Political Ecologies of Cattle Ranching in Northern Mexico: Private Revolutions

7. Trail’s End: Ranching a Continent

7 Trail’s End: Ranching a Continent Ranching continues to survive, if not thrive, in most parts of the Americas . From the colonial-era Bourbon Reforms, through the so-called liberal reforms of the mid-1800s, large private estates were consolidated in Sonora. After the Mexican Revolution and its period of land distribution , private producers still remained; irrigated agricultural areas were the first targets for expropriation during agrarian reforms. From the Green Revolution and the arrival of its new hybrids, to the Brown Revolution and its emphasis on livestock-as-development project, and to the latest effects of globalization or neo-liberalization, private ranchers remain. For each wave of newfound interest in communal efforts or redistributive economic attempts in Mexico, private landowners have pushed back in multiple waves of private, reactionary revolutions. The earliest practices of territorial control in the colonial period have clearly waned, yet ranchers have continued with their spatial gains, while minimizing losses, even during periods of progressive land reforms or aggressive agrarismo. Surviving on even the toughest of frontiers, the urban and suburban fringes of North America, “the ranch” as an entity has not remained immutable and unchanging (Sayre 2002). More scholarly attention is needed on how place or region-specific ranching cultures have changed, historically and more recently, to avoid the single-category generalizations so common in the social and natural science literature. The sizes of ranch outfits do matter, as do the variety of grasses available, as do the cattle breeds. These are obvious points of departure for any narrative; less obvious are the qualitative management decisions taken by landowners and herders. But these decisions have resulted in a cumulative set of landscape changes that is hard to ignore. Trail’s End 177 Living Landscapes: Economic and Ecological Exotics As we have seen, the keys for private ranchers are managing for ecological complexity and economic diversity, if not adversity. In this context, complexity refers to the biophysical attributes of the ranches and the difficult tasks to maintain or limit the loss of carrying capacity, not to the more abstract realm of complexity theory. The decisions made by land managers are reflected in the landscape over time, as we have seen, and yet the consequences of intended landscapes are frequently unintended. Planting an exotic grass led to a set of consequences not anticipated by ranchers: they hoped for better pasture, not a more aggressive fire cycle, one of the results of using buffelgrass. These hybrid landscapes have bitten back, producing complications for future decision makers, local residents, and ecological policy wonks (Tellman 2002). Buffelgrass pasture development in the Sonoran Desert region has run counter to a rather odd shift in land cover change occurring in Mexico and in parts of dry Central America, from tropical to semi-arid forests, a type of mid-grading of ecosystems (Bass 2004). Large tree stands, for example, give way to secondary forests in areas under frontier or population pressures. Alternatively, in areas with once-rich semi-arid grasslands like Sonora, the woody species are making their presence felt. What is being produced is a variety of Mexican landscapes held in a midpoint of successions: no longer primary forests, a richness of secondary growth and low-lying woody species, and a poverty of undisturbed grasslands. Yet these are landscapes of economic activity constantly held in a state of disequilibrium, and our understanding of them has been flawed by temperate climate ecology models. The transborder perceptions, while different on each side, produce particular kinds of rhetoric and ecological practices . The visual irony is striking: While poor Sonorans collect buffelgrass seeds to sell to ranchers nearby, locals in southern Arizona are aggressively uprooting the grass; paradoxically, the species is both an economic opportunity in Mexico and an ecological villain in Arizona (fig. 7.1). Local news stories report help is needed in the “war against buffelgrass” (Poole 2007). Citizen groups in southern Arizona are aggressively pushing for Figure 7.1 Buffelgrass narratives: Wanted dead, not alive. This poster is one common representation of buffelgrass by a southern Arizona citizens group hoping to eradicate the species in the region. Source: Pima Association of Governments, 2007. Used by permission. WANTED Dead and Gone Buffelgrass Trail’s End 17 the elimination of buffelgrass in the region, due to increased fire risk and impacts on native species, while ranchers in Sonora still pine and hope for increased forage from “better versions” of buffelgrass hybrids...