Southwestern Homelands

by William Kittredge

  Would those monies be paid back, ever? The answer, based on the century-long example of dozens of federally funded reclamation districts around the West, with hundreds of thousands of acres of managed wetlands and thousands of irrigators, is not likely, certainly not entirely. And trust is a workable notion in the community of the like-minded the Animas Foundation deals with, but it’s wispy basis for negotiation in the bottom-line world.

  Some people, nevertheless, think federal money should back up the grassbanks. Losses could be written off as gifts the nation makes to itself, as with reclamation districts, or when we covered for defunct savings-and-loan institutions. They say preserving rural communities is as important as subsidizing United Airlines or Chrysler.

  Unfortunately for ranchers, the range livestock industry is not widely understood as necessary. It’s commonly thought federal funding for programs like the grassbank would constitute a handout. And to an industry with a long history of environmental destruction, an industry the nation doesn’t need except in cowhand dreams. Loans, public will tends to think, should be secured, and foreclosures should always be a possibility.

  Many environmentalists think it would be more sensible to simply retire federal and state lands traditionally used for grazing. Citizens with no connection to ranching are bidding on government grazing leases, which have by custom been the virtual private property of ranchers. And they are outbidding ranchers, who for generations have paid fees so low as to constitute a subsidy. In a case argued by the Arizona Center for Law in the Public Interest on behalf of a group called Forest Guardians, the Arizona Supreme Court slapped down state officials who claimed the leases were for grazers and no one else, saying the leases should be given to the “best bidder” even though the intent was to restore the land rather than run livestock. The land, say the environmentalists, is worth more to the nation than ranchers are likely to be capable of paying.

  Another model for managing the relationship between public lands and ranching is evolving in New Mexico, in the Valles Caldera, or Valle Grande, a 95,000-acre reach of high meadowland under the timbered rim created when an ancient volcano collapsed. In mountains west of Los Alamos, on the headwaters of the Jemez River, the Valle Grande was a Spanish land grant known as the Baca Ranch. Most recently it was owned and lovingly maintained by a Texas oil family.

  It’s now public land, purchased by Congress in 2000, for 101 million dollars, and officially known as the Valles Caldera National Preserve. It won’t be managed by federal agencies, but rather by nine trustees, led by a local named William deBuys, a writer. Their mission is to “protect and preserve the scenic, geological, watershed, fish, wildlife, historic, cultural and recreational values of the preserve, and to provide for multiple use and sustained yield of renewable resources within the preserve.” Quite a mouthful, considering that they must also maintain the property as a working cattle ranch and attempt to be financially self-sufficient by 2017.

  The board is presently committed to a limited elk hunting season in 2002, and a few hundred acres of timber thinning. But there will be, deBuys says, no elitist privileges, and the resources will be carefully maintained, while programs for all the people of New Mexico are slowly developed.

  The following, from a book deBuys co-wrote with Alex Harris, called River of Traps: A Village Life, is testimony to respect for traditional Hispanic ways. “No barbed wire. Open fields. No Forest Service in the mountains with limits and regulations. Every man a farmer and rancher like every other. Every woman, like every other, making do with what her family’s fields and animals yielded. What you did not own you might freely borrow. Neighbors charged no rent. There was no envidia, say the old-timers. No envy. And almost no cash. If there was not always sufficiency, there was at least equality.”

  Mutual respect and trust. Sounds like a lost version of communal paradise. In River of Traps, an old man, lying on the ground beside an irrigation ditch, sleeping, in answer to fears that he might be dead says, “Yah, maybe so. But only like a cat, trying it out.” Limited resurrections are possible.

  Care and reverence loom large in William deBuys’s marching orders. But environmentalists would like to forget the hunting, and get rid of the cattle on the Valles Caldera National Preserve. Some say they’d like to lock the gates.

  Public will to preserve ranching based on public lands will only coalesce if preserving both ranchers and ecologies seems simultaneously possible and in the national interest. People say, shaking their heads sadly, maybe it’s time for the range livestock industry to just wither away. They’re quite willing to write off the sadness of the people whose sense of themselves is doing the withering. They look into the distance when I ask about funding health care, schools, and humanitarian aid for the poor in Mexico.

