Rock Art Rancher

If the study of people is the definition of anthropology,  Brantley Baird, without the benefit of academic degree, is a top- notch anthropologist.

The weathered, careful speaking and listening lanky octogenarian with a gentle demeanor is a born and bred Arizona cowboy. When he married 60 years ago he began his work on the ranch belonging to his wife's family now known as the Rock Art Ranch.

In the vastness of the Arizona desert and canyons, his study of people began with reminders that the family ranch had been home to other families, perhaps hundreds of them, both in both recent history, and, as he would come to learn, from more than 9000 years ago. 

Brantley's study of people began with finding shards pots bowls cups and other hunting tools. As Brantley went about hunting and tending to livestock, he came across areas on the ranch where evidence of homes from the past emerged after gullies were washed in flash floods. It was Brantley's careful observation that two sites were uncovered on the ranch where Navajo, Hopi and Anastazi had cooked, reared families, hunted, traded and used weapons,  playing their corresponding roles in defending or expanding their tribe's territories.

Over the years, Brantley spotted on the ranch many museum quality examples of native American family life and it's remainders. The bowls, cups, utensils, and tools tell a story of people who raise children worked hard for their living using your resources and held religious ceremonies. 

Canyon walls along a creek on the ranch preserve hundreds of petroglyphs of people, animals and inscrutable symbols showing us humans' first written communication.

Brantley's learned from contemporary Navajos who have helped him restore two hogans or Navajo houses on the ranch, one for men and another for women. He showed us the door which always faced the sunrise to direct prevailing eastern winds through the roof opening and remove cooking fire smoke. But there was another purpose for the hogan's roof opening. He pointed to the square of sunlight on the pounded dirt floor of the hogan and told us we are watching the world's oldest clock and calendar. The sun's path across the sky told people the time of day and when during the seasons to plant and harvest crops.

Brantley has also learned from scientists at museums and universities who visit and conduct digs on the ranch's two principal sites, one residential and the other a kiva used for ceremonial worship and prayer. 

What fuels this 80 year old cowboy's lifelong interest in the preservation of native culture?  One clue is family. His grandmother was Native American and he and his wife fostered a Navajo girl. 

No one knows if Brantley's legacy with will be continued with his kids and grandchildren, but at 80 years, he is going strong as a one man Guide and museum curator of artifacts that he literally stumbled into through marriage and by working cattle on his family's ranch.

Brantley inherited this ranch in the Arizona desert, but has paid back his good fortune with hard work and, one shard and pot at a time, retrieving from the desert and the sands of centuries, pieces of history to preserve and to share with others.

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There May Have Been A Day Without Mexicans on Bridge One

I loved this funny film, "A Day Without Mexicans" and was excited to see life imitating art yesterday while in Laredo and Nuevo Laredo. The business community in Nuevo Laredo had called for a boycott of US businesses to protest Arizona's controversial new law allowing the police to stop and question anyone about their immigration status.

I drove over early Monday morning from my hotel to the bridge and was happily reminded the distances were not those that I'm accustomed to living in Pipe Creek. I was at the bridge in less than 10 minutes.

I walked to the area where the toll booths are located and could see the long line of pedestrians, which meant the planned Day Without Mexicans boycott of US businesses had not worked. The supervisor I spoke with said there was no difference in traffic this morning from any other morning.

Later in the day I returned to cross into Nuevo Laredo, and at 4:45 p.m. was the only car on the bridge, both ways. That was strange. I did my interview with the two very generous communication professionals who filled me in on their takes of what the border violence was doing to their lives--everyone staying indoors at night, essentially.

Also stopped in to visit my Aunt Angelica and Cousin Estelita, who live close to the bridge, and then drove home on an equally empty bridge. The attendant on the Mexican side said there had been 70 percent decrease in traffic, while the US Customs agent said there had been no change from the regular traffic.

