Essays

Moseying: History of the Southern Llano Estacado

Mexican immigration due to Green Revolution
June 8, 2005

A daytripping Good Samaritan sometimes hears a totally new story. I got a history lesson about the oil field days during a recent vacation day. I had gone to scope out a hunting lease on the western edge of the Llano Estacado just north of Penwell. The lessee was Brandon Young, a former Sibley Nature Center employee and presently a graduate student at UTPB in the history department. Although a knowledgeable amateur naturalist, he had asked me to identify some plants unfamiliar to him, and wanted to show me a world-record javelina bush. (It was 9 feet tall and 12 feet across, and the species is rarely more than 3 feet tall.) We also found a Zinnia acerosa some 75 miles north of its usual range. Only one hill of the ranch had the species – every where else we found the more common Zinnia grandiflora. He also showed me a number of button cacti north of their usual range.

Brandon served as an historical tour guide. We examined the remains of an oil camp, and he ably discussed artifacts half buried between the creosote bush and tarbrush. We admired a still living row of lecheguilla that a housewife of the 1940s planted at the camp, along with a Bird of Paradise shrub in full bloom. Plants are often artifacts of history! Huge bleached Siberian elm trunk sections were stacked not far away, pushed there, when the frame houses of the camp were bulldozed thirty years ago. Brandon ably interpreted artifacts that we found – blue willow plate fragments, a base to a “soda water” bottle that came from an Odessa bottling company. Like veteran arrowhead hunters do to others amazement, he can easily spot artifacts where most people only see the gravelly soil. Most of the folks that lived in the oil camp moved to Odessa, or on to other oil field jobs. The little community lasted only a few years.

I got another history lesson on the way home, this time in agricultural history in Mexico. On the way back I passed a young man standing at a disabled car with two flat tires. Having been marooned in that very situation in times past, and having to watch car after car pass by and no one stopping to offer help, I decided to help. I slammed on the brakes, and then backed up along the shoulder of the road, the busy I-20 traffic whizzing by. I got out, shook his hand, and told him we could toss the tires in the back of the truck and I would take him to town to get them fixed. As he finished taking off the second tire with the help of my jack, I noticed a Native Seeds?SEARCH bumpersticker.

In the 1970s Gary Paul Nabhan and others started the non-profit to collect and grow the heirloom seeds of Indian and Mexican farmers in Arizona and Sonora. Not only had these farmers carefully bred their food plants for drought-adaptability, many grew species not commonly found in supermarkets.

Over the years Nabhan has published or editted a number of wonderful books, from a collection of writings about bighorn sheep to essays on desert plants and people. One of his recent books chronicles his attempts to “eat locally”, to eat nothing that had been transported from growing fields furher than 100 miles from his Tucson home. I have admired is work and his writings for yeats.

As we carred the tires to my truck, I made a comment about the bumpersticker, and said I admired the work of the organization. He told me he also did, but it took 10 minutes for him to say it. With the passion of youth he launched into the story of his family.

“My family farmed near Guaymas, Sonora for 5 generations. Our farm benefitted from the annual floods of the Rio Yaqui. The area is known as Mexico’s breadbasket. Until the “Green Revolution” that reinvented farming with the use of chemical fertilizers, thousands of people farmed in the valley on small land holdings. As the Green Revolution with its high notrogen-high yield farming methods were tried, many of the small land holders were bought out by the people able to afford the fertilizers and tractors need for the new method. In the last decade multinational corporations who benefitted from NAFTA bought out these people. Now there are hundreds of hot houses raising tomatoes for the United States market.”

“It takes very few people to farm the region now, and most of the men have become “mojados,” These men send money home from construction jobs in California, Las Vegas, or Pheonix. A number of the men, like my father, brought their families north. In the last 15 years an estimated 2 million small land holders in Mexico have lost their land, 15,000 in the Rio Yaqui valley alone. Many of these people live in the United States, and I believe the causes of their immigration is directly related to innovations in farming that occurred in the United States, and later supported by policies of the United States government. My father and grandfather were one of the first to lose their land – so much anhydrous ammonia (nitorogen fertilizer) was dumped on fields next to theirs, that their water well became polluted. The chemical fertilizers exhausted the natural organic fertility produced by the annual floodwaters. He came north the year I was born, and the family followed a year later.”

“A disease called “carnal bunt” hit the big farms hard. The Green Revolution farmers had planted miles and miles of wheat of the same genetic type. Some of the people that had lost their land said it was “God’s justice,” but it made the switchover to corporate hothouse farming easier. The corporate farms easily switched to other crops beyond the reach of the hothouses. Crop failures can ruin the family farm, but corporate farms see it as just a small blip on the annual profit-loss ledger of their entire multi-billion dollar diversified enterprises.”

“My father worked in the fields of farms along the Colorado River in Arizona. He encouraged me to go to college. I chose agricultural history as my field because of the stories of my grandfather. After losing the family land, my grandfather slowly declined, suffering from a broken heart. When I was a child I listened to his endless stories of life on the farm. He repeated the stories over and over, and each time tears came to his eyes. I wanted to understand what had happened to my family and their community along the Rio Yaqui. I am hoping to finish my Phd next year."

“At present I am headed to College Station to attend a graduate seminar, and to do more research on my thesis. After six weeks, I will go to Las Cruces for more of the same, and hope to get back to the University of California at Davis, near Sacramento in September. I also admire Mr. Nabhan, and have attended several of his presentations, and have visited the Native Seed/SEARCH facilities.”