Political Ecologies of Cattle Ranching in Northern Mexico: Private Revolutions

3. Land, Labor, and Resource Management on Private Ranches

3 Land, Labor, and Resource Management on Private Ranches The private ranchers of Sonora, including those in the study area of this book, have successfully defended much of their landed estates, despite the early twentieth-century land reforms. Their role in the defense of private property has been likened to a passive-aggressive nature, and while hired guns are not uncommon, they are less common today than during the height of land and water conflicts (Bobrow-Strain 2007). The tactics and strategies pursued by private owners reflect those pursued elsewhere in Mexico, as they flexibly accommodated or fought certain provisions of land redistribution along the valley. The lack of large, irrigated, private estates along the Río Sonora meant that little of the privately owned milpa land was affected by land reforms. Unfortunately for ejidatarios and comuneros, the national provisions for dividing large estates were not customized for local conditions, and along the Río Sonora and other narrow, semi-arid valleys of northern Mexico, much of the most valuable arable land was excluded from expropriation by the state. In fact, the early grants along the Río Sonora to communal owners consisted of a mix of rain-fed (called temporal) and irrigated lands, and not the prime green irrigated areas so coveted by landless cultivators. The landtenure revolution, however, did little to change range management in northern Mexico. Barbed wire, changing labor relations, and the influx of new capital did play significant roles in how contemporary ranches are managed. As private owners with outright title to their properties, ranchers make both direct and indirect decisions for land and resource management. Small and modestly sized properties depend on the ranch owner primarily , although family and hired labor certainly add to the mix and variability of decision making. Without family participation, the smaller properties are never financially viable; few owners can afford nonfamily labor 5 Chapter 3 for their ranch spreads. The larger properties have a form of management by proxy: indirect by the owner, more direct by the laborers or mayordomos (work bosses) who essentially make the decisions on a daily basis. Complementing the range of decisions handled by ranchers and their labor crews, mayordomos must also handle the relationships between ranchers and ranch workers. The human resources, then, of ranches are just as important as the biophysical natural resources that most range scientists focus on. For some, however, the ranch remains not only the economic base for their living, but their identity. Management by private ranchers entails both decision making and the manipulation of natural resources on the ranch. By management I simply refer to the control of production and reproduction of the ranch unit. While the overtly functionalist nature of the word is difficult to sidestep, these land managers also care deeply about aesthetic and seemingly nonfunctional aspects of their daily tasks. One rancher, for example, was absolutely compelled to move rocks to the borders of footpaths. When asked if that was to protect the hooves of calves using these paths, he simply responded, “Well, sure, but I also like the way it looks and it helps me find my way around.” So while many of these daily routines and habits have some function to them, they may not be as overtly functionalist as observers might interpret them to be. By resource, I mean any biophysical feature that is either important in caloric yield per unit or culturally identified as important or useful. What may be a resource for one person may not be viewed as valuable or needed by another, underlining the importance of perception in the definition of a natural resource. Ranch management occurs on two levels, not scales per se (Sayre 2005a). The ranchers (or owners) themselves are the ultimate decision makers who set overall ranch policy. Their employees, the mayordomos or vaqueros who reside much of the time on the ranch, are responsible for decisions involving day-to-day operations. The scale of management can be understood at the micro-level, where the herder or vaquero is vital, or at the macro-level, where the ranch owner or mayordomo makes the larger decisions based on market prices, shipping costs, and balancing the inputs and outputs of the ranch itself in the context of competitors and regional prices. Perhaps not surprisingly, the degree of involvement of the private rancher is inversely correlated with ranch size: the larger the ranch, the Land, Labor, and...