D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
March
2009
Don't Fence Me In
Two sides of big landowners' lives — tough self-reliance and, for some border growers, a willingness to exploit others.
I drove for miles over a dirt road with puffs of dust rising behind me, through a landscape rolling and dry and scruffy as the hide of a wandering steer. It was on a clear fall day somewhere in the Bootheel, just hot enough for the air to ache a bit.
A quarter of a mile up ahead I saw 10 antelope in the road. Two of them sighted me and bounded away, simultaneously, with the grace of ballerinas. Then the little group raced across the landscape toward my right. The touches of white on their neck and legs and face made them look like clouds sailing through the sky.
"So that's what that stuff is about deer and antelope playing," I said. I'd seen antelope a few times between Deming and Silver City, but they'd never seemed as beautiful as this.
I think I had some of the cowboy spirit when I was about 11. I remember lounging in our living room on Saturday morning with my knees swung over one arm of a chair and my head laid back over the other as I sang at the top of my lungs: "I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences, gaze at the moon till I lose my senses, can't look at hobbles and I can't stand fences. Don't fence me in!"
That autumn morning I was out looking for a certain spring that had some history behind it, but took a wrong turn and ended up at somebody else's ranch around 11 o'clock. A collection of buildings curved around an open space like a small village.
There was a one-story, spread-out stucco or adobe house, painted white, in a more or less Mexican style. It really didn't have much of any style, as is the norm in ranch architecture around here. There was a workshop of some kind to the right of the house with the door wide open and nobody there.
To the right there was a tiny watering hole, now dry, where the people must have cooled themselves off in the 105-degree heat last summer. Next to that was a swing hanging from a big overarching tree and a child's red wagon, as if this place was a movie set created to represent "family values."
Then to the right around this curve was another, smaller house where maybe a ranch hand lived. There were dozens of cattle behind this, separated by a fence.
I must have waited 20 minutes for someone to come home for lunch, but nobody did. I looked at the land behind the buildings, sloping way down to a spring surrounded by several tall cottonwoods and then up a large juniper-dotted hill behind it all.
I've seen a few ranches, but none with such charm. I could imagine how the place would sink into your heart for your whole life, if you ever lived there for a while. This working ranch looked so self-sufficient, capacious and all-absorbing that it would be hard to pull oneself away from this way of life if once engaged in it.
I hope I'm not violating the privacy of the family who lived there — I don't even remember their name. Their place just symbolizes for me what's loved about the rancher tradition.
Someone who has a respect for the ranching life she was raised in, without being cranky about it (as so many are), told me a little anecdote about how hardworking the ranchers were in her native Arizona. She says she's seen an uncle of hers, when he could hardly lift himself out of bed with the flu, get up and deliver a calf, a process that takes hours. She saw him once go out in a two-hour hailstorm to fix a fence when he had dysentery.
These guys are really proud of their self-reliance, and are sometimes just as tough as barbed wire. There's much to be respected in the ranching tradition. But I wonder how one gets from this classic American ideal to the bullying boors one sometimes encounters. It may be because of the "land, lots of land" that they own.
I'm talking about some growers near the border I've been learning about recently. I've known for a while that this family pays their chile and onion pickers less than what pickers get in Deming. The reasoning is that most of their workers live in Palomas, where the cost of living is lower. There's a kind of logic to that. But with the same reasoning you could also say they should pay more than others, because they're among the richest growers around.
Back in the early 1970s these growers paid fieldworkers only $5 a day for 10- or 11-hour days, although the patriarch of the family denied it. The workers came from Las Chepas, on the other side of the border. One nice old man there was willing to come across to the grower's house to show him his old pay stubs, but I didn't take up his offer. I had much too much conflict in my life at the time and couldn't face any more.
Five dollars bought a lot more in Mexico in those days — one woman gave me a list of the sugar, flour, coffee and other things you could get — but the fact is that the low pay helped the rancher family build its wealth.
To top it all off, I got it confirmed a few months ago that these growers actually kick their workers. A few years ago I heard this from a man at a 16 de septiembre celebration in Palomas. But I didn't get it verified beyond a doubt until I said to a worker, "They take them by the collar. . .," and he finished the sentence by swinging his foot and nodding his head with a knowing smile. No prompting by me.
I'm not sure exactly what the offenses of the fieldworkers were — maybe stealing a little chile, maybe working a little slowly. But assaulting anybody in New Mexico is a felony, and from what I gather from the workers, these attacks are pretty common. The growers could potentially spend years in jail.
You hear farmers grumble that what they pay workers is okay because it's so much more than what Mexicans pay. It's very true they earn more here. You hear the ladies distributing food in Palomas say those who work on the other side have no money problems.
But the treatment of workers on this side is often dismal and unjust, too. There are so many ways they lack rights I can't list them all here. I just wish they'd stop kicking the farmworkers. It's a minimal thing to ask.