Man of Fire: Selected Writings

The Reason Why: Lessons in Cartography

The Reason Why Lessons in Cartography Ernesto Galarza, “The Reason Why: Lessons in Cartography,” Rural America (September 1978). Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This short piece notes the importance of human geography and maps the political and economic terrains that unfolded because of the borders the United States and Mexico share. Galarza’s mentor at Columbia University was William R. Shepherd, a renowned historian and cartographer of the United States and Latin America. During the early twentieth century, Shepherd published The Hispanic Nations of the New World: A Chronicle of Our Southern Neighbors (Yale University Press, 1919) and a series titled Historical Atlas (Henry Holt and Company, 1911–1964), a collection of maps that illustrate watershed moments in the development of world civilizations, both of which influenced how Galarza viewed and analyzed society. Notable life event during this era: • 1977: With community members, Galarza founds the Community Organization to Monitor Education (COME) to assess bilingual curricula in the San Jose Unified School District and advocate for a full-immersion bilingual curriculum. The making of political maps is one of the more comforting occupations of mankind. The neat designs in contrasting colors convey a feeling of an orderly division of habitats. Such maps are frozen devices that show how peoples and governments have arranged themselves on any given date. The difficulty is that the map is always outdated because men will not stay in place. Especially when they have been assigned by their governments and ruling institutions a habitat that constrains rather than liberates, will they devise ways of breaking through. That, in essence, is the history of the borderlands between the United States and Mexico. In theory these borders are a wall of containment between the two countries. In practice they are a sieve through which millions of persons move back and forth, more or less legally, more or less temporarily. The neat separation that The Reason Why 73 Ernesto Galarza in the classroom. Courtesy of the Seaver Center for Western History Research, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. shows on the political map ignores bulges, breaks, pressures and displacements of rootless fugitives from want. They have produced a mass of workers crowded into potholes of poverty second to none, in numbers and deprivation, in the Western hemisphere. The closer one looks at the realities of life and work in the borderlands during the 1970s the less they fit into the trim precision of official cartography. 74 part 3. action research in defense of the barrio Among the underlying realities are the following: • The Mexican border areas for 50 years have been principally way stations for refugees in flight. Rural Mexico has been slowly and systematically colonized by more efficient forms of capitalist control and management of land, with an eye on the more lucrative export markets abroad. Commodity exchanges move Mexican cotton, melons, sugar, tomatoes and many other foods and fibers to foreign markets to become important items in the international balance of payments. • Correspondingly, the forms and techniques of production have changed in favor of machines, centralized management, credit control, mass transportation and consolidated production units of land assembled to the requirements of corporate control. The technical revolution in land tenure and culture that began in the late nineteenth century has moved forward. The disestablishment of peasants and tenants has become a condition of modernization, and the surplus of landless rural folk has spilled from the large metropolitan centers into the borderlands where they await the chance to migrate into the United States. • With these radical changes the character of Mexican rural society is being revolutionized. The traditional marketplace, the tianguis, with its localized exchange and its direct connections with the area of production, becomes the metropolitan mercado [marketplace] and the international commodities exchange. Barter gives way to monetary systems of profit and loss on a scale beyond villagers’ ability to conceive or city consumers to control. • The loosening and collapse of the sensitive network of relationships in a rural society, whose members play their roles as economic and political persons in relatively open view of their contemporaries, are being completed as urbanism takes over. The massive export of the unemployed from the countryside to the metropolitan centers is followed by their emigration as surplus people from the crowded centers to the nearest exit—the borderlands. • Such an exodus, increasing in numbers decade after decade, invents its own devices for escaping the...