  The Chiricahua Mountains, where the Apache held out against the U.S. Army until Geronimo surrendered for the last time in 1886, are topped with whimsically eroded stacks and towers of soft reddish rhyolite (people see figures in them, as they do in clouds, camels, forefingers pointing to heaven—one is called Duck on a Rock). Annick and I rove the twisting, graded gravel road over the eastern flank of the mountains, in and out of a scattered roadside settlement called Paradise, and into Cave Creek Canyon. Orangish stone walls rose into the sunset and white-barked sycamores existed like ghosts in shade along the Portal Creek. Portal, just down the road, is reputed to be half Ph.D’s, mostly in the biological sciences. It’s a birder’s semisecret heaven.

  But Douglas, a hundred miles south on the U.S./Mexican border, where the copper ore from Bisbee was processed before the mines closed, is not any sort of heaven. We checked out the art deco lobby in the Gadsden Hotel (spectacular, but the upstairs is indifferent at best; the beds, when we tested them, before moving on, were terrible). The old Vaquero Southwest, on the other hand, was still alive and taking tequila downstairs in the Saddle & Spur Tavern. Ranchland transactions were being resolved in a mixture of Spanish and English. The Saddle & Spur is a zone of transition. Tourist and cowhand versions of value, Anglo and Mexican, intersecting.

  After appropriate margaritas, we drove on a half hour to the old Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee, a hill-slope mining town inhabited by miners and their widows and artsy drifters. On weekends expect a party that can make its way into the streets. Bisbee gets it on. But I’ve lived beyond such delights. In the morning I stood on the porch and thought back to that long-ago night with Abbey and Peacock and Eastlake, saying good-bye to Bill Eastlake for the last time, and tried to imagine the boy I might have been if my grandfather had been old enough to go down in the Butte mines and not become a blacksmith for COPCO in Klamath Falls.

  By noon, after dallying with hummingbirds in Ramsey Canyon, another paradise for birders, we made it to Nogales and crossed the border into Mexico in time to watched a white-haired Utah couple, seemingly sane, dicker over the price of a giant ceramic model of E.T. Then we drifted along into a high-end store called the Green Frog, where nobody would dicker on the prices for elegant, extravagantly imagined pottery. Annick spent serious money on plates to hang on her kitchen wall in Montana.

  For unknown but undoubtedly awful reasons, on the streets we were beset by beggars. Mexico, we think, and its tragedies. We shrug them off as inevitable. But they’re the result of economic policies. Dealings on the border have been, more than ever, inhumanely commodified since NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement—an executive agreement—“opened” the border, at least to many economic transactions. It’s proposed that it be almost entirely opened. But that’s not likely; citizens across the Southwest are infuriated and terrified by the idea of their towns and economies being overwhelmed by thousands upon thousands, maybe millions, of immigrants.

  In any event, a lot of goods cross without paying tariffs. So both economies benefit; that’s the theory. And they perhaps have. But it hasn’t been an entirely win-win deal. Good jobs in the United States were moved to Mexico, to be taken by workers earning less than minimum wage.


  CEOs in the United States, interested in locating production facilities where wages are cheap and environmental constraints are not a serious factor, began setting up factories in borderland Mexico, directly connected to U.S. highways, rather than across the expensive seas in Malaysia. General Motors closed plants in the U.S. and Canada and became the largest employer in Mexico. Factories in Mexico, called maquiladoras, paint Fords, make steering wheels, brake shoes, entire Volkswagons, toasters, Sony TVs, ATMs, modems, you name it, and shorten their workers’ lives by regarding environmental heedlessness as a part of doing business.

  Thousands of Mexican citizens have moved north to the border in order to work in the maquiladoras, and trucks bearing “goods” produced with cheap Mexican labor enter the United States by the thousands every day. It’s a system in which international corporations, and their customers, exploit the poor. In my own case, ducking away from the beggars in Nogales is typical of my relationship to the Mexican poor; ultimately it’s much like a dealing between a master and slaves.

