The Myth of Maladaptation
Weber further mischaracterizes Hispano agriculture as "maladaptive" in a modern market economy. The natural, economic and cultural resources available to farmers and ranchers in the region are said to be "necessary but insufficient." Weber's stereotype of a "maladaptive" rural culture of poverty can be read as a restatement of Steinel's views cast in the "value-neutral" vernacular of 1990s social science research.
Hispano farmers, Weber argues, are hindered by a lack of access to land, water and credit. This threatens the long-term survival of family-based agriculture. Weber overlooks the role of discrimination by the USDA and other credit, loan guarantee, or subsidy sources that have notoriously denied famers of color access to these markets. For Weber, smallholder intensive agriculture is not a viable alternative for future economic development in the Upper Río Grande bioregion and this has nothing to do with racial discrimination by the very institutions purporting to support farmers.
The construction of maladaptation is problematic in several ways. It assumes that all Hispano farmers and ranchers have limited access to land, water and credit. Other researchers, including my colleague sociologist Ruben Martinez, suggest that there are some significant generational and regional differences. For example, younger Hispano and Anglo farmers have tended to use credit more often, for more reasons, and more effectively than older farmers.
Ruben Martinez and others have studied Hispano land loss and acquisition and found that there is an oft misunderstood complexity in patterns that go beyond the myth of mass displacement and out-migration. Our own research in the San Luis Valley (1994-2008) found that Hispanos, and particularly college-educated men in their thirties, are actively acquiring land to expand acreage for irrigated row crops and pasture. Current research suggests that many Hispanos are returning to work the land, sometimes after living in cities for two or three decades.
Throughout the Upper Río Grande there are dozens of agricultural cooperatives actively reviving local production. Some of these efforts focus on helping younger farmers get started; others are designed to help part-time, limited-resource producers make the transition to full-time farming; and yet others are encouraging women to become more actively involved in the ownership and management of agricultural micro-enterprises.
There are clearly a variety of strategies Hispanos have used, and are using, to adapt to economic and technological changes in agriculture. In a growing number of cases, Hispano farmers and ranchers are making a successful transition to commercial agriculture while blending "modern" mechanized technologies with traditional techniques.
The Myth of the Disappeared
There is a fourth myth which derives from the preceding three. This is the myth of the "disappearing" rural folk culture. A renowned cultural geographer recently expressed this myth in the following straightforward terms:
Unmistakably, given the trends of American agriculture and rural life, one can foresee the continuing erosion of the old way of life identifiable with the Spanish-American [sic] folk culture....After centuries of not having been confronted with the need for change, this way of life will disappear rather quickly, largely with the passing of the older generations and the alienation of their landholdings to non-Spanish Americans. The farming of the small acreages will eventually cease altogether as they offer no hope to the younger generations. (Alvar Ward Carlson (1990) The Spanish-American Homeland: Four Centuries in New Mexico's Rio Arriba. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press; p. 213.)
One aspect of this myth states that Hispanos lived for centuries without having to confront the need for change. Hispano culture has a static and unchanging quality. Another aspect declares: Because Hispanos are not accustomed to change, when confronted by it they will disappear. If Hispano culture is inherently conservative and resistant to change then surely the current frenetic pace of social, economic and technological change is bound to destroy the last remnants of what is viewed as a 19th Century relic.
As we will see, Hispano farmers have always adapted to change and one example we will discuss later is the changing roles of women in the household division of labor.
Historians and sociologists have been predicting the demise of rural Hispano culture since at least the 1930s. Longstanding concerns with this presumably imminent extinction have led to many attempts to "preserve" Hispano culture. Suzanne Forrest, in a brilliant study of the so-called Hispanic New Deal in New Mexico, notes how these efforts were:
....[d]esigned ostensibly to preserve Hispanic village life while "modernizing" the villagers and teaching them Anglo, middle-class economic behavior and cultural values...[T]he Hispanic New Deal was...part of both the 1930s intellectual fascination with "primitivism," and with our southern neighbor's socialistic experiment in education and land reform. (Suzanne Forrest (1987) The Preservation of the Village. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press; p. 16.)As Forrest demonstrates, the progressive intellectuals who were involved in the pioneering Tewa Basin Study and the Interdepartmental Río Grande Board fell tragically short of effecting substantive land reform, even if they succeeded in amassing an impressive archive based on field research in numerous Hispano villages.
Contemporary researchers seem not to fully appreciate the significance of the Tewa Basin Study as a point of departure for understanding the political and ecological character of the most enduring problems facing Hispano agriculture. The Tewa Basin researchers recognized that the key problems in the struggle for a revitalized rural economy centered on the unresolved land claims of Hispanos and the historical process of environmental degradation. Land reform, the just resolution of Hispano claims, was the critical public policy issue that had to be resolved.
