While a student, and at the encouragement of my mother, I recruited my grandmother to help me collect ghost stories from her oldest sister, Julia, the most renowned storyteller and tamale maker in my family. In addition to learning a little bit about linguistics and a lot about transcribing interviews I also heard for the first time the tale of how her family came to Texas from Torreón, Coahuila. In honor of Diez y Seis and with all due respect to the still precarious status of immigrants and refugees in the United States I am retelling it to you today.

Special thanks are due to my mom Janis, Grandma Pauline, and Aunt Julia who guided me to that kitchen in south central Austin, January 1997, where I first heard this tale.  I had to exercise a little poetic license to weave that conversation into a single narrative but its really Julia’s story. Believe me, when its family holding you to account you’re going to do your best to tell the tale right!

SPOILER ALERT I hesitated to put this next paragraph ahead of the narrative, but disliked placing it at the end of the post. Go read the story first and then come back, I’ll wait… Okay… At the climax of the story the captain of the Villistas spontaneously decides to spare Julia’s father’s life announcing that Frank is his guardian angel. There’s some interesting symbolism here that might have been clearer had Julia’s ordering of the events been more linear, but then she was already quite elderly when I recorded the story. First, the soldiers had already rounded up all the men and locked then in a warehouse, although Frank was just a boy he should have been with them but somehow they missed him and he slept through it. Second, he is wrapped in a sheet because he rolled off the bed when the raiders stole the mattress. Thus, not only does he appear out of nowhere but he is literally clothed all in white, hence why he is like an angel.

NB. At the end of the story, after the family has risen from destitution to some degree of stability, Julia describes herself as being in a house where “we felt like we were okay.” Being that she and her friend have easy access to the river that is only a short horse ride away this is probably the Deep Eddy house, which is where the ghost stories begin.

The Castruita Family Flees to Texas to Escape War in Mexico

by Aunt Julia, with a little help from my Grandma and me

When I was little, you see my daddy would live in a big hacienda. I don’t know how they call it (laughs). Hacienda. And do you know it’s all big and round and all the people sleep all the way round, it’s adobe. Las casas. The houses were made of adobe. Adobe, yes. And it was a big, high wall all the way round the hacienda. Like a village. There was just one gate.

And we live there, my daddy was the el gerente. Manager. There was a water tank beside the house. There was a big windmill that pulled out the water. And a vegetable garden. On one side was the produce for the people, the vegetables and stuff. But over here on this other side, the other side of this huge water tower. It’s as high as the house on the other side, is where they had the fodder for the animals. And they plant oats and alfalfa.

See the man that brought my grandfather over here to Texas is the one that owned that big hacienda. He had a restaurant and one of the biggest hotels in Torreón. They had a warehouse where they had all the stuff that they produced from farming.

In the middle of the night. They were all asleep. And remember now they’re little houses, the hacienda is all these little adobe houses. The rooms all connect. That’s where all the help lived. The people who worked the fields. You see it go around like that and all just rooms together. My father is one that managed it all, he oversaw all the help that worked there.

They were asleep. About two in the morning. There was one guy who was the watchman. And he made the rounds. The Villistas came. They forced their way in.

It was the summer. They were sleeping outdoors.

They pointed their rifles. They put a noose around my father’s head. Everybody got up. They wanted my father to go and open all the warehouses, they were going to loot them. They looted the horses and the mules. They had the wine, the beans. Everything. Cheese.

They took all the men and put ‘em all in one room and locked it. It was an empty warehouse. They locked ‘em in there, just the men. They only left my mother and me, and then everybody else, all the families and everything, they were locked. I cry and cry. But daddy gave ‘em a lock that really didn’t lock. He knew that, but he gave it to ‘em. So they locked it.

My mother, they insisted that my mother give ‘em money and they went into the house where my mother lived. And here I am, a little girl grabbing onto my mother’s skirt. And they tear me away from her, from mama. And I’d come back and then they had a gun, a rifle pointed at my mother all the time. They came in. They took all their clothes. All the bed linens, everything. She had an old sewing machine. And her purse with the money. My mother’s purse with money was inside the sewing machine.

“Give us money!”

They never did find the money cause she had it locked, her purse was locked inside. They don’t find the money. And I was crying and screaming! And my mother would hold me. The soldier were trying to take me. He tried to kill me. With the, you know, turn of the gun. Tried to hit me. And my mother’s arm is all bruised where they hit ‘em.

So then he went and take out my daddy. And you know, Frank. He wrapped in one the sheets. They took the mattress, everything. They went out, take out my daddy. They tied him up.

Down the road from the hacienda was where the Chinese lived and they had orchards, okay. They wanted to know where the China-men lived.

So my daddy walk behind there. Tied up with the rope. He was walking behind the horses. They were going to hang my father. Frank, they went behind him. He was nine years old. He follow him. They were going to put the noose around his neck. They were going to hang my daddy.