  Meanwhile, the Mexican economy is driven by a “shadow market” in cocaine, heroin, medicines, pesticides banned in the United States, cowboy boots made of endangered sea-turtle flippers, and laundered money. The cocaine trade, it’s said, is worth twice the profits of the Mexican petroleum industry. The police in Sinaloa province, along the western border, are said to cooperate with the drug dealers; they are not simply corrupt, they are in fact another batch of criminals. Mexico goes increasingly outlaw as a result of pandering to U.S. appetites. And hundreds of thousands migrate, or attempt to migrate, into the U.S. The most lucrative racket, after dealing drugs and laundering money, is forging U.S. visas. It’s claimed that 60 percent of the retail economy in Douglas and Nogales turns on drugs, and 25 percent of the economy in Tucson. The war on drugs, if it were to succeed, might destroy the economy in Mexico (not to speak of Tucson).

  Eight hundred thousand Mexicans cross the border legally, many daily, some flashing plastic cards, which constitute a visa. Some have seasonal jobs; others go shopping at Wal-Mart (the Wal-Mart in Laredo, Texas, has the highest per square foot sales of any in the world; Wal-Mart’s sales equal the total GNP of the world’s ninety-three smallest national economies). They take jobs nobody else wants, then they go home to sleep in Mexico. That’s fine with everybody at U.S. immigration.

  But there are many who don’t qualify for visas. They are poor and uneducated, often from the villages. They have no economic ties to anyone but a family which they can better serve by sending money from the U.S. They’re seen as bad risks to overstay any kind of visa, and are semiautomatically rejected. Most don’t bother to apply.

  Four or five thousand are caught trying to cross the border illegally every twenty-four hours. Around Douglas, the hottest point for attempted entry, in March 1999, Border Patrol agents arrested 61,000—almost one hundred per hour.

  But thousands of those who try the border each night succeed. They travel north to work as fruit pickers, gardeners and motel maids and domestic servants, ranch hands and garbage men. They, again, are not really a problem. They work at jobs nobody else wants, for less than a minimum wage, and maintain a very low profile. Lots of Americans love to hire them.

  But we’re troubled by those who fail. They haunt us, sad, eager people who hire a “coyote” to smuggle them across the border in the heat of summer and perish while locked in the trunk of an automobile or wander unto death without water in 120-degree heat. Pulsing needs and yearnings drive them and some die trying.

  Our answer to the “problem” of illegal immigrants, like our answer to that other problem driven by desire, our exploding use of drugs, is a “war.” The battle against illegal immigrants, just like the war on drugs, is against a tide that’s not likely to subside in the foreseeable future. It’s obviously an ongoing, expensive failure—militaristic, inhumane, and foolish.

  Street theory has it that illegals, like the flow of drugs, constitute an unsolvable problem. But that’s nonsensical. Long-term humane solutions don’t lie with “wars” or trickle-down NAFTA economics. Responsible ways of dealing with our borderland troubles, to succeed, must center on giving, by both the U.S. and Mexican governments, and by international corporations which buy and sell on both sides of the border—cutting the poor in on the economic action.

  National governments and the corporations could institute a system of long-term economic stimulus and social aid aimed directly toward the disenfranchised in urban ghettos and backland villages. But there’d be no quick fixes; there’d be literally millions of attempts at graft, many of which succeeded; it would take generations and big-time funding.

  Ethical morale among the Mexican public, and democratic control of both the Mexican government and international economic ties, might eventually evolve. Mexican citizens might generate the will to clean up their banking and justice system, and to put the lid on institutionalized graft. Mexico might become the good clean-handed, clear-hearted neighbor. It’s not a clear choice, but it’s our choice. Otherwise, we’re looking at social and moral chaos. The world can’t be bullied into order.