This concern seems to have disappeared from much of the Southwestern agricultural literature. Instead, the land reform question has become the focus of more recent scholarly work in the area of Spanish-Mexican land grant studies. The study of Hispano agriculture cannot be separated from the study of Spanish-Mexican land grants any more than we can separate the watershed from acequias. Afterall, the commons of the land grants are the watersheds of the village farms and ranches. The land grants are not just a somewhat amorphous physical boundary system. They also encompass ecosystems which bind the headwaters of the high mountain peaks with the irrigation networks in the riparian bottom lands.
Perhaps the failure to address land reform policies stems from the tendency of ag researchers to conflate cultural change with culture destruction? It seems to us that the history of relations between Spanish-Mexicans and Anglos has always involved profound structural and ideological conflicts. Change did not begin yesterday and Hispanos never occupied the land of mañana or poco tiempo. Hispanos did not remain "outside" change over centuries, then or now. Perhaps Hispanos more often are viewed as "swept along" rather than being in complete command of the direction of change throgh their own capacity for agency?
The enchanted, timeless and yet disappearing "Hispanic" rural folk culture of the Southwest seems more the contrivance of a fanciful EuroAmerican imagination than an expression of authentic bioregional traditions and experiences. But myths often have at least some basis in reality. What then might be real sources of this myth?
Certainly, Upper Río Grande communities have faced numerous environmental, economic, political and social catastrophes: the loss (enclosure) and degradation of the commons and other lands; the breakup of riparian long-lots and the decline of the family as the basic economic unit of village life; a legacy of discrimination which produced persistent poverty, unemployment, and low educational attainment; displacement by federal reclamation projects (e.g., Elephant Butte and Navajo Reservoir); and out-migration of youth to the cities to mention a few of the more critical problems.
All these problems have more than one ending. For example, while migration of youth was a clear and persistent trend between the 1940s and 1960s, Hispano populations in many rural areas of the bioregion have stabilized. In some cases, rural populations are growing in part through return migration from the cities.
The abandonment or loss of many farms and the existence of a large number of Hispano "ghost towns" is another source of the myth. Will the Hispano family farm community disappear? Are the smallholders of the Upper Río Grande following the path of the Midwestern farmers into financial bankruptcy and cultural oblivion?
The number of Hispano "commercial" farm owner-operators in the U.S. actually increased from 16,000 in 1982 to 17,000 in 1987 (and these are gross underreportings). There are still an estimated 50,000 parciantes (acequia water rights users) in New Mexico, consisting for the most part of small landholders who irrigate subsistence garden plots or maintain small pastures. It would appear that the persistence of Hispano land-based communities continues to defy the most astute predictions of disappearance.
We do not deny that Hispanos have suffered a tremendous loss of land, water and other resources. Nor do we deny that very real threats are posed to rural Hispano communities by the forces of capitalist maldevelopment. The enclosure of the land grant commons is not the only threat either. Water rights have also been lost or destroyed by development and adjudication politics. Rural industrialization (mining and timbering) pose a constant threat to the land and water rights of Hispano communities. And the recent growth of high country tourism (skiing, backcountry hiking, hunting, fishing, etc.) poses additional threats from real estate and related infrastructure development. Given 150 years of assimilationist policies, a great loss in traditional values is also evident.
But these losses do not present an all-encompassing or even irreversible experience. Cultures change and evolve, sometimes against the proclivities of their members. But change is not necessarily the death of a culture, particularly if people manage to conserve at least some of their land, water, language and customs. In the absence of explicit genocidal policies, cultural change is seldom a zero-sum game. Indeed, resilience, the ability for local place-based cultures to renew their epistemological and ontological groundings, is a continuing source of cultural survival and metamorphosis.
The four myths also obscure the continuing role of the land as a type of "symbolic cultural capital." Hispanos still view ownership of land as part of the family patrimony. One does not sell a member of the family. This belief is associated with the existence and reproduction of a deeply-rooted political ideology, a native sense of place that begets "militant residency" on the land.
It is difficult to assess the changing nature of Hispano agriculture without accounting for non-market dimensions of economic and political life in land-based communities. Hispanos have an emotional and physical attachment to the land; they have an historical memory of place. Rural Hispanos in the Upper Río Grande have weaved a multigenerational land-based identity through storied residence (legends, folktales, aphorisms, and place names). This sense of place can be a very powerful antidote to rootless modernity because it supports an ethos of militant resistance to outside pressures.
Given a militant ethos of "living-on-the-land" against the odds, it is not surprising that rural Hispanos have resisted disappearing for more than 150 years. There are many reasons to believe that rural Hispano culture will continue to evolve and change, but there are very few reasons to expect that it will "disappear." Hispanos are not likely to empty out of the countryside, rushing off into the cities like so many acculturated lemmings leaping off the precipice into the seas of cultural extinction.
NOTE: This excerpt is from the original and unedited version of a chapter first written in 1994 (and this explains the dates of the sources). The only changes in this entry include additions to place this in the context of the blog series. A revised, fully referenced, and more detailed ethnographic version of this chapter will appear in the forthcoming book, The Last Commons: Endangered Landscapes and Disappeared People in the Politics of Place (Arizona, 2011).
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