Political Ecologies of Cattle Ranching in Northern Mexico: Private Revolutions

2. The Development of Cattle Ranching in Sonora, Mexico

2 The Development of Cattle Ranching in Sonora, Mexico Since their introduction to Mexico in 1521, domesticated livestock have successfully expanded into new, unfamiliar ecosystems. By the late sixteenth century, the presence of livestock was ubiquitous in the eastern lowlands of Mexico and, to a lesser extent, on the Pacific side of Mexico by the end of the seventeenth century. Historian Alfred Crosby (1986) discussed this inundation of livestock as part of the larger biological conquest by Europeans, or in his phrasing, as “ecological imperialism.” In temperate regions of the Americas, the domination of the landscape was as much human as it was livestock driven; the environmental and historical record of impacts was mixed (Hernández 2001). In northern Mexico, where the arid frontier limited the growth of Spanish settlement, livestock and mining formed a conjoined and transformative landscape complex (Sheridan 1992). The movement of lay settlers and livestock northward into Sonora, after the establishment of Jesuit missions, followed the coastal Pacific route of earlier Spanish explorers. The origins of the Pacific extension of cattle ranching are generally treated as originating from the Guadalajara region, where the cultural phenomena of charrería (a style of rodeo) and mariachi music may have also taken root. Indeed, these last two attributes of the region have become stereotypical of Guadalajara and immortalized in Mexican song and dance. Horse and cattle culture, the seeming essence of rural and rustic Mexico, spread easily along the Pacific route into Sonora. The first cattle in northwestern New Spain arrived with the Vázquez de Coronado expedition of 1540, which traced the Pacific coast of Mexico on way to Fray Marcos de Niza’s cities of Cíbola, bringing some 150 head of livestock to maintain the soldiers during the voyage. Some animals apparently escaped near Culiacán (in present-day Sinaloa), and these few rogue livestock had multiplied into thousands of untamed cattle by the 32 Chapter 2 time Francisco de Ibarra arrived in the same region 25 years later (Wagoner 1952). To be sure, however, the foundations for the cattle industry in Sonora were transplanted by the Jesuit missions that arrived via the Pacific Coast (Jordan 1993). At the time of mission establishment along the Río Sonora Valley, in the mid-1640s, the balance of sheep and cattle was roughly equal and would stay so until more private ranches were established in the region (Radding 1997). Until cattle became king in the region, the pastoral systems in place were closer to what might have been found in central Mexico, with a balance of cattle and sheep in the landscape. Sheep were especially valued in missions, whether Franciscan or Jesuit, because of their relative docility and their size. Cattle herding, since the first years of Spanish colonization, also had a peculiarly cultural meaning: Spaniards did not look down upon ranching as they did upon field agriculture (Chevalier 1952, 110–25; Prem 1992). This preference for herding was strongly linked to the contemporary cultural geography. Menial field tasks were delegated to Mexico’s natives and a growing black population, while caballeros, or gentlemen, rode horses. This tendency of ethnic-spatial division of agricultural labor roles survives in many aspects today. Cattlemen in Sonora have more prestige than farmers, even if the “gentleman” horseman mythology broke down on the far-flung frontiers of the Spanish Empire. Mestizo and mulatto vaqueros became the norm, not the exception, in these peripheral regions of the Americas (Iber 2000). This is a crucial point of distinction for the spatial nature of ranching, as conflicts between farmers and ranchers have been multifaceted, not just based on “ethnicity” crudely understood as they are in other world regions. Unlike pastoral societies in Africa, for example, the spatial fixity of ranching versus the dispersed nature of nomadic pastoralism has created clear distinctions in how cultivators and herders interact (Bassett 1988; Barfield 1993). What distinguished extensive cattle and sheep raising in the New World was the immediate contrast to anything preexisting on the new continent, and it became the mark of difference, a cultural “brand” for Spaniards to use as a marker of status, class, and ethnic relations. Domesticated livestock, especially sheep and cattle, occupied a particularly favorable cultural and ecological niche in Mexico. They expanded due to Spanish efforts to supplant native agriculture and culture, at the The Development of Cattle Ranching 33 expense of both native population numbers and New World ecosystems (Crosby...