Frank he ran and grabbed my daddy by his leg, and then the captain said, “That’s this man’s guardian angel.” And so cut down the rope. And they let him come back.

Frank slipped out. He roll in one of the sheets. And they took him (laughs). Yes, because they take the mattress and everything. But he roll to one corner they don’t see him. Cause it was dark.

And do you know, my mother make coffee right away. And they put some alcohol in their cafe. They were drunk when they left there. The soldiers. They insisted that my mother make coffee, and then they just poured this liquor in. It was 100 proof! (laughs)

They had big cans full of well, it looks like curds and whey. Ready to make cheese. The soldiers just reached in there, would eat the cheese. The cheese, what they need to do was to strain it you know. But they would just eat it. It was a big mess, where they had, you know, all stuck their hand and it was dirty.

All right, when they released my daddy and Frank they came back and because he put just a false lock on the door he opened it and released them. All the people from the hacienda, including me and mama (laughs), just night clothes. We don’t have nothing. Next day my daddy had to come to town and buy some clothes for us to use and everything. The soldiers stole them all. Yes, they took everything. They tore down the place.

They did leave after they decided not to kill my daddy. Yes, yes. They went to the Chinese and kill all the Chinese. And took whatever they want. This was very common. And they, cause that men just live on the mountains. They were guerrillas, more or less. But they’d come, it was very common for them to raid whatever little hacienda was close.

Oh yes. And then, and they told my daddy when they come back they find him there they gonna kill ‘em! So we stay about two weeks there and then my grandfather Anacleto, my daddy’s father say, “No you don’t stay here nomore. Go to Estadio Unido.” Go to U.S. Cause they gonna kill him and his whole family gonna be awful. So my daddy left, he had to go to Austin. He know somebody in Austin.

Yeah, the brother of the man, Mr. Lewis’s brother. This one named Carlos? Charley? Carlos. We stay there for six months, then my daddy went back and bring us to here. To Texas. He came here first, alone. And then he established himself, and then he went back in six months. And brought us back. My daddy went on a train. We went on a train, yeah.

Whenever these guerrillas, they took everything. Nobody go out. And no food, nothing. There wasn’t anything left so what we did was to grind corn, dry corn, and from that she made like a porridge. And that’s what we ate. Just little-bitty cups. One each.

On top of the roof of the house they put the machine guns. So nobody go out. They don’t sell nothing. The stores was close and everything. After the guerrillas would go through the government would send train loads of food. But then all the people, you know, didn’t have anything so they all mobbed the train. And they pass out wheat, flour. Each family would get just a little box which was equal to about a quart of flour, beans, rice.

Okay, see, my daddy after this raid, you know, when they cleaned out the hacienda the owner of the hacienda said, “You better go because they’re going to come back.” And in fact they told my daddy that the next time they came, if he was still there they will kill him. So he, that’s when he came to Texas.

My father’s cousin wrote him and said, “You’d better come back for the family cause, see the rations, your family is starving. You better come back.” So that’s when my daddy went back, six months later. And he brought us.

So we come. We stay in Piedras Negras. One week, because my daddy you know he didn’t have no passport. Well they detained ‘em. While the whole family had a passport, my daddy didn’t. He had only a tourist pass and it had run out. We were a week there, in Piedras Negras at the border. Doing the paperwork.

When we came over, it was Augustine. Mother. Maggie. Frank. Me (Julia). Four children and my mother. And we traveled alone, because see my daddy came the other way around. They traveled alone. I remember that picture of my mother, she was so skinny. But we had had hardship for six months. Down there.

When we first got here we lived in this big ol’, this empty store. And it was just one big, you know, hall. And behind there was this big water tower with a metal tank because it was a windmill pump. And it was so cold that year that in the morning there’d be a huge icicle on the side of the tank. We had no bedding.

In the evening, when we went to bed my mother would wash our clothes and hang the clothes to dry inside the building. There was one stove where she did the cooking. Wood stove. And we all slept around it. But because she had to wash the clothes, cause that was all the clothes we brought what was on our back.

And there was a little black woman that lived near there and she gave my mother some old rattly-tattly blankets and we wrapped ourselves in it to sleep. And the kids wake up in the middle of the night, they’d be so cold, they’d be crying. My father would wake up in the middle of the night, add wood to the stove so it would stay warm. He’d kill birds and coons and possums and squirrels. And that’s what we used to eat when we first come to Austin. And next to the house it was a big field of cabbage (laughs), steal the cabbage from the guy next door. It was so sweet to steal cabbage like that (laughs)!

For 25 cents a day the boys were hired to spinach. Turnips, big turnips. Now my father was working in the dairy already, but this man that hired him would give him breakfast which my mother cooked. She would fix for each one of the hired hands, bacon and biscuits. And my daddy would eat one egg and one slice of bacon, and give my mother the other egg and the other bacon and the biscuit and she then took that divided it among the four kids.