Later yet that evening, Dee Dee Fuentes, the editor of the Laredo Morning Times met with me. She was working on a story for today's paper about A Day Without Mexicans not panning out. Turns out there can be no day without Mexicans, as people need to show up for work because they depend on a paycheck.

This is the reality, but the point of the film can still be useful in understanding just how interlaced our economies are, especially here in los dos Laredos.

Check out the movie, if you haven't seen it yet, it's funny and it makes you think...what if?

Deliver Me From Arizona

Our Father, Who Art in Heaven: What were You thinking when you created Arizona elected officials?

This question comes from an Arizona-born, but reared and educated as a “Got-Here-As-Soon-As-I-Could” Texas transplant. This dual citizenship of a sort has made me wonder how two states that make up the major part of the U.S. –Mexico border could be so different in their approaches to immigration.
The answers I’ve come up with are as follows:

(I have had some help with this vexing question from historians at the college where I teach).

1. Arizona legislators put in more hours than ours do in Texas. Ours only meet every two years and for special sessions called by the governor, while theirs meet every year. I’m normally not a less-government-is-better kind of person, but in this case I’m apparently sipping tea.

2. In Arizona, the border with Mexico is a fence dividing the vast, sparsely populated Sonoran desert. You could see it from our back yard in Douglas, where my family lived for 19 years, and where my Dad was killed in a copper smelter accident when I was a toddler. In Texas, the border with Mexico’s Tamaulipas and Chihuahua states is a river, where villages and towns have thrived for more than 300 years.

3. Every year for the better part of this new century, 300 undocumented workers, also known as people, died crossing the Sonora. Last month, unknown thugs murdered an Arizona rancher. The death enraged residents and sparked the state’s lawmakers to pass a controversial law allowing local police to stop those they suspect of being here illegally to show legal work permits or citizenship. One person dead is too many, but you have to wonder if the Arizona lawmakers were wearing cultural blinders not to react in similar shock to the deaths of thousands in the state’s desert.

4. Culturally, Texas’ history is intertwined with those of Spain and Mexico. There have been serious conflicts, some still unresolved. But there has also been, especially at the border, many surprises and successes in the blending of two polar opposites. It takes real grit and tolerance to smooth over differences between such strikingly different cultures, but the Tex-Mex border has been working at it for fun and profit since Texas won its independence from Mexico. This “best of both worlds” brew of heritages is ultimately stronger than any divisions, despite and including dispiriting health and economic problems, and the recent return of the worst of the Wild West, lawless drug cartel thugs.

5. Follow the money. Both states’ largest trading partner is Mexico, yet according to the Department of Transportation, in August of 2008, Texas’ trade with Mexico was estimated at $8.3 billion, while Arizona logged in $787 million in that same month’s business with Mexico.

6. Money talks, but votes talk too, as the old Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project wisely counseled in their bumper sticker slogan, “su voto es su voz” your vote is your voice. According to the U.S. Census, Texan Latinos comprise 36.5% of the state’s population, while in Arizona, Latinos make up 30% of the state’s population. With both the money and demographics talking, it’s no wonder Texas politicians, starting with former Texas governor and U.S. president George W. Bush, have been listening. Their ears are tuned to business and political strategists more than to talk-radio hate-mongers bent on making scapegoats of undocumented workers.

So do we know if the next session of the Texas legislature will pass a law similar to that of Arizona’s? Or will the U.S. Congress finally see beyond election myopia to pass immigration reform that includes a legal accommodation for workers from Mexico? I don’t know, but I do have a sense that the drug cartel crisis will influence the outcome, as well as the new push for our nation’s climate policy. Likewise, Arizona may experience unexpected economic repercussions from the diplomatic fury in Mexico.

Exploring the different stances at the U.S. Mexican border has convinced me that Texas and my birth state, Arizona, diverge in their approach to immigration for reasons that differ as much as their shapes and sizes on the U.S. map. Amen.