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One day we ended up celebrating with some of the women on the day of comadres, which is dedicated to women. It’s almost like a Mother’s Day, but more for the women of the mines. We brought along serpentinas and decorations and drinks and some beer and stuff to celebrate with the women, but when we got there we found that most of the men were just kind of off working and they weren’t paying it a lot of attention. So, in a sense, we kind of got the party started. It was almost like our presence forced the men to acknowledge that they were supposed to put down their tools and go out and buy some beer and celebrate with the women.

Steph: Interesting.

Jason: Especially after a couple drinks. A lot of the women have many children and their husbands have run off and so they have to basically sort the rubble outside of the mines to try and scrape together a living. So they become kind of sad on that day, and then the men start to feel really bad that they’re not paying more respect to the women because they remember their mothers. And all of a sudden everybody’s starting to remember their mothers and everybody’s got tears in their eyes. I wasn’t expecting that. I was expecting more of a festive atmosphere.

Steph: So if you were to do this project over, is there anything that you would do differently next time?

Jason: I don’t know if I could quite put it in those terms because this is still an ongoing project for me. I’m trying to work on a photo project which is essentially a biography of the Bolivian miner. I hope to dig into the allegory of the miner’s life and his Faustian bargain. And everything the miner represents in terms of a prototypical revolutionary figure in Bolivia, as well.

It’s something I would have liked to have done for the original story as well, but there’s only so much time and that type of thing takes a lot more time. You can’t just show up for a few weeks and get into that, necessarily, unless you’re very lucky.

Steph: So do you have plans to go back then?

Jason: Yes. I’ll definitely be going back this year, sometime before the elections in December. It could be sooner or later depending on how things go here.

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