The high mesa
Long before the US-Mexico border came into effect, vaqueros drove huge herds of Spanish cattle free through the border areas, establishing a cultural and linguistic legacy that continues to this day. For example, “Buckaroo” is derived from “vaquero”, while the word “rodeo” comes from the Spanish verb “rodear” (round up). In addition, the US livestock industry is full of techniques that originated in Mexico, from branding and saddle dressing to the use of hand-braided lariats (a word derived from “la reata”, which means “the rope”) for roping up cattle.
And while cowboy culture north of the border has become a shadow of itself, some insist that Baja’s off-grid vaqueros still embody the raw individualism of US legends. “You are the last representative of the cowboys who have conquered the West,” Fermín Reygadas tells me on the phone. He is Professor of Alternative Tourism at the Autonomous University of Baja California Sur and has conducted field research with ranchers in Baja California for more than four decades. “Life is hard, endless work for them, but they are free.”
Every morning before the rooster calls, Nary’s wife Erlinda ‘Linda’ Arce Arce begins her daily ritual. She puts a pot of hand-ground coffee to boil over a cholla-fired stove and begins to beat corn tortillas, while the two-meter-long radio crackles in the background, mostly with chatter about the weather. It doesn’t take long before Linda and Nary’s five-year-old daughter Guadelupe jumps into the kitchen to mix chocolate powder into the milk she just pulled from a cow.
Strongly built, with an ebony braid that reaches her waist, Linda met Nary at a wedding. They danced and “had eyes for each other,” she says, but it was four years before they got married. Nary had to ride out and ask Linda’s father’s permission to court her. Then he had to return several times a year to work on the ranch and prove his worth to the family; all part of an ancient ritual. Often separated for months and without a reliable telephone service, the two talked for hours on the radio and limited themselves to politeness, since everyone in the valley could tune in with a two-day party full of feasting, drinking and live music.
These fun-loving times seem a long way off in view of the water shortage in the region, but the family still manages to lighten the mood. When Ricardo shows up with his guitar at noon, Nary and his stocky father José María ‘Chema’ Arce Arce take a break from their housework and grab their instruments (accordion for chema, bass cello for Nary) to perform an impromptu concert of ranchero’s ballads the porch. Chema hums with unrequited love, the silver caps of his teeth gleam as he flashes a mischievous grin. Nary hits the baseline and exchanges a smile with Guadelupe. I rock in my chair and drink another cup of Linda’s strong, dark coffee, content to stand in the shade.
In the afternoon, Nary and Chema sweat it out again to make sure that all of their cattle are fed. We use pitchforks to swing cholla cacti in small fires to burn off the spines and toss smoldering chunks at the cows, which crash into each other for a bite. It takes us three hours to feed them all, then Nary goes looking for barrel cacti for his mules and horses. In lockstep we hike across the gorge to an even higher table mountain, which is laden with volcanic rock that has been split by the sun.
The sky is pitch black by the time we’re done, so Nary chops off a dead branch of an organ pipe cactus and lights it for the way home. It burns red and white against an ink-colored sky speckled with constellations. “Lámpara de ranchero,” he exclaims. Rancher’s torch.