Extending the Carpa: A North-South View of Conservation

 Speech by Arturo Sandoval

To the Annual Conference
of
The New Mexico Wilderness Alliance

Sunrise Springs, NM

Intro—Canción Mixteca”—play song (2 minutes)

Translation:

How far away I am from the place where I was born
My thoughts are overwhelmed by nostalgia
And seeing me so alone and sad
Like a leaf in the wind
I want to cry
I want to die
From sorrow

O land filled with sun
I sigh wanting to see you
But now I live
without
light and love
And seeing me so alone and sad
Like a leaf in the wind
I want to cry
I want to die
From sorrow

This song is the one song all Mexican immigrants in the United States sing every time they gather. It speaks of their enormous love for “place” -- for their place.  This song is only one of hundreds of Mexican songs I’ve researched that clearly show that Mexicans possess a deep love for the earth and that this love is an integral part of their world view and of their culture.

Thanks to the ruinous, short-sighted and downright stupid immigration policies of the US government, we have forced millions of Mexican immigrants to remain in this country permanently, when in fact, they would prefer to travel seasonally between this country and Mexico to survive economically, and would ultimately prefer to remain in Mexico if the Mexican economy only provided livable wages.

Earlier this year, I was privileged to be able to work in Mexico with an international aid organization that is looking for ways to help poor land-based communities around the world develop sustainable economic crops and methods to keep families and communities intact and in place.

I was contracted by this international aid group to conduct a power map of the internal relationships among the community members in a small ejido—a communal agricultural community of about 250 families in the state of Guanajuato.

Once I arrived, I began walking around the village, meeting people, stopping to introduce myself and to chat informally. I met the leaders of the brigades—the formal way in which the villagers organize themselves to plant their crops, tend their fields and sell their produce in the market.

It wasn’t until my second day there that I noticed something was amiss in the village. Then it struck me. I saw almost no males between the ages of 18 and 55 in the village. When I asked, I was told all of the males were in “el norte”—the US--working to send money back to support their families.

We are so ethno-centric in this country that we worry only about the impacts of immigration on our communities and on our society and on our creature comforts.

Let me tell you, there are huge negative impacts on Mexico as well. It is not a healthy community indicator to spend time in a village where fathers, brothers, uncles and husbands are missing. I saw many overt signs of depression because of the missing family members. Imagine what your city or town or neighborhood would be like if all of your husbands, brothers, uncles and male friends were gone for long periods of time.

I don’t even want to guess what national immigration policy will emerge from next year’s Congress. Whatever it is, it won’t solve the underlying socio-economic forces that we as a country have largely let loose upon the world and that have resulted in an incredible human upheaval around the globe.

But I do want to reflect for a moment on what I sense is a mainstream American view on immigration: we think that we can make of the US a “gated community.” We will simply build a wall around our country, hire security to limit who can come in for a visit, we will play golf, read the New York TIMES, and feel that whatever else happens in the world is just not our damned concern and is not of our making.

I have a couple of dear friends who actually live in a gated community in Albuquerque. Every time I visit, I have to stop at the gate, give my name and tell who it is I plan on visiting. My friends have to put me on a visitors’ list to permit the guards to let me in.

Ironically, in the past 10 years, my friends have been burglarized twice—once when they were at home. My friend woke up to get a drink of water about 3 AM and found a burglar in her kitchen. In contrast, I live near Old Town in a very mixed socio-economic neighborhood and in 18 years there, we have never been burglarized nor have we ever had one thing taken from our yard.

I mention this because it is symptomatic of what is happening to us as a nation. It is our wish to maintain our lifestyles in a place where anger and poverty and hate do not intrude. We are desperately seeking Nirvana with illusory approaches and false assumptions.

It will not work now and it will not work in the future.

I have been married to Clara, my wife, for more than 28 years. She was born and raised in Chihuahua City and was a young professional woman there when I met and courted her. I think I was looking for her as a result of my life’s journey as a bicultural, English-Spanish speaking native of New Mexico.

Since early in my life, I have been attuned to the north south flow of peoples and cultures in this beautiful state of ours.

As a child growing up in Española, I learned to swim on the Rio Grande and would spend many hours just watching the river flow south. My dreams would float south down the Rio as well, hoping to entice me to follow later.

We have a deep human imprint on our state that shows us we had—and still have—pathways and dream ways that flow along a north-south axis. While we are bombarded daily through the media with the glossy façade of Euro-American culture that comes to us through the dominant east-west cultural axis, we are blessed in this state to still have among us the guides who can show us the north-south pathways to our sustainable future.

As conservationists, we have the capacity that many other Euro-Americans do not possess: a keen sense to seek out allies that can help us preserve and protect our most sacred places. We have that sense because each of us in this room has a personal relationship with place. We have nurtured that relationship and we cherish our journey upon this earth.

We realize that we cannot continue our work alone. Fewer Americans seem willing to join us in preserving our wild places. Why? Perhaps it is because we’ve insulated our children from experiencing the outdoors. We can blame Nintendo, TV, play stations and a host of other distractions modern society has provided as a sedative for our children.

But given that reality, we need to look for what I call “unlikely allies” in our fight to preserve and protect this precious place we call New Mexico.

I believe those allies are here already. Native Americans, Hispanos, acequia associations, land grant communities, and yes, ranchers and farmers across our state can make our movement even more vital and more powerful.

How do we create that movement here in New Mexico?

We do it by reaching out to those others who love place to seek collaborations and coalitions. I don’t think we need to spend time and money trying to convince Indo-Hispanos to come to our potlucks and parades.

I do think we need to learn what their issues are, and what we as disciplined conservationists can do to help them move their agendas forward, with an explicit understanding that we want and need their help on our issues.

We need to learn humility, so that we can construct organizational relationships with Native Americans, Indo-Hispanos and others that are peer-to-peer and not one-up.

We should encourage and support with our resources the creation of Native American and indo-Hispano groups who wish to support conservation issues in their own way and on their own terms.

Finally, we need to erase once and forever our belief that we are the anointed arbiters that decide who a conservationist is. In a way, we have lived in a gated community of fellow travelers. We know and love Aldo Leopold; we have hiked the La Luz Trail; we’re a close-knit community of believers. The down side of that is that we tend to ignore those who aren’t living in the gated community. We tend to only focus on our issues and on our needs to achieve our goals. We can be superior and intolerant. That behavior is simply not acceptable, nor is it productive.

We need to use other words to identify a conservationist in New Mexico, words like “parciante” and “heredero” and “cowboy” and “pueblo-ite” and “gardener.”

I want to end with another beautiful Mexican song about place, only this time I’m going to provide the translation first, then play the song.

The song is called “Que Bonito es mi Tierra”

How Beautiful  My Land Is

Ay, Caray, Caray
How beautiful my land is
How beautiful, how lovely

God made garments embroidered
With sunlight and created
a sombrero made of sky
Then he created stirrups of moonlight and stars
And that’s how he dressed up my land

There isn’t a rainbow that can compare
To the color of my land
Its sky and its sea

God formed you, my land, to be the envy of the world
And gave you unmatched blessings.