Last week I participated in a wake for the martiarch of a local mining family in Potosí. The five children spent their entire savings shipping the body back from Argentina, where the woman had died of cancer.

The ceremony lasted until sunrise and, as is the custom in Bolivia, we sat with the body all night.

My friend Zenón Oxachoque, who had invited me to the vigil, said the tradition of sitting with the deceased dates back to when Bolivians did not have the technology to confirm when a body had gone completely lifeless.

“In those days they would sit 48 hours with the body,” Oxachoque said. “It was more common to be buried alive then.”

I’ve heard of similar practices in other countries, including my own, but particularly Bolivian is the nostalgic conviction not to let these rituals go out of practice.

Modern Bolivians identify with a whimsical mish-mash of cultures, taking from the indigenous peasant society of the country’s origin, Spanish colonialism, and the smartphone revolution.

Mining, one of the most dangerous professions on the planet, is woven into the fabric of this community in Potosí. The spiritual system by which it understands death incorporates this dangerous profession into its practices.

Death in the mines

With the eeriness of Dante’s gates of hell, someone has painted a message on the entrance of Potosí’s main mining mausoleum at the town cemetery.

“Silence! here rest the men who left their lungs in the mines,” it reads.

There are three ways you can die inside a mine, Oxachoque told me. Asphyxiation, a dynamite misfire, or a tunnel collapse.

“Death is always top of mind,” a miner of the 27 de Marzo Cooperative called “Chino” told me. “We work underneath a mountain and death is always all around. But that is the value for us. It gives us power.”

In January, five young miners died from carbon monoxide poising in one day inside the mountain.

Often the cause of such deaths is the rain, which moves gases, such as carbon monoxide, through empty cavities inside the mountain, said Rolando Colque Rios, a former miner and tour guide.

Some of the miners use 1950s-style carbide lamps, which burn acetylene gas that changes color when carbon monoxide or other deadly gases enter the work area. But even that method of prevention is uncommon.

Of the more than 15,000 miners who work inside Cerro Rico, about 35 die each year due to accidents, Oxachoque said. And when an accident occurs the whole community comes together to help the family deal with the loss.

By far the greatest killer of miners is a disease called silicosis, caused by inhaling the small bits of hard silicon dust over a long period of time.

The average life expectancy of a Cerro Rico miner is 40 years because of the disease, according to articles by the BBC and Time Magazine.

Rios said he has heard of men who worked just four years in the mine before contracting the silicosis.

In all of my trips to the mines, I never saw one miner wearing a mask. Some of them said they use them, but only when jackhammering.

The devil inside

Most Bolivian miners believe that the only thing standing between themselves and death is an underground god called El Tio, the foil or anti-god of the above ground Quechua goddess Pachamama or Mother Earth.

Each mine has its own clay or concrete Tío, placed in a quiet recess, shielded from any possible stray dynamite blasts. Most of the Tío statures resemble a devil with horns and a large, unclothed penis and testicles – a source of pride for the miners.

A week after my first visit, Oxachoque and I visited a Tío that he had made in the San Miguel Mine, operated by the 1 de Abril Mining Cooperative.

Sitting next to the statue, the miners acted quiet and restrained.

I watched as one miner in a Cleveland Indians hat and a dusty soccer jersey quietly placed a lit cigarette in Tío’s mouth and then sat down to sip alcohol with a thick plug of coca leaves stuffed into his cheek.

Coca is the active ingredient in the illegal drug cocaine. However, the unprocessed, leaf form is the essential Bolivian habit. Coca is both legal to possess and consume here.

Miners take twenty-four-hour shifts in the mine, taking nothing more with them than a bag of coca for nourishment.

Oxachoque’s apartment

The night of the wake we went by Oxachoque’s apartment to pick up some candles and bottles of alcohol. Since his mother died in January, Oxachoque wears black clothing and will continue for one full year of mourning.

“It’s obligatory,” he said.

Down the street, inside the downstairs living room of a back alley home, the wake had already begun.

In the center of a floor scattered with coca leaves and cigarette ash, stood the woman’s coffin, covered in colorful flowers, photographs and her favorite meal, a tomato lentil dish, which had long since gone cold.

All night her sons roamed around the room, mopping away tears and offering trays of coca leaves, cigarettes and a hot drink called “té con té,” a kind of a Bolivian hot toddy, an infusion of cinnamon, coffee bean husk and pure alcohol.

Every hour the brother of the dead would rise and say a prayer in mixed Quechua and Spanish. When he was through, the mourners would pour a sip of their drinks on the floor as an offering to the Pachamama.

By 5 a.m., after hours of rich conversation, coca and endless cups of strong alcoholic tea, the service ended. Many of the men went straight to work in the mountain.