Political Ecologies of Cattle Ranching in Northern Mexico: Private Revolutions

5. Gender, Community, and the Spatial Dynamics of Ranching

5 Gender, Community, and the Spatial Dynamics of Ranching¡Por supuesto soy ganadera! / Of course I’m a rancher! —Amalia Ruiz Women, children, and the elderly are key characters in the dynamics of ranching as a livelihood, even as the importance of extended families has declined in maintaining ranch traditions. The gender and community aspects in forming the identities of ranchers are formidable, and social scientists frequently use the euphemism social reproduction to explain how societies create and re-create the confines and contours of daily lived experience. The daily geographies of ranching, ranchers, and ranch families are shaped by many mundane factors. The time-space routes and movements of ranchers and vaqueros, the role of plazas and social interactions, and the gendered dimensions of life on a local scale all serve to drive the social relations of production in the towns strung along the Río Sonora.1 Less visible to the eye is the importance of gendered local knowledge, and how the unevenness of that knowledge contributes to the success, stability , or failures of ranching livelihoods in the Río Sonora Valley. Steve Stern (1995) has referred to this ignorance of past gender dimensions in discussing the “secret history” of Mexico, one that has been lacking in broader works from geography (Massey 1994). There is, on a parallel scheme, a “secret geography” to gender in all societies, only complicated in Mexico by social conventions such as machismo and vergüenza. Machismo is a complicated concept, wrought with ideas about manhood, and can be used either pejoratively, usually by women, or proudly as a badge of honor, usually by men (Guttman 1996). The ambivalent concept and multifaceted understanding of the word vergüenza, including the notions of simultaneous honor and shame, enables some understanding 126 Chapter 5 of the way gendered codes and the social control of women and sexuality prove fundamental to the construction and legitimation of the culturalpolitical order in this ranching society. Even for the influential female ranchers in this study this concept matters greatly, as they have been largely removed from the political sphere at the local level because of the gendered understandings of political and apolitical culture. Not to mince words, ranching has always been about the ideology and geography of masculinity as well as the construction of gendered identity roles. And this firmament has shaped and enforced particular kinds of social relations as much as, if not more than, class and ethnicity have, long since the colonial period in Mexico (Alonso 1995, 230). The Geography of Ranching Families We have already seen, in previous chapters, how ranchers and ranch laborers spend their time on and off the ranches. Some, such as the absentee owners, rarely set foot on their ranches, save for key moments of sales and transactions. Direct land managers, whether owner or vaquero, spend much of their week or even month on the ranch itself. But other factors contribute to the spatial arrangement and dynamics of ranch life, and these are usually based around the pivot point of the small towns they typically occupy, the plaza (Low 2000). The spatial configuration of ranch family homes within the towns of the Río Sonora has several peculiar and important qualities. Most notable is the town layout-level distribution of ranching families; the houses of private ranchers are usually located as a second tier around the main town square (plaza), that is, one or two blocks away from the plaza. The houses of politicians and some local merchants usually face the plaza and occupy the first block behind it. The concept and feature of la plaza play an important cultural geographic role in forming place throughout Latin America and provide one of the central points of contact for understanding the spatial quality of ranchers’ role in the community. Unlike many of their New World counterparts , Mexican ranchers have long been urban dwellers, or at least town inhabitants. Since the partition of large estates during and after the Mexican Revolution, the trend has been toward increased settlement Gender, Community, and Spatial Dynamics 127 and concentration of ranchers within town cores. Plazas serve, then, as central nodes of interaction for ranchers, farmers, politicians, and merchants , be they male or female. My usage of the term is not a simple reference to plazas as a form of architecture or urban morphology. The plaza is a social phenomenon of singular importance for religious, political, and...