and dismounts. Seizing its horns, he tries to help it stand,
but the calf is limp, its eyes glazed over. “There’s nothing
else I can do,” Nary shrugs.
The high mesa
Long before the US-Mexico border came into force,
vaqueros drove massive herds of Spanish cattle freely
through the borderlands, seeding a cultural and linguistic
legacy that endures to this day. ‘Buckaroo’, for instance,
derives from ‘vaquero’, while the word ‘rodeo’ comes from
the Spanish verb ‘rodear’ (to round up). Moreover, the US
livestock industry is full of techniques that originated in
Mexico, from branding and saddle-cinching to the use of
hand-braided lariats (a word that derives from ‘la reata’,
meaning ‘the rope’) to rope cattle.
And while cowboy culture north of the border has
dwindled to become a shadow of its former self, some
insist that Baja’s off-grid vaqueros still embody the
rugged individualism of US legend. “They’re the last
representation of the cowboys who conquered the
West,” Fermín Reygadas tells me over the phone. He’s
a professor of alternative tourism at the Autonomous
University of Baja California Sur and has done field
research with Baja Californian ranchers for more than
four decades. “Life is hard, endless work for them, but
they’re free.”
Every morning before the rooster’s call, Nary’s wife,
Erlinda ‘Linda’ Arce Arce begins her daily ritual. Over
a cholla-fuelled stove, she sets a pot of hand-ground
coffee to boil and starts slapping out corn tortillas as the
two-metre radio crackles in the background, mostly with
chatter about the weather. It’s not long before Guadelupe,
Linda and Nary’s five-year-old daughter, bounds into the
kitchen to mix chocolate powder into the milk she’s just
pulled from a cow.
Sturdily built, with an ebony braid that falls to her
waist, Linda met Nary at a wedding. They danced and
“had eyes for each other”, she says, but it took four years
of courtship before they married. Nary had to ride out
and ask Linda’s father for permission to court her. Then
he had to return several times a year to work on the ranch
and prove his worth to the family; all part of a time-worn
ritual. Often apart for months at a time, and without
a reliable phone service, the two of them would talk
on the radio for hours, limiting their conversations to
pleasantries, since everyone in the valley could tune in.
When their wedding was finally held, they celebrated with
a two-day party full of feasting, drinking and live music.
Those fun-loving times seem a long way off, in the
face of the region’s water shortages, but the family still
manages to lighten the mood. When Ricardo shows up
at midday with his guitar, Nary and his burly father, José
María ‘Chema’ Arce Arce take a break from their chores
and grab their instruments (accordion for Chema, bass
cello for Nary) to perform an impromptu concert of
ranchero ballads on the front porch. Chema croons about
114 nationalgeographic.co.uk/travel
MEXICO