El Rio: Culture and Environment in the Rio Grande/rio Bravo Basin (review)

The El Río exhibition greets visitors with a panoramic view of the river that anchors the Río Grande/río Bravo Basin and extends two thousand miles across varied terrain. From the headwaters of the river in Colorado to its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico, the river flows through mountains, deserts, plains, and delta in the states of Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas in the United States and the states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas in Mexico. The exhibition explores the relationship between the people who live in this diverse region and its equally diverse environment. As Juanita Elizondo Garza, project consultant and exhibit host at the University of Texas–Pan American, explains, "From the headwaters in Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico, every region of the Rio Grande/río Bravo Basin faces its own issues of history, language, culture, religion, and sustenance." Like the river, this traveling exhibition also crisscrosses social, political, and environmental borders.

El Río continually focuses on the complex identities of individuals and communities in the basin. Often a highly contested site, the river is a culturally arbitrary political border, a place of both traditional communities and modern industrialization, and an ecologically and economically sensitive environment. Curators Olivia Cadaval and Cynthia Vidaurri chose a case-study format to structure the exhibition as a collection of stories, each told with particular voices and perspectives. The goals are to depict the relationship between culture and environment and to address the region's diversity through three interrelated themes: traditional knowledge, sustainable development, and cultural identity.

How does traditional knowledge contribute to managing land and water resources? Visitors encounter the "Traditional Knowledge" segment by entering a cabin of a shrimping boat, complete with a captain's chair, while Julius Collins speaks out through a video about shrimping in Brownsville, Texas. "You can put the best of everything on a boat—radar, global positioning, even television—but your experience in running that technology is what counts. You get the knowledge of where the shrimp is from years and years of experience." This understanding of traditional knowledge is again invoked in the "Ranching" section, where visitors can relax in a ranch-style sala, or den, complete with deer horns and leather furniture. Juan Luis Longoria speaks about how ranchers all over south Texas often pass along skills and ranching culture to the younger generation through rodeos, cook-offs, and trail rides.

In what ways does a community's environment nurture its cultural identity? The "Cultural Identity" segment addresses how cultural practices shape and give meaning to the physical environment and how people who have lived in the river basin for generations are often in conflict with newcomers about this community-environment relationship. The section about the Rarámuri from Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, focuses on how people whose livelihood and culture once depended on the land and its resources now must try to survive on the margins of cities. As José Guadalupe Bautista explains in a video panel in the exhibition, "It's a bit tough for us, because in our homeland there is hardly any work. In the city, we do what we can to eat, to survive."

How do local knowledge and cultural practices contribute to sustainable development? The "Sustainable Development" segment highlights how the wool weaving traditions in Los Ojos, New Mexico, have created sustainable economic opportunities. Tierra Wools, a local [End Page...