  Conditions along the border are already out of control. I’ve been studying horrific pictures taken by street photographers and collected in Juárez: The Laboratory of our Future, with text by Charles Bowden, an introduction by Noam Chomsky, and an afterword Eduardo Galeano (whose three-volume Memories of Fire is the most necessary text for anyone interested in the underside of history in the Americas). “The precarious equilibrium of the world,” Galeano writes, “which teeters on the brink of the abyss, depends on the perpetuation of injustice. The misery of the many makes possible the extravagance of the few.”

  There are photographs of desiccated bodies, many of them, the murdered, people involved in drug deals gone wrong, women who were raped and killed, shallow graves dug in the sand and uncovered by the wind. There are children harvesting the city dumps, contesting with dogs and goats for what food they can find. In Juárez, Charles Bowden writes, “you cannot sustain hope.” I’m driven, eyeing those photos, to nausea. Sneaking glances, I see why so many are so frantic to escape the “Third World.” Why so many, worldwide, are so furious when we exclude them from the “First World” party. Then I look away, as we mostly do. The book protests horrifying realities, and a future we’re likely to have—the privileged alone in a set of increasingly isolated, barricaded enclaves spotted around the world; the poor wandering furiously in denuded homelands, plotting revenge.

  A man at a party said, “Once we needed immigrants, we welcomed them. Now we don’t need them, so we wall them out, and call them barbarians. One of these days, like they did to Rome, they’re going to come after us.”

  In An Empire Wilderness: Travels into America’s Future, Robert D. Kaplan says the border between the United States and Mexico is presently set up to function like the Great Wall of China, which never worked to save China. He also says that the border between the “Third World” and the “First” lies at the break between flatland barrios in south Tucson and the bajada foothills to the north, backed up against the Santa Catalina Mountains, where the privileged Hispanic and Anglos live. The disadvantaged looking north, and up, to a hated ruling class that’s looking south, and down.

  Tucson began a desert trading center, Spanish, Mexican, and Indian, hardhanded and dusty. Culture and amenities came to Tucson with the University of Arizona, and with immigrants from the east and north, monied retirees seeking refuge from winter or a cure for tuberculosis. Developers and elegant places to stay followed and flourished. The Arizona Inn, one of my favorites, was built during the Great Depression—breakfast by the pool, card games in the shade once the table has been cleared.

  Tucson, these days, is several cities. One’s in the barrios. Another is an underwatered tourist-and-retiree oasis up for grabs, ruled by developers who lay down mall after mall, and subdivision after high-and low-end subdivision, people devoted to the creation of wealth and not beauty. Another lies insi
de the gated, monied, retiree-tourist hideouts, where people want to be left to enjoy themselves among their own kind.

  First-string tourist havens have developed on the high north side. La Paloma is open-passage architecture and swim-up-to-the bar-for-another-margarita pools, a Southwestern version of what must have been going in the minds of those Arab princes in Granada who created the Alhambra. Kids are whooping on the waterslide and adults wear Rolex watches while slowly swimming laps. For dinner, we crossed the parking lot to Janos, widely regarded as the finest eating establishment in Tucson. The menu was described as French-inspired Southwestern. A Spring Tasting Menu (five courses with wine) featured sea scallops marinated in citrus, honey, and mint, pan-seared and served on fruit salad with kiwi-and-mango coulis, citrus beurre blanc, salmon cavier, and a touch of avocado mousse. I ordered green-tea smoked duck, stir-fried bok choy, and spiced plums off the regular menu. When we retired to the lobby bar for a nightcap and dessert, a pianist played “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes” and “String of Pearls.” This is indeed the life if you just blew in from Missoula in January.

  The Lodge at Ventana Canyon has forty-nine suites and privacy is absolute. Guests are quiet and intent on sensible pleasures. It would not be the place to go alone unless you enjoy talking to yourself. For dinner we went up the hill to Loew’s Ventana Canyon Resort. For openers we tried the pan-seared fois gras on challah toast, with kumquat compote, accompanied by a glass of eiswein, Sichel, Rheinpfalz, 1994. My main course was chilled Maine lobster with oven-dried tomatoes, tart apples and sweet corn under a lemon-basil vinaigrette. All gods, except those of fairness, were secure in their heavens. Blue butterflies, the next morning, flitted among cactus in the rough.