Student Slideshows Arizona 2011: Amy Connors

Caught in the middle of nowhere

Text and photos by Amy Connors

Eighty miles from Tucson on solitary, flat roads that carve through pristine-looking fields and brazen rock formations, the dry winds pass heavily, veiling all in a pale dust. The story of ranchers on the Arizona-Mexico border is as much about this land as it is about their lives. Among the fifty states, Arizona is unique in the way that its farmlands were distributed and are managed. The majority of ranch land in Arizona is not privately owned, but rather leased, dating back to the Homestead Act of the 1860s.

As Gary Thrasher, an Ohio born veterinarian who became passionate about the political issues facing Arizona ranchers in the years since he settled on his land in Cochise County, explained, “In [Arizona’s] original constitution, it was given a certain amount of property by the federal government as what they call ‘school trust lands’: lands that are managed by the state primarily for grazing.” Cochise County has one of the highest percentages of privately owned ranching property, but that still is only 30 percent of the land.

Arizona’s arid climate, where nine months of the year are essentially rain-free, requires ranchers to maintain 50 acres per each head of cattle. Since ranchers must farm at least several hundred cattle to make a profit, Thrasher reflected, “You’re kind of out by yourself on a lot of those ranches.” The sheer acreage of the ranches has made them susceptible to illegal migrants.

Living at the intersection of a neighboring country has not always been problematic for ranchers in Arizona, according to Laurinda Oswald. A thin, Italian-American rancher who grew up in Italy, Oswald drives around in her jeep with the windows rolled down, even in 101º heat. Her land has suffered from massive amounts of trash left by passing migrants, and she herself has had several nerve-racking encounters with illegal immigrants. She notes, though, that this wasn’t always the case. “For many years, the [traffic] was a dribble, a drip,” she said, something that didn’t affect her day-to-day life.

Thrasher echoed Oswald’s sentiment, but noted that it wasn’t that ranchers previously ignored illegal immigrants, but that they actually coexisted peacefully with Mexican border crossers. He said, “The people who were migrating at that time were rural-type people. They had respect for livestock. They had respect for assets, the fences, the barns, the water tanks.”

He added, “And very often, they might stop at your ranch and say, ‘I need a sandwich, I’ll work for food for a day or two before I go on’…and there was never a conflict, hardly any.”

Today, that has changed. Instead of the rural immigrants who returned seasonally for work and with whom ranchers established relationships, immigrants now seem to possess little understanding of the land and are just passing through on their way to urban centers.

These new immigrants rely more on the elusive guides known as coyotes, who often have no qualms about tearing out fences, cutting water pipes, or leaving huge piles of trash at a pickup station. A huge business has been made out of leading illegal immigrants into the U.S., and while many of the border cities have been fortified, the ranches, seemingly protected by a harsh environment, are otherwise unarmored.

Recent immigrant traffic across ranches has come with a severe economic and environmental impact. Though the land can withstand 110º heat and only 17 inches of rainfall each year, Oswald says that in reality “it’s very fragile.”

Another rancher, Lynn Kimble, who lives with her husband near the eastern border with New Mexico, explained that a cattle rancher’s business is truly “growing the grass, the cattle are secondary.”

According to John Ladd, who doesn’t have any hired cowboys and runs hundreds of acres with the periodic help of his three sons, “People ranching on the border spend fifty percent of their time dealing with it [migration]. Between Border Patrol and illegal activity, it’s a constant repair mode that you’re in.”

The problems that now plague life on the border come from the fact that balance, whether in an ecological or a social sense, is never secure or permanent.

Ranchers have always known that they gambled with climate and rainfall, but they never imagined that settling in Southern Arizona, they were also gambling with a global labor market, economic depression in Mexico and the US, complex networks of drug cartels, and an elaborate system of illegal people smuggling. Jim Chilton, who lives with his wife Sue and always carries two guns around his ranch in Arivaca, explained that the situation he now faces is not something he would have entered into had he known that ranching on the border would become such a dangerous and difficult way of life. He said, “Who wants to live next to the mafia in New York? We have to live next to the cartels in the United States. I would certainly like to have a ranch somewhere where I didn’t have these problems. It costs us a lot of money, the cartels can come through the country, our ranch and cut fences.”