See for a whole year we were there with that man. Then after the end of the year this other man hired him and he gave us a house to live. And then we were no longer hungry because we have everything there. There was a lady she would give us eggs and bacon. And my mother had a vegetable garden. Peach orchard. Grapes. You know every weekend they go fishing, perch. The lady had two sons and one daughter, and they’d climb up and cut the grapes. So see we felt like we were okay because they had all this to eat. They put netting around the trees in the orchard. Plums and grapes.

The little girl was my same age and we would get on the horse and go play on the beach near the river. We go on the river and play there.

Okay. We’ll cut it there.

This morning, as I am sitting down to write this blog entry in my rental apartment in Nogales, I peer through the window: The sun has illuminated the dark brown border wall that coils over the hilly landscape and reminds me of the spiked back of a stegosaurus. Six months ago I arrived in Southern Arizona to begin fieldwork with firefighters and paramedics for a new ethnographic project about emergency responders on both sides of the line, as the international boundary which abruptly separates Mexico and the United States is locally called. Though ethnographic fieldwork takes many forms – I am conducting interviews, participating in the daily activities at the firehouse, volunteering at a first aid station for migrants, teaching prehospital emergency care at a local fire district, and engaging with the first responder communities in Arizona and Sonora in multiple other ways – my primary activity continues to be writing.

I have always been a morning writer. When I was working on the manuscript of my first book, Savage Frontier: Making News and Security on the Argentine Border (University of California Press 2015), I would shut the doors of my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house in the forested suburbs of Vilnius, Lithuania, where I was fortunate to spend my research leave, and would sit at my large desk, facing the barren trees outside, until noontime. I did it every day of the week for several months during a long and cold winter. The manuscript was complete and sent off to my editor on the eve of spring.

But during fieldwork keeping a regular writing routine has been difficult. The topic of our research inevitably shapes how, where and what we write, and my study of fire and rescue services under heightened border security is no exception. Often I spend the entire day on shift with the crew at the fire station, riding along with them to the scenes of emergencies. Other days there is training, community events, long drives to do interviews at more remote fire districts. Having a background in both journalism and in anthropology affects how I go about conducting research. Instead of dividing my time into chunks for doing fieldwork and writing up fieldnotes, I tend to pursue the story as far as it takes me before I finally sit down to reflect on the new material. I think of it as combining the in-depth view of an anthropologist with the fervor of an investigative journalist. It can be exhausting.

Because of this, I write anywhere and everywhere, whenever I have a minute to jot down my thoughts and observations. I scribble names, places and dates in my pocket notebook, in a handwriting that has become illegible, especially when the entries are made while riding in the back of a fire engine or on a 4×4 truck plowing through the dirt roads to where the fence between the U.S. and Mexico is nothing more than a Normandy barrier and four-strand barbed wire. I type abbreviated notes on my cell phone during stops at gas stations along the I-19 connecting Tucson with Nogales, and whenever pulling out my phone to quickly enter some text seems more polite – and less intrusive – than opening my notebook. When I am driving and I can’t pull over to jot down a thought that I want to keep, I record voice memos; I have done so passing through Border Patrol checkpoints on Arivaca Road and on Sasabe Highway, back when I used to count the times I was stopped and to document what the agents were saying.

I also take pictures. Many pictures. On my cell phone or using one of the two DSLR cameras that I carry around. I take pictures of dumpster fires and vehicle accidents, of picturesque sunsets over the Tumacácori and the Baboquivori Peaks, of hazardous materials equipment and of tacos al pastor being prepared for dinner at the firehouse. In fact, photography has been a particularly important ethnographic tool. I am frequently asked to take pictures of official community events, bi-national meetings, and training exercises, and to later share them with the participating agencies and the media. As a designated photographer, however, I may not have time to take notes, so the pictures later become cues for the activities that took place and help me write about what happened. Writing from photographs changes the way we convert experiences and events into prose, suggested Casey N. Cep in an article for the New Yorker. They serve as powerful tools to enhance memories about the encounter that begin to twist immediately after it is over. When I finally open my laptop and begin writing, I draw on all of these cues – notes on my cell phone, handwritten memos, voice messages, photos. They neatly fall into places and begin to form a story. I may not have a well-structured writing routine, but this haphazard creation of fieldnotes has been surprisingly productive.

Fieldwork also precipitates other genres of writing such as writing for the public. There used to be a delay, a pause between ethnographic research often conducted in remote locations, and anthropological publications carefully crafted at academic institutions and perfected through cycles of rigorous revision. It could take years of going back and forth to the fieldsite before scholars would decide to share their findings with the public. Still today many monographs and research articles do not see the light of day until long after the events they depict have transpired. But this has been changing. Ethnographic fieldwork and public writing now happen simultaneously. Federal funding agencies that use taxpayer money are pressured to demonstrate the relevance of the research that they support to the society at large. Meanwhile, technological innovation and easy access to the internet allows us to share photos and news about our fieldwork instantaneously via e-mail, blogging or social media. These developments, among others, have led anthropologists to more openly talk about our work-in-progress. More of us now report preliminary findings from the frontlines of ethnographic research.

While conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Sonora and Southern Arizona over the last half a year, I have written across different genres of public writing. I created a public website, http://www.borderrescueproject.com/, which I update with news, excerpts from my fieldnotes and interviews, reflections written by my research assistants, and numerous photographs. The website is also linked to the project’s Twitter account and displays a feed of the most recent events linked to my work. At the request of my contacts in the fire service and emergency management, who invite me to participate in their trainings and meetings, on a couple of occasions I wrote brief news pieces and sent photographs to the local newspaper in Nogales, Arizona. I have also given interviews to several Mexican news outlets in Sonora. As a former journalist, I am familiar with the practice of deploying information to promote activities in the community and I eagerly engage with the media in ways that benefit the people with whom I work. News media provides a powerful and readily available channel to communicate the significance of the research project to the broader public. With that in mind, I wrote an op-ed for the Guardian that was a critical commentary on existing federal policies that blend emergency healthcare with immigration policing, and thus the riskiest form of public writing I have done. This article likely had more readers than any of my scholarly publications ever will. It was shared instantaneously via social networks and thus was immediately available to the firefighters and paramedics who have been participating in my research project. I had reasons to fear their reaction. Politics are generally seen as a threat to camaraderie, and thus are a taboo topic in the firehouse where people of different political leanings have to rely on each other in life and death situations. Had they found my op-ed to be politically aggressive or provocative, my fieldwork relationships could have ended there and then and the future of my research would be uncertain. To my relief, they liked it.

Messages to the media are different than other narrative genre more familiar to anthropologists. In “Why Ethnography Matters: On Anthropology and Its Publics”, Didier Fassin writes about the challenges that scholars face when their research goes public. The shift from the academic realm to the world of news journalism, which substitutes nuanced accounts of complex social reality with flashy, explicit headlines, is often frustrating to those who invest years to understand a multifaceted problem with no easy solutions, such as the political, legal and economic conundrum on the U.S.-Mexico border. Talking to the press and writing for the public before the research is over can be even more problematic. Preliminary findings can be inconclusive or contradictory. What if, once you are back at your desk, going through your fieldnotes with analytical focus, you regret what you said or wrote while your experiences were still fresh like wet paint? It seems safer to create a distance between the messy stage of ethnographic research – the fieldwork – and the structured phase of reflection and scholarly production that comes afterwards. It may be wise to wait before you reach out to the public. But such caution has its cost: the lost opportunity to build and maintain bridges between the scientific community and the multiple publics who we want and need to address.

Writing in the field and writing from the field are forms of ethnographic writing that, because of their unpretentious character and temporary relevance, are overshadowed by academia’s focus on full-length monographs and peer-reviewed scholarly articles. Fieldnotes posted on the blog may be unpolished and haphazardly put together, news articles too narrow and shallow, editorials and commentaries for the press – candid and biased (“wrinkles” which anthropologists as authors soften out after long hours spent on drafting and then revising our CV-worthy manuscripts), but they also come with the immediate reward of sharing knowledge in the making.

Writing is not the aftermath of fieldwork. Fieldwork is writing.

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to interview Christian Zlolniski about his ongoing work in Baja California, Mexico. I contacted Zlolniski in hopes of getting some more insight about the farmworker strikes in the San Quintin Valley that began this past March. Zlolniski is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) at the University of Texas at Arlington. His research focuses on economic globalization and immigrant labor, with regional emphasis in the US Southwest and Mexico.  He is the author of the book Janitors, Street Vendors, and Activists: The Lives of Mexican Immigrants in Silicon Valley (UC Press, 2006) and co-author of De Jornaleros a Colonos: Residencia, Trabajo e Identidad en el Valle de San Quintín (COLEF, Mexico 2014).

Ryan Anderson: When did you first start doing fieldwork in San Quintin? Why San Quintin?

Christian Zlolniski: I began doing fieldwork in 2005 with two professors at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte (Colef) in Tijuana, Mexico –Laura Velasco a sociologist, and Marie Laure Coubes a demographer. We wanted to study the settlement of thousands of indigenous farmworkers in the region who in the past were seasonal migratory workers. It was evident to us that San Quintin was changing fast and becoming a major agro-export enclave in Northern Mexico. It combined advanced agricultural production technologies with the massive employment of indigenous workers as a source of cheap and flexible labor. Except for a few pioneering studies, the academic literature on this region was rather thin and San Quintin was not in the radar screen of politicians, the media or scholars. We also felt that the academic literature on border studies in Mexico had an urban bias with special focus on the economic, demographic and cultural changes in large border cities (and studies on the maquila industry) while important transformations in rural society and economy, including the rapid growth of export agriculture, were largely ignored.

RA: Can you give us some insight into the lives of the jornaleros (ie migrant farmworkers) in the San Quintin Valley? Where are many of these workers from? What is it like to live and work in San Quintin?

