Political Ecologies of Cattle Ranching in Northern Mexico: Private Revolutions (review)

The northern Mexico region of Sonora is of enduring interest to residents of the United States, an area long portrayed in fact or fiction. There, after all, the Hearst family maintained huge ranch properties (extending to the adjoining State of Chihuahua); to Sonora head Cormac McCarthy's characters on the lam from the nineteenthcentury law in Blood Meridian, and of course it would be Sonora where the Ringo Kid (John Wayne) alludes to owning "a ranch south of the border" in director John Ford's groundbreaking 1939 film, Stagecoach. This study by Eric Perramond is not in the main about the role of ranching in Sonora's epic popular culture (though I'll wager he could write something suitable if called upon), instead, it's about the meaning of who owns what and why, a classic theme within historical geography. Now, casting a long loop like an adept charro snagging a herd-quitter, Perramond effectively co-opts to his cause geography's currently-stylish distaff offspring, political ecology. With respectful but occasionally humorous nods to theory and fact, Perramond's investigations of ranching in Sonora are ably laid out in this book-length account, considerably modified from a doctoral dissertation earlier completed at the University of Texas, Austin.

Ranching is never less than complicated. Does attending to the on-the-ground details of landscape variation matter? No single variety of ranching dominates the Río Sonora Valley of Mexico. Eric Perramond admonishes that "[R]anch locations matter, the ecology and setting of their ranches matter, in spite of rancher creativity, and they are as constrained by pasture quality and rainfall as by anything else" (p. 188). Capturing that diversity and acknowledging the improvisations from ranch to ranch is crucial in an honest account. While there are many enduring values to this study, by no means the least is Perramond's reminder of the value of visiting a place again and again, through time and geography, an exhortation delivered most memorably by James J. Parsons in a 1976 Presidential address to the Association of American Geographers. As Perramond puts it, "One of our greatest challenges is how, when, why, and to what purpose we read landscapes" (p. 191). That is byword enough, but in addition Perramond's reference to Parsons's researches in Colombia and throughout the Americas, I'm given to think of more recent efforts in Mexico by Dan Arreola, by Bill Doolittle, by Diana Liverman, and by Jack Wright, among just a diverse few authors who muster credentials and credibility. There are many more, and you know who you are, but count Eric Perramond among the cadre of strong fieldwork advocates.

What's at hand in Political Ecologies of Cattle Ranching in Northern Mexico isn't by any means an encyclopedic study of ranch ownership — but it has enough of such details to make it sound, and certainly an abundance in the way of interviews, liberally quoted, that offer an excellent story and account of what has happened in the development of northern Mexico ranch life in the last century (and to some degree, before). There are excellent moments of humor, and humility, and of discovery. The worker preparing to head to the field will find solace — and some admonitory heartbreak — in Eric Perramond's hard-learned comment about the inevitability of plans carefully enunciated, formed, and funded changing the minute that a field researcher arrives on the ground. Firmly held theoretical convictions, too, can go topsy-turvy at the field site. There are startling moments, as upon attending a party for visitors in Baviácora, when one of the invited visitors from Hermosillo remarks that he'd love to own a large ranch in Río Sonora. "¡Te lo vendo!" is the immediate shout from three of the local ranchers, reflecting an ongoing (if sarcastic) struggle to stay economically afloat in the...