The Keys to Time

Non-fiction, written by Andrea Piaget, Part one, Immigration from Europe to Bolivia: Bayonne to Riveralta

In 1812, Emperor Alexander I of Russia led its army in the fight against Napoleon and the grand armée of the French Empire. After approximately seven months in Russia, the French were defeated, retreating from the Russian nation. This triumph for the Russian Tsar gained Finnish and Polish territory for the Russian Empire. Upon his death, his successor became his younger brother Nicholas I, Emperor of Russia, King of Congress Poland, and Grand Duke of Finland, whose reign lasted from December 26, 1825, until March 2, 1855, during a time when Britain was passing through the end of the Georgian Era, the former king of the period, William IV, whose reign took place from June 26, 1830, until June 20, 1937, when her successor, Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, reign began in June 20, 1837 until January 22, 1902. In the 19th century, the monarchy was paramount in telling us what happened in history, and it will forever continue to anchor us in time. 

During Queen Victoria's reign, access to education increased rapidly during the 19th century. State-funded schools were established in England and Wales, and private education for wealthier children became formalized. For many today, the Victorian Era may feel like it took place long ago, but what if I tell you it did not happen that long ago, refresh our memories, and give us a point of référence?

It was during a time of British expansion overseas and conflicts within Central Europe when my third great-grandmother, a German woman, married a Polish gentleman when Poland was struggling with ongoing partitions of Polish territory by three European giants. These governments used to be the Astro-Hungarian Empire, which, from 1867 to 1918, was a multinational constitutional monarchy. Prussia was a German state located on the Northern European plain, occupying southern and eastern regions. It later formed the German Empire when all German states united in 1871, and finally, the Russian Empire. 

The 19th century was an active time of land seizing in Central Europe, creating conflicts escalating to the First World War in the twentieth century following the July crisis of 1914, which broke unexpectedly after almost a century of continuous conflict. The First World War was a conflict between the Entente Powers, led by France, Russia, the British Empire, Italy in 1915, and the United States in 1917, who defeated the Central Powers, led by the German, Astro-Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Ottoman Empires. Russia withdrew from the war after the Russian Revolution in 1917. 

On January 8, 1918, American president Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the twenty-eight president of the United States from 1913 to 1921, issued The Fourteen Points at The Treaty of Versailles, a statement of principles of peace to be used for peace negotiations to end the First World War, outlining a policy of free trade, open agreements, and democracy. The Treaty of Versailles called for negotiation to end the war, international disarmament, the withdrawal of the central powers from occupied territory, the creation of the Polish state, the redrawing of European borders, and the formation of a League of Nations to guarantee political independence and territorial integrity of all states. Poland became independent via the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919.  

During an ongoing upheaval, land seizing, and annexations of Poland, my third great-grandparents chose to live in Côte Basque on the French western border with Spain in Bayonne, where their son Amadeus Czerniewicz Heitzmann was born in 1875. Twenty-five years later, in 1900, after having earned an education in Finance in Seville, Spain, his friends, the Suárez Brothers, four ambitious men in business, including Nicolás Suárez, and his brothers Gregório, Romulo, and Fransisco, asked him to travel to the affluent Bolivian lands of Riveralta to be a financier of the House of Suárez empire during the peaking period of the rubber boom. The eldest brother, Fransisco Suárez, left Bolivia for England in 1871 to become the Bolivian Consul-General in London and open a trading house. The rubber from the House of Suárez was exclusively traded from Bolivia to the English market for a while. 

In her recollections of the past, my grandmother shares that this company also exported wood to France and England and, later, chestnuts. They would import elegant Spanish furniture, art, musical instruments, and rugs from Europe into Riveralta to decorate their residences. During his stay in the Bolivian Oriente, my third great-grandfather, Amadeus Czerniewicz Heitzmann, fell in love with a Bolivian woman with whom he had four children. Two boys and two girls. After an irreconcilable rupture in their relationship, Amadeus returned to Spain with his four kids, where his two girls died from Spanish fever. The boys attended a catholic boarding school eight miles outside the city of Paris in a town called Bry-sur-Marne, the eldest from the age of seven.  

The city of Riveralta resides within the department of Bení, one of the nine departments that make modern-day Bolivia. It borders Brazil to the north, the Department of Santa Cruz de La Sierra to the east, the Department of Cochabamba to the south, and the Department of La Paz to the west. Riveralta is a small city located north of the Amazon, referred to as Bolivia's Amazonian capital, with a population of 89,000 today. In the 1900s, it was populated mainly by indigenous communities and traditional Europeans, primarily by Barons of Spanish heritage, with the money to invest and work the lands. The city was built around the Amazonian Cuenca, at the confluence of the Bení and Madre de Dios Rivers, the most appointed for transportation. 

Since the mid-19th century, explorers and navigators in Northern Bolivia knew about the ravine that was more than thirty meters high, around 100 feet, erected and blessed by the confluence of the two colossal rivers, which turned this city into the economic center of the Northern part of the nation. The Amazon rubber boom, also known as the Amazon rubber fever, peaked between 1879 and 1912, experiencing a revival between 1942 and 1945. The discovery of rubber vulcanization by Charles Goodyear, patented in 1844, exhibited at the World's Fairs in the 50s, and the pneumatic tire invented by John Boyd Dunlop in 1888 continued to give rise to rubber extraction in the mid-twentieth century.

Natural rubber is extracted from large trees by rubber tapping, slicing a groove into the bark at a depth of one-quarter inch from the hevea brasiliensis, castilla ulei, and gutta-percha, amongst other trees. Later, ammonia is incorporated to prevent the metéria-prima from solidifying, succeeding with acid, introduced into the mix to extract the natural rubber through a process known as coagulation. Once the product was ready for export, it was carefully packed and shipped through the rivers of the Bolivian lowlands, first by water and then by land, until it arrived at the coast of the South American continent to ship to Europe by sea.