CZ: The lives of farm laborers in San Quintin experienced significant changes since the 1990s. In the past many were migratory workers housed in labor camps who after the harvest season left the region. With the expansion of employment opportunities year-round because of the growth of commercial agriculture, many of these workers settled with their families and severed links with their home communities. To settle, they had to buy land plots and work very hard over the years to build and improve their homes and sustain their families. Often they lived in one-room shacks made of cardboard and plastic until they could save enough money to add more rooms and build a roof on their homes. Many of the jornaleros in San Quintin are indigenous peoples from poor regions in southern Mexico such as Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Chiapas among others. Thus San Quintin is one of the most ethnically diverse regions in Baja and Mexico as a whole. This is quite remarkable considering this is not a big city but a rural region, which shows that like in other parts of the world agro-export enclaves are magnets for labor immigration of the most vulnerable segments of the population.

While San Quintin is a beautiful region along the Pacific coast that attracts some tourists from California, the lives of farmworkers remain largely invisible for outsiders passing by. They live in colonias difficulty accessible in dusty roads and lack the basic infrastructure and service we take for granted in the United States such as sewage, paved roads, water, clinics, and the like. With time and thanks to the collective mobilization of their residents who organized to press the local government to respond to their needs, the conditions in some colonias have improved. Yet San Quintin is one of the least developed regions in Baja despite having one of the most productive and affluent horticultural industry in the country. Despite the big challenges they confront, farmworkers in San Quintin have adopted this region as their own and are proud citizens of the region and committed to build a better future for their children so they don’t have to work as jornaleros like them and find employment in better-paid and less strenuous jobs.

RA: Much of your work focuses on the social costs of export agriculture. Elsewhere, you talk about the price we pay for having access to fresh produce all year long. Can you briefly outline your argument? What is the price we pay?

CZ: My argument is that we are used to expect easy access to fresh vegetables and fruits year round at reasonable prices to sustain our lifestyles without thinking about what is takes to produce these crops. One or two generations ago, our parents and grandparents did not expect access to off-season veggies unless they were willing to pay high prices in premium stores. Today things have changed and we can find tomatoes, berries, grapes, and all types of tropical fruits all year round regardless of the season with some but not dramatic price fluctuations. How is this done? To meet our demands commercial agriculture has gone through a major restructuring over the past few decades with the formation of large multinational companies that outsource and buy these produce from developing countries around the world. It has also fueled the development of the so-called counter-seasonal agriculture, which is growing crops in protected environments such as greenhouses to “liberate” agriculture form traditional nature constrains and increase productivity. The result is that in Mexico and many other regions in Latin America, agro-export enclaves have emerged as part of the global food commodity chain which are fully dedicated to export agriculture.

But while providing jobs for farmworkers, agro-export enclaves also generate high ecological, economic and social costs. In San Quintin which is an arid region, water-intense crops such as tomatoes and berries are irrigated with underground water. As a result the underground table has dramatically receded and farmworkers and other residents have increasing problems having access to water for their basic needs. The work in the fields and greenhouses is also very demanding, and field workers when reaching the forties or fifties are often replaced by a young cohort of indigenous workers without having access to pensions or any support after having worked in the region and the same employers. These workers cannot afford to buy the very vegetables they grow, most of which are destined to export markets alone. And because they cannot grow their own food staples any longer, their diets have deteriorated and have health problems such as diabetes they did not have before when they lived as peasants growing their own foods. The social transformation from peasants to rural wage workers employed in commercial agriculture has come with a price tag for them. I think as consumers we have to be aware of these implications and just we have become more socially sensitive about the labor conditions of the workers overseas who build our computers or make our clothes and garments, we ought to ask the same questions about the food and vegetables we consume.

RA: The migrant farmworkers have received a lot of coverage this year because of the strikes that began back in March of this year (see here and here). As an anthropologist, what’s your take on the media coverage and public response to these strikes? What are the root causes of the current strike?

CZ: The strikes that started last March took everybody by surprise, including growers, government officials and the media. There are several factors that explain the resurgence of labor unrest in the Valley which, since the late 1990s, did not experience large strikes. First, while horticultural companies have been doing very well with impressive productivity gains, workers who contribute to this wealth have barely received any benefits from their labor. On the contrary, wages have only modestly increased over the past ten years, and many farmworkers still do not receive the basic labor benefits mandated by the law, including health coverage through the Seguro Social (IMSS). Also since the early 2000s, companies implemented a new pay system based on piece-rate rather than daily wages to enhance workers’ productivity which has led to the intensification of work and, often, more labor exploitation. Labor subcontracting has also become a common practice by many growers and companies to reduce labor costs and increase labor flexibility.

