Paco Estrada Ruiz stood in a light rain Monday morning, swearing quietly. He is part of a family clan of campesinos whose ample, but modest ranch sets mostly on a steep twist of Jalisco highlands southeast of Guadalajara. It was a region treated unkindly by weather this growing season. Paco spat into the drizzle. Sunday had smiled with a convincingly lying sunny sky. Today’s rain was swearworthy, but not totally unexpected this loco year.
The wavery weather station said two hurricanes were churning up the Pacific coast. One was at Manzanillo; another at Guerrero. Taking the reins from the North American, Paco swung onto his spotted mare, and the other horse bucked once. Side-by-side they passed the lower fields where just-cut corn stalks, stacked to dry, stood leaning together at the tops to form monos — corn shocks. Many were covered with faded blue lonas (plastic tarps). Paco smiled. The light-skinned man said, “Remember the ones who called you ‘Paco-Loco’ in September when you said a lot of rain was coming?” Paco had talked then of the scrawny mountain growth of wild flowers, the still budless guamuchil and mesquite trees. He’d sent his immediate family to buy used lonas being sold by the unsavvy, the rich who thought the the rainy season was over. And when he draped his monos in blue plastic, they laughed.
Rancho Santa Cruz is home to a cluster of related families that has guarded its independence and traditional ways of survival in the face of much more than rough weather. Challenges mostly have been government-produced disasters: economic mismanagement, a long record of anti-small farm policies and habitual corruption. This history has made the ranch severely practical and thus old-fashioned-seeming to outsiders. It is both a product and a survivor of the dissolution of the hacienda culture, which in various forms died hard in Jalisco — despite conventional conviction. (Almost all haciendas had apparently ended operations much earlier, official history has calculated. But on the ground in rural Mexico the culture of peonage could be found operating as late as 1950. The purpose of official statistics is to provide tidy synopses; reality, unservile by nature, is both disorderly and incorrigible.)
Paco’s kind are called cerro campesinos, often derisively. For such people mere topographical height doesn’t make a montaña. Impressive verticality does. For Paco’s people, who had long been peons harshly used to keep large landholders wealthy, the roots of what was to become a ranch were planted in a remote piece of neglected, seemingly unfruitful mountainside by escapees from the way things were. This began minutely during the ragged end of the 1910 Revolution when commanders on the run abandoned soldiers left to defend untenable positions. Some soldiers were simply forgotten. Recruited in hasty, disorganized ways, they were lost, or they disappeared in the same manner. Some threw down their weapons and left, seeking water, food, a quiet place to mend or die. Twenty-five percent of Mexico’s population is officially said to have fled to the United States. Many unnamed, unaccounted-for recruits did the same. Others just vanished, killed in action and hastily dumped into unknown graves, blown apart by artillery, or left on some forgotten ridge for scavengers to dispose of. It was during this chaos, Paco’s gringo friend had rather recently been told, that the three veterans of peonage and slaughter decided to find their own manner of survival. They were not men to throw down their weapons. They combed battlefields, loading left-behind weapons, ammunition, canteens, tack, canned food onto limping mules and cast-off horses. Not related, they shed old identities to take a common name as they retreated into the central mountains. They avoided towns and pueblos, migrated away from everything they knew, moving northwest until they found a high, seemingly uninhabitable cerro with a bit of seepage at its base, barely enough to support a spotty line of scruffy mesquite trees shading a scattering of wild plants. They lived on wild game caught mostly in traps — to conserve both ammunition and silence. They did not wish to be found. Used to thin rations, they foraged for plants and roots to eat, and use as medicine. Outlasting the carnage of reckless warfare had taught this uneducated trio the utility of stealth and caution, of preservation and living off the land. When the rainy season came they enlarged the seepage, dug additional uphill arroyos to feed newly planted trees and plants. Their caution allowed them to head off lost wanderers at a distance, sending them on circuitous routes to mythical settlements below. They met intent interlopers lethally. One of the three had learned to read and write by the time President — and former General — Alvaro Obregon was assassinated in 1928. Youngest of the three, he sweated over discarded elementary pamphlet texts distributed during Obregon’s national educational push. Before President Lazaro Cardenas, 1934-1940, launched his immense redistribution of land, the three were busy with their own land reform program. They gathered a baffling assortment of almost illegible documents regarding their ownership of a stack of uphill tracts, inherited from nonexistent veterans of the first moments of the Revolution and subsequent upheavals. Like many, the offices of the nearest municipalidad (town hall) had been looted and burned more than once during that time. Since the cerro land had been deemed useless by a previous municipal administration, the municipio clerk they met did not seek to confiscate the land for himself or his family. Bored with the absence of larcenous opportunity, he stamped each sheet of paper with a blurry, certifying smear.
The three men started with a few stray (and not so stray) cattle and horses. Besides livestock, they and their soon growing families sold hides, corn, beans, diary products, wild vegetables and fruits, mountain cures, agave for tequila — and distilled their own. For this clan, the cerro could be destroyed by nature, stolen by the powerful or by the government, but it never lied. This week, as some worried that hurricane-bred rains would destroy the frijole crop, Paco Estrada Ruiz said he would harvest his beans in December. The rain would give him more beans. But garbanzo planting would be delayed. Chickpeas liked to incubate in warm, unsoaked earth.
Weeks before the Pacific’s “meteorological events” became news, Paco was riding fence with his gringo friend. They were checking and repairing fencing: repiling the base stones, splicing rusted or cut barbed-wire strung above on posts loosened by the rain and needing to be reset. Paco pointed to the scattered guamulchil and mesquite trees. “See how late they are to bloom.” He knelt to dig a small pocket in the dry ground, sifting and smelling the earth. “Sudada. It’s sweating.” Paco showed a handful to his companion. “It shouldn’t be, not this time of year.” He tasted it. “It’s wrong for September.” He had shaken his head at how sparse the mountain flowers were. That’s when his household began looking for used lonas. “Maiz sometimes has to be treated like a pretty woman.” Paco grinned. “You have to drape her in a gown. A colorful one.” He laughed at himself, pleased with such an unaccustomed poetic idea.
The two men mounted and headed uphill, each checking different sections of fencing. Continuing an ancient, repetitive chore begun carefully, watchfully on that rocky slant, that tilted cerro, nearly a century before.