The Bare-Toed Vaquero: Life in Baja California’s Desert Mountains by Peter J. Marchand (review)

Peter J. Marchand’s The Bare-Toed Vaquero: Life in Baja California’s Desert Mountains, published in 2013 by the University of New Mexico Press, is a little bit of a whole lot of genres. In tracing his journey along the Sierra de la Giganta, Marchand draws on elements of photojournalism, photonarrative, and ethnography to describe the landscape and the lives of the families who inhabit it. As well, Marchand’s inclusion of Latin names for flora lends a scientific air to the narrative while his easygoing recounting of his journeys evokes travelogue. This eclecticism, though, is also the text’s weakness; its fragmented structure--of the book’s 122 pages, 33 are divided into five brief narrative “chapters”—are a challenge at any level. Most conspicuously, between the third and fourth chapters are no fewer than 89 pages presented as a series of two-page spreads with one or two photographs on the right page and a brief explanatory caption on the left. Among the photographs are some that depict the unforgiving landscape, but most are of the residents shown either formally in portrait or informally at work. The result is that, rather than a text that integrates words and pictures in a way the enriches each medium as well as overall content, The Bare-Toed Vaquero offers disjointed sections of narrative interrupted by a seemingly random section of photographs.

One explanation for the text’s organization might lie in Marchand’s intentions. In his introduction, Marchand explains that his goal is to “provide a window” into the lives of the residents whose qualities of resourcefulness, stewardship, and community he admires and to record how their lives are changing. In addition, he continues, although change is coming to the Sierra at “slightly more than a geological pace,” he contends it is “worth recording” (ix). Recording, Marchand asserts firmly, must not move to intrusive analysis of what he experiences, for “this work is observational rather than analytical.” Drawing conclusions is the task left to the reader: “Whatever lessons may be found here I leave to the reader to extract” (xi). Marchand thus establishes himself as writing from within but standing outside the communities he visits.

Although Marchand’s approach might be applauded as heuristic, it can also be, more simply interpreted, frustrating. After all, it is Marchand who has travelled among these people, and the reader looks to him for guidance. Instead, the fragmented structure of the text does little to assist the captioned photographs only minimally referenced in the narratives. In Chapter Two, for example, Marchand travels to Los Pilares, where he meets the particularly endearing “Chavalo.” Chavalo is recovering from a recent and devastating flood that has destroyed his homestead and taken 70 of his goats. Yet, as Marchand writes, “For the privation and isolation that is his life now, Chavalo is bright, witty, uncomplaining, energetic, and seemingly undaunted by his misfortune” (9). The entire chapter then recounts Marchand’s time with Chavalo while he prepares to start again, but the photographs of Chavalo, his land, and the palapa he is building single-handedly appear randomly in the section of photographs (nos. 17-18 and 32-33 of the 44 total). One longs at times for a clear, resonant connection of words and pictures.

At issue in Marchand’s text, then, is generic effect. From Georges Rodenbach’s 1892 Symbolist masterpiece, Bruges-la-Morte, to André Breton’s Nadja or Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, both published in 1928, photographs can wonderfully destabilize traditional genres. This mixing of modes and media continues in the fiction of contemporary writers such as Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Marianne Wiggins. Other writers--Leslie Marmon Silko, Nikky Finney, and Norma Cantu, for example--include family photographs in the same way as Marchand to illustrate the lives of those about whom they write. Marchand’s book falls somewhere between works like Storyteller, Rice, or Canicula and those of...