A second factor is the inclusion of labor claims as part of a larger agenda of community activism by farm laborers in San Quintin. In the past when many migratory workers settled in San Quintin they concentrated their time and energies to get a land lot where to build their homes and to mobilize to press government authorities to get the basic infrastructure and services such as water, electricity, schools, and clinics for the colonias. For a while labor-related issues and demands took a back seat as farmworkers and their families were setting up roots in the region. Now after many years of community-based activism, labor issues have come back at the center of the political agenda. Many farmworkers are eager and ready to mobilize for old demands that were never met, including their registration in the Seguro Social, higher wages, and stop abuses by mayordomos (crew leaders) and labor contractors.

A final factor is the emergence of a new independent labor union to articulate workers’ demands and feelings. In San Quintin farm workers have been represented by what in Mexico are known as “sindicatos patronales” state-sanctioned yellow unions that represent more the interest of the companies than the workers. Local growers and the Mexican government have always opposed, sometimes through the use of violence, the formation of independent unions that could threaten the political status quo in the region. Yet this time a new independent organization –the Alianza de Organizaciones Nacional, Estatal y Municipal por la Justicia Social– has emerged to challenge the historical shady association between growers, “official” unions like the CTM, and government officials to demand a seat and voice in the table when labor contracts for farmworkers in the Valley are negotiated. There is also new blood in the labor leadership brought by the Alianza, including Mixtec and Triqui farmworkers with experience of labor organizing in Florida and Mexico. And while in the past when labor strikes erupted, growers and government officials tried to regionalize the conflict to control it, this time the Alianza has internationalized farmworkers’ strike to galvanize the support of sympathizers in the United States where the crops they produce are sold. These innovative strategies have paid off and the labor strike in San Quintin has captured the media attention in the U.S., especially in California, Mexico as a whole, and even reached Europe in countries like Spain. I hope the media does not forget San Quintin and keeps bringing attention to the labor conditions of farmworkers employed in this important agro-export enclave.

When you see piles of fresh fish in a market, do you ever ask yourself whether or not the listed price accurately reflects the actual value of those now-lifeless creatures? How much is one fish really worth? I never thought much about that question until I attended a community meeting in the coastal pueblo of La Ribera, Baja California Sur. Who knew it would be a lesson in value?

The meeting itself was hosted by a group of marine scientists and other scholars from the nearby university in La Paz. The goal of the meeting was to change some minds. You see, fishermen from La Ribera weren’t exactly elated about the nearby Marine Protected Area in Cabo Pulmo (aka the Cabo Pulmo National Park), despite its immense national and international support. Some surrounding communities were not completely sold on the idea of a no-take fishing zone. La Ribera was among them; many residents felt that Pulmo’s MPA only benefited the residents of Cabo Pulmo. A group of marine biologists, economists and other scholars from the nearby university in La Paz (UABCS) arranged a community meeting to try to convince residents of La Ribera otherwise.

About 35 to 40 people showed up. One of the main speakers was a marine biologist who has spent more than two decades working in Cabo Pulmo. He began by talking about the “environmental services” that Pulmo’s MPA provides. He followed up with a brief overview about coral reef systems and how they benefit local communities. Next, he talked about why Cabo Pulmo is so famous–it is one of the few hard coral reefs in this part of the Pacific. This is why it was set aside as a protected area back in 1995.

Reefs provide many things, the marine biologist explained, including basic necessities such as food. Much of the value of reefs can be calculated in monetary terms, he told the audience, but not all of it. He explained that reefs produce billions of dollars annually around the world, and, for some countries, are the base of their economy. Reefs are places where commercially valuable fish live and breed, he added. Then he listed all of the raw materials and products that come from reefs. They also add to the beauty of places, he said, which draws in tourists.

The message: reefs mean money.

This is where things get interesting. He followed up by telling the audience that each fish on the reef is worth about $400 dollars. He was talking in terms of US dollars, not pesos. This is about 6400 pesos. Think about this. The minimum wage in Mexico is about 70 pesos per day (about $4.50 USD). For someone making double the minimum wage (140 pesos per day, or 3360 per month), one fish is equivalent almost two months of work (assuming six working days per week).

The notion of a $400 fish reverberated through the audience. Attention captured.

After the expensive fish bombshell, the marine biologist started to wrap up his presentation by talking about the relations between the communities of Cabo Pulmo and La Ribera. Both are communities of fishermen; both rely on the ocean for survival. He explained how marine reserves and no-take zones work: fish concentrate, populations grow, then they spread out to other places. The protected area at Cabo Pulmo directly impacts the fisheries in La Ribera, he told the audience. The MPA, he said, is like a McDonald’s for various species–they come to the reef, eat, and run. His final point was that there is room for the people of La Ribera to benefit from the conservation of Pulmo Reef–and the growing tourism market. This can happen without direct competition or conflict, he explained. He implored the audience to consider the idea that preserving Pulmo can be complementary for La Ribera, that everyone can benefit from conservation.