The ranchers acknowledge that, in most cases, immigrants themselves are not to blame for the damage. Oswald reflected that “one’s attitude towards the immigrants” is very important because, “the vast majority of them are simple people coming to work—I try not to live in fear…you just adapt…unfortunately they’re breaking the law, but few are criminals.”

To Oswald and many other ranchers, the onus of illegal immigration falls to the U.S. Border Patrol, which they feel does an inadequate and inefficient job of managing the border. Vague or poorly managed borders create the very means by which coyotes run their operations. Chilton was critical of the actual amount of time Border Patrol agents spend on the border, what he estimated was essentially four hours of a ten-hour shift.

But just as ranchers’ experiences with illegal immigration range from the humorous to the somber, their impressions of the border patrol are also ambivalent.

Oswald highlighted that while she has issues with the Border Patrol, she understands that her dissatisfaction comes from how tangled up the system is and how little Border Patrol agents are trained to work on ranches. “I understand why they move their agents around [to keep them fresh] but for ranchers that’s a problem,” she said. “They’re yee-haws, they tear things up, they’ll do that for a few years and then later another batch comes in.” Between a lack of faith in the Border Patrol and a sense that immigration is no longer something that they can coexist with, many ranchers lament that their culture is suffering. With depreciating property values, many of them are forced to watch their profits diminish and their savings dry up. Perhaps the biggest frustration for the ranchers is how they feel caught in the middle with no true sense of protection or support.

Chilton was particularly concerned about the competition between different drug cartels trying to claim land corridors, often fighting over territory within the individual ranches. In his eyes, “The fear is you get caught in the middle of a fight. There’s just the idea that groups of bandits duke it out in the United States over drugs [which] is outrageous in the first place and in the second place there’s just no honor among bandits anymore.”

Many of the ranchers can’t understand why these desperate circumstances seem to be growing with no observable response from the state or federal government. Border Patrol policies seem to be non-responsive to what ranchers see as clearly changing patterns in illegal traffic patterns. There is a clear disconnect between ranching culture and the wider culture of Southern Arizona urban centers. Few ranchers have actually been on the other side of this divide, but Lynn Kimble, who was a broker before she left the city to be a rancher with her husband, understands the disbelief that urbanites feel towards ranchers’ complaints. She recalled, “Until I moved out here, even when I lived in Tucson, when I lived in Phoenix, I was like, ‘oh, you guys are crazy, this isn’t that bad’. But since I’m down here you’re very cautious about that. And I think that’s bizarre because you’re out in the middle of nowhere. You would think that you’d be perfectly fine here.”

Many ranchers choose to put up with the difficulties of this way of life, because as Kimble’s husband said, “I don’t know anything different…I’ve spent sixty years here. I know every nook and cranny, everything that should happen or is supposed to happen around here and I’ve kinda got down to where I’m the last one that has any interest in it.”

Yet, ranchers’ disillusionment with so many facets of government, society, and culture has not sullied their fondness of place. The cultural overlap between Mexican and American influences predates the dangerous and contentious border, making a shared identity between Mexican and American ranchers truly locked into the land. And as ranchers time and again find themselves intertwined with the land, they find the strength to endure the tribulations of immigration and problematic border politics. Rather than viewing the current atmosphere of economic depression and personal struggle as inevitable, ranchers separate it from their understanding of the ranching way of life. Sue Chilton said, “Reality is: the Mexican culture permeates the ranch culture on the border…Being a rancher here with no Mexican influence would be like trying to ranch here without the desert having any impact on you. It’s the environment. If you want to have a different cultural experience and background and heritage, you’re going to have to move somewhere else, because that’s reality here. And it’s a pleasant reality.”

Return to the 2011 Workshop page: Immigration on the US-Mexico Border