THE RIVER, THE WORKERS AND THE WALL

THE RIVER, THE WORKERS AND THE WALL
Photographs by David Bacon
Las Cruces, NM  12/22/21

 

 

The Rio Bravo is the border between Mexico and the U.S. from El Paso and Juarez to Brownsville and Matamoros.  Just upriver from El Paso it passes through New Mexico, or it would if there were water in it.  Today, though, the mighty river is dry.
    
There are eight major dams on the Rio Bravo.  The big one at Elephant Butte, near Truth or Consequences, controls the flow down through Las Cruces and El Paso. Greeting the release of the water from Elephant Butte used to be an occasion, when people would come to greet the river as it came alive, submerging again dry sand and brush under the brown flow.
    
That flow, fed by the runoff from rains and snow in the Rockies, would begin in February and finally run dry in October.  But climate change is changing the pattern.  In 2020 water began to course down the riverbed in March, and petered out in September.  This past year the river only flowed from June through July - two months instead of nine.

Route 28 is the old two-lane road that follows the watercourse through the Mesilla Valley that extends from Las Cruces south to El Paso - the border between New Mexico and Texas.  It is pecan country, where rundown buildings line the highway as it runs through the old farmworker towns.  While its people may be poor, however, pecans are New Mexico's most profitable crop, worth over $220 million each year.  Today Doña Ana County harvests more of the nuts than any other in the country.
    
From late December through early January alligator-like machines snake through the orchards, grabbing each tree between rubber-coated jaws, shaking the pecans off the branches.  Another machine follows behind, sweeping the nuts into long rows.  
    
Then the workers arrive.  They clean out branches and debris, that would otherwise clog up the final set of machines in the groves - the giant vacuum cleaners that suck up the nuts, spit out the leaves, and haul the crop down to the sheds.
    
Pecan workers were some of the southwest's first labor activists.  Emma Tenayuca, a young Communist organizer trained at the Universidad Obrera in Mexico City, led twelve thousand young Mexican and Chicana women out on strike in San Antonio in 1938.  
    
This generation of pecan workers, however, may be the last.  The trees yield big profits for growers but they need water, and the river is drying up.  The aquifer below the valley depends on river flow, so pumping water is a solution that will only work for a while.

 

According to Kevin Bixby, director of the Southwest Environmental Center, "it's only a matter of time until people understand that growing pecans in the desert is not sustainable.  Water is a resource of public trust, which means that the government has the duty as an administrator to manage this resource for the benefit of all, including future generations."
    
Below the Mesilla Valley, just before the riverbed becomes the border between Mexico and the U.S., the new border wall stretches across the desert west of El Paso.  In El Paso itself, the city of Juarez is visible through an older section of the wall and its network of wire mesh.

The work of people arriving from the south produced the pecan industry and its profits. But the wall is a potent symbol of the hostility of Texas and U.S. authorities towards migrants.