At the end of the meeting, the presenters asked the audience to evaluate and comment on everything they heard. All of the responses were positive. All of them. One man stood up: “This is the first time I have gone to one of these meetings,” he said. “Now, I understand the importance of Pulmo,” he declared. He also added that he sees there are many opportunities for his own community to create businesses, to make money. “We just need the training to do this,” he explained. He ended by telling the audience that he has seen the effects of environmental degradation–and recovery–first hand. In the past, he said, lobsters were hard to find. But today, there are many more, thanks to Pulmo’s MPA. This man made it very clear that he saw things very differently, thanks to this meeting.

I remember walking out of the meeting thinking “Well, that worked pretty well.” And it apparently did. The whole money/economic opportunities angle did seem to be compelling for the local fishermen. It made people stand up and pay attention. It seemed to change some minds, to get people to rethink the importance of Cabo Pulmo and its protected reef. But the whole idea of the $400 fish stuck with me. I understand the rationale behind telling people that one fish swimming out there on the reef is worth all of that money. It’s meant to express the value of something in clear, powerful terms. The point is to motivate people, using one of the dominant registers of our time. Money talks–I get it.

But isn’t there something wrong with putting a price on nature? The moral indignation of this question was expressed perfectly by the late comedian Bill Hicks, who once shouted: “Quit putting a dollar sign on every fucking thing on this planet!” Yet, beyond all of the arguments and righteous indignation about the commodification of every possible aspect of our daily lives, what is actually the problem with standing in front of a room full of people and telling them that there’s a fish out there that’s worth two months of work? Do we really need to stay up late at night worrying about this?

Possibly. As Richard Conniff wrote on Yale Environment 360 (linked above), critics suggest that viewing nature in purely economic terms makes “a fundamental change not just in the world around us, but in ourselves.” Ok, so it changes the world around us, and it also changes us in a fundamental sense. Along similar lines, Marx once wrote,

Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world—both the world of men and nature—of  its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.

Money robs the world of its specific value, says Marx.  For David Harvey, money is a corrupting, corrosive force. In Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, he also argues that the intrinsic value of nature exists beyond the imposed realm of money values (1996:157-158). Money, as powerful as it is, falls short–it doesn’t quite cover over our world. But we often don’t take the time to look, to see the holes in the facade. There is something about nature (land, trees–and fish) that cannot quite be captured or expressed by money–much in the same way that language can never completely express human reality and experience. Money is a social convention, Harvey reminds us, not an immutable fact or law. It exists within particular social arrangements (or, to use other terms, specific modes of production).

In Capital, Marx warned against naturalizing value as it is created and understood in capitalism. Because if we internalize particular ways of valuing the world around us, we may lose the ability to think outside of such conceptions and imagine alternatives (see Harvey 2010:45-46). This brings us back to that $400 fish. This way of thinking about fish–and nature–commits exactly the kind of naturalization of one form of value that Marx warns about. It takes something that exists within a complex, dynamic ecological system and reduces it to a very specific value within one particular human-constructed system. Such a discourse frames nature in terms of money, markets, and capitalism. Period. This presupposes a certain kind of world, in which the primary meaning (i.e. value) of nature is tied to its economic productivity (even if the money values that are often assigned to nature are often incredibly vague). And thus, nature is robbed of all other potential meanings and values. This reminds me of an Aldo Leopold quote (in this case about land, but equally applicable to “nature” in general):

It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect and admiration for the land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense so that a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it trends otherwise” (1968:223-224).

So where does this leave us? Is the $400 fish a signal of immanent corruption and doom, as Marx seems to suggest? In speaking about nature in terms of money, are we opening up a Pandora’s Box that ultimately leads us down a destructive, end-of-the-world path that could only be painted by Hieronymus Bosch? Maybe, and maybe not. As Keith Hart writes, “Anthropologists might sign up for the sentiment that money is the root of all evil. But, in demonising money, they come close to endowing the institution with an evil power all of its own.” Clearly, both Harvey and Marx can be put into the “money is the root of all evil” camp. But are they right?

On the one hand, speaking about fish in terms of dollars sets up the kind of situation that often plagues many Payment for Ecosystem Services schemes. In essence, when you start atomizing nature and putting price tags on all of its various components, it becomes possible to start substituting money for those components. Especially when things go wrong. In the case of fish, imagine if a local developer wanted to put in a massive hotel that required an equally behemoth desalination plant. Let’s say this desal plant produces sludge that affects the reef, and ends up killing 30% of the local reef’s fish biomass. Well, if you know the specific money value of each fish, you can just pay for the damage and move on with your business. Pay the 30% in cash, and done. No problem…except for the degraded reef and all the dead fish.

But then there’s the other hand. One of the issues here is that it sometimes seems as if the rhetoric of commodification automatically transforms and reshapes the world in which we live. As if the mere mention of money completely washes over, corrupts, and distorts nature. Sure, discourse has its effects and all, but the act of speaking of fish in terms of (US-based) money values doesn’t instantly make it so. And although this comparison may have grabbed the attention of La Ribera’s fishermen, it doesn’t mean, from that moment on, that they completely forgot about all of the other meanings and values of the fish, fisheries, and local marine systems. Other values persist, despite the ubiquitous dominance of money, markets, and western economies. There are times, I think, when our critiques about commodification do indeed endow money–and capitalism–with a bit too much evil, almost magic, transformational power.

