I visited the former Hacienda Santa María Regla in the state of Hidalgo and it amazed me. The property is now being turned into a hotel with a temescal in one of the old factory buildings. You can rent the entire place to hold your wedding. All I can find on it is tourist information, but our guide had a great deal of historical information. Someone should write a dissertation.
This fortress like place was an industrial hacienda which refined the gold and silver mined at Real del Monte and brought by mule through long underground tunnels. Founded in 1760, it was manned by 1,000 indigenous slaves. They were worked to exhaustion and then put in a basement room to wait for death. Once dead, they were cut open in case they had swallowed any gold. Finally, the bodies were handed over to the families for burial.
Gold parting uses dangerous chemicals and the temperatures at which the metals melt is very high. Observing what operations were at this hacienda makes work in the sugar factories of the era look easy. I think sulphur and antimony processes were used here, although mineral acids may have been used as well. The rooms in which this work was undertaken are many and enormous, and the machinery is very heavy. The person assigned to check oven temperatures had their eyeballs boiled. That meant each person could only be used once for this task, but this did not matter because they were expendable persons.
The hacienda’s founder was penniless when he started out, but was the richest man in the world when he died in 1781, by which time he had also bought the title of Count. The Virgin of Regla reigns over the hacienda chapel; she looks exactly like the famous one in Havana and was apparently carved by the same carver.
After Independence the hacienda fell into disuse, but President Benito Juárez, in an effort to revive mining, gave a concession to a Welsh company. Many Welsh miners arrived, and the Welsh pasty was introduced in town. These are now the regional delicacy and people drive up from Mexico City at weekends to eat them. You can have potato and leek pasties, like the Welsh, or lamb and mint pasties, because lamb is as Mexican as it is Celtic. There are pasties of chile verde and mole negro, and sweet pasties.
As this is mountainous country with rivers and pools and basaltic prisms, there are also many trout. That is why the dissertation which will be written, will end in a lagoon. Right now, however, there are still many lacunae in this story.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
So fascinating. And horrifying. Boiled eyeballs *shudder.*
My mother talks about the torture chambers in the basement of the Santa Barbara Mission where the Indians were taken if they objected to being worked to death.
Ugh. Cruelest people who ever lived, along with the Nazis.
SB Mission, good God.
Cruelest, I don’t know: check out Cecil Rhodes’ activities in Africa, etc., there are so many examples of cruelty.
Boiled, I think the eyeballs were really just cooked, but I say boiled because I imagine them to have ended up like hard-boiled eggs.
What is so obvious about the gold refinery, though, is that capitalism is evil. First you have people mining the stuff, then this deadly refining process. And all because of the addiction to money.
What galls me is the religiosity and pretense of virtue, but that of course only supports your point that religion is false, faux, and FOX.
Talked, I should say. She is always present to me.
N. Ed. Yes, fortunately some people do remain present. –Z
And let us not overlook the role of the Catholic Church in all this horror.
Yes. And I didn’t find the Pope Joan movie outstanding, but it was valiant as an anticlerical vehicle.
And: I should edit this post to add that pollution from the 18th century has the land around this refinery infertile to this day. All these chemicals got into the river they had harnessed for purposes of refining, and deposited the poisons in the land.
Ah — also, in these places in Hidalgo, tortillas are still handmade. In this century have had intermittent trouble finding handmade tortillas in the states of Mexico, Oaxaca, and Chiapas.
N. Ed.: Here was a spam comment which reminded me of this fascinating post. –Z