams.

What stunned me most was the difference that emerged between groups of kids. When I chatted with the six- to eight-year-olds and asked them what they wanted to do with their lives, they all had enthusiastic answers. One wanted to be a teacher, another a beautician. But when I asked the same question to the older kids, the eleven- to thirteen-year-olds, they had no answers. They merely shrugged. By that age, most of the boys were working in the mine after school and the girls were working as palliris, breaking refuse rock with their families to try to make ends meet. Many of them had already given up hope of doing anything different with their lives. Instead, they mapped that hope onto their younger siblings. “Maybe my little brother can get away,” one of the older girls told me, not meeting my eyes.

The clash between the two realities shown in this note’s epigraphs—the blinding wealth produced by the mountain and the crushing poverty experienced by those who have extracted that wealth over the centuries—is the core injustice that drove me to tell this story. I wanted to explore how a girl could dig out from under the weight of generational poverty where the generations began in the 1500s. I wanted to showcase Bolivia, in all its stunning Andean glory and societal complexity, for readers unfamiliar with the country. But most of all, I wanted to write a possible future for the girls—Jadahi, Emily, Noelia, Joela, Jimena, Cintia, and Emiliane—I had met on the Mountain That Eats Men. May they not suffer as their forebearers have.

A NOTE on the USE OF ITALICS, LANGUAGES, and the BIBLE

There has recently been some discussion over whether non-English words should or should not be italicized in a predominantly English text. The argument is that such italicization serves to highlight the foreignness of those words and is not the way bilingual people think or speak. However, the story I wanted to tell in Treasure of the World was not one of bilingual identity. In this book, my characters are not code-switching between English and other languages: they are not using English at all. For clarity, I have chosen to italicize non-English words—not to highlight that they are a change from the way my characters have been speaking, but to remind my readers that the characters are speaking a language that is not English throughout.

So how, in an English-language text, could I best represent Spanish? Whenever possible, I have tried to reflect the fact that my characters are speaking Spanish at the level of word choice and grammar. For example, I have used Spanish colloquialisms (“if you give him a hand, he’ll take your arm”) rather than their English equivalents (“give him an inch, he’ll take a mile”) and kept the subjunctive mood, which is optional in English but mandatory in Spanish. Similarly, the response Ana gives to the readings in church is not the response one would give in English, but a translation of the Mass response from the Spanish. My hope was that, though these choices might make the phrasing feel jarring to Anglophone readers, moments like this would help sink them into the cadence of the language my characters would really be speaking. In addition, some of the Spanish used in this book may not be familiar even to native speakers, as many of the terms are regionally specific to Bolivia.

And what of the Quechua? Variations in the spelling of Quechua come from the fact that the Inca had no written language. More than one modern spelling has evolved to capture the sound of the oral language. Moreover, Quechua is spoken from southern Colombia to northern Argentina and has many regional variations. I took the phrases and spellings used in this book from my graduate school studies with Francisco Tandioy Jansasoy at Indiana University. Though the words I have used are quite basic and likely do not vary regionally, it is possible—as Francisco taught me the type of Quechua (Inga) that was his native language growing up in the Sibundoy Valley in highland Putumayo, Colombia—that there may be discrepancies between the words I have used on the page and the Quechua spoken by the families of the Cerro Rico. I was not able to check it on my research trip as, sadly, my “classroom Quechua” did not stretch far enough for me to do much more than greet my sources politely. To conduct more detailed interviews, I was assisted by a Spanish-Quechua interpreter familiar with the local dialect.

Lastly, the Bible translation used in the text is from the World English Bible, a public domain Modern English translation of the Holy Bible found on biblegateway.com. The Catholic Church rotates biblical readings based on church season. The Gospel reading that Ana hears in the cathedral (Matthew 4:1–11, the temptation of Christ in the desert) is traditionally the reading used for the first Sunday in Lent. In 2016, the first of April was the Friday after Easter. This would most definitely not be the reading you would hear in a Catholic Mass on this day. However, as the passage had interesting resonances with the fictional story I wanted to tell, I used it anyway.

All other errors and