Despite the seemingly unending dominance of global capitalism, it’s vital to imagine alternatives, to see other possibilities. In the case of La Ribera, maybe the strategic framing of fish in terms of money accomplished just that for La Ribera’s fishermen. It was a rhetorical tactic, framed in one powerful register of value, that helped people think differently about the importance of local conservation. Maybe, in the final tally, the fish in Pulmo reef aren’t doomed to be swimming dollar signs after all–thanks to one imaginary four hundred dollar fish.

I’m sitting in the auditorium of LANGEBIO, a national genomics biodiversity lab in Mexico. Perched towards the middle of a room that holds about 220 people, I’m listening to a day-long series of presentations by doctoral plant geneticists. The bare concrete walls bear streamers of sponsors, such as Illumina, Biosis, and Biosistemas Avanzados. Each speaker strides out onto an overly large stage that dwarfs them as much as the giant overhead screen, across which their presentations flash. The featured species are Zea mays and Arabidopsis thaliana (the first flowering plant to have its genome sequenced), along with varieties of yeast—all well-established model organisms upon and through which genetics steadily advances.

This is my third field stint at LANGEBIO but the first time I get such an overview of the institution. Instead of first catching up with the lab practices of particular researchers, this trip starts with the panoply of projects underway throughout LANGEBIO. So initially I’m overwhelmed and a bit disconcerted. First, I’ve focused entirely on maize and particularly “razas de maíz” or races of corn. So I’m surprised to realize this institute, founded in response to U.S. efforts to sequence the maize genome, features so much work on Arabidopsis—a plant genus with no agricultural value, but whose rapid reproductive cycles are far more conducive to publishing dictates. But I’m also overwhelmed by the slew of genetics techniques on display in the presentation. In the first paper alone (“Search and Description of New Genomic Regions Selected during the Domestication Process of Maize”): a window analysis to assess nucleotide diversity, which leads to a series of comparative studies (one for a gene encoding a S-adenosyl methyltransferase, another for one encoding an ARF-gap zinc finger protein), followed by an experimental analysis looking for genetic sweep selection during domestication, closing with coalescent simulation (CS) and Hudson-Kreitman-Aguade (HKA) statistical tests. Before the second paper (“Delving in bioinformatics of –omics data from a biochemistry background) is finished, I’m feeling unmoored.

What seemed so intelligible in lab settings spiraled quickly beyond my comprehension; due in part to my modest grasp of genetics, but also the detachment of hearing this work rendered in the abstract—that is, removed from routine, material contexts. Perhaps in a mild panic, I fall back on my ethnographic training and ask, ‘What’s cultural here?’ Of course, I turned to metaphor immediately. Even before George Marcus asserted “follow the metaphor” as a basic focus of multisited fieldwork, metaphors have long captivated ethnographers. And they’re plentiful in the presentations. Soon my notebook is jammed full of them: “window,” “signature,” and “downstream,” etc. There were ones that made me hesitate, such as “promoter” and “transcript,” but “housekeeper genes” [see Emily Martin, Flexible Bodies] “genetic architecture” seemed quite clear.

My head was buzzing with all of this during the coffee-break when Jean Philippe Vielle Calzada—the senior researcher who had generously allowed me to do fieldwork in his lab—asked me what I had observed so far. In reply, I blurted out an initial analysis of the metaphorics of genomics. I was neither disappointed nor surprised that it made so little of an impression upon him. After all, this is not an unusual reaction to science studies accounts. What did surprise me is that I experienced a moment of doubt as I heard myself talking. This doubt was amplified further in a string of such conversations with other researchers, that year and on a subsequent visit in 2014, when my words seemed to fall flat or ring hollow, even to myself.

Looking back, I recognize a disparity opened up between the kind of insight I could generate with an attention to metaphor and what the researchers depict about what is happening with these species: how their reproductive behaviors are operating in lab settings, performing in close calibration with that of other model organisms, all aligned via utterly massive comparative genetic databases around the world. For that matter, I recognized my line of analysis ran in one direction, towards ideology and what was going on in the researchers’ heads; and that inexorably this led away from the plants. Following the coffee break, as I listened to more papers, I grew more interested in the life forms they were depicting. Two realizations followed: first, that I needed the geneticists more as guides than as ideological ciphers; second, I had to follow the species (maize, in this case)—follow how its sexual history, reflecting 9,000 years of domestication, is being molded and directed to produce genetic knowledge, not just for greater yields but for insights on how companions species relations have developed and may yet unfold in the future.

John Hartigan (University of Texas, Austin) theorizes culture across species lines at www.aesopsanthropology.com and @aesopsanthro. His guest posts concern ethnography of life forms. Aesop’s Anthropology is also available in e-book format from University of Minnesota Press.