Where the Dove Calls: The Political Ecology of a Peasant Corporate Community in Northwestern Mexico by Thomas E. Sheridan, and Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest by Laura Pulido (review)

Abstract

Where the Dove Calls: The Political Ecology ofa Peasant Corporate Community in Northwestern Mexico Thomas E. Sheridan Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988 and Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest Laura Pulido Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996 Reviewed by F rederick S tr a n g e Eastern Washington University, Cheney, WA 99004 191 192 APCG YEARBOOK • VOLUME 58 • 1996 W h a t these two theoretically aware and research-rich studies share in common is an effort to articulate ecological, cultural, and political approaches to Southwestern Latino communities and social move­ ments. They offer encouraging approximations to an ideal paid lip-service more often than realized: the linking of local adaptations or resistance struggles to national or international systems. Thomas E. Sheridan’s Where the Dove Calls is based on ethno­ graphic fieldwork in Cucurpe, an agropastoral peasant community less than half a day’s drive from the U.S. border at Nogales. In a concise and engaging style, Sheridan shows us how high-tension political factionalism in the town results from strategies to wrest con­ trol of scare surface water, pasture, and arable land. The author makes a convincing case for the crucial determination of these struggles by the following factors: a) land reform agents and policies of the Mexi­ can government; b) a wavering but always reviving tradition of land to the tiller (or stockman); c) a contested land base, continually split by partible inheritance; and d) a position as cattle vendors at the bot­ tom of an international (U.S.) hierarchy. The agile way Sheridan combines these elements enables him to contextualize the gritty pres­ sures and short-lived triumphs of life in Cucurpe. Its citizens don’t simply react to the social and natural forces bearing down on them; they resist in an ever-renewed process of creative adaptation. Along with vignettes of alliance and confrontation in the town, the chapters on the history and functions of corporate land tenure are especially welcome. In a contribution to long-standing debates on the extent and meaning of corporateness in peasant communities, Sheridan neither romanticizes yet another peasant communal utopia nor veers to the opposite extreme, the reduction of peasants to au­ tomatons in a specious Darwinian struggle. For these peasants in cowboy boots, corporate control of land is eminently pragmatic; it is agonizingly problematic as well, owing to contradictions that arise between households and communities, and between the needs for both arable land and pasture. I am left to wonder why Sheridan does STRANGE: Reviews of Where the Dove Calls and Environmentalism 193 not subject his basic unit of analysis, the household, to the same deconstructive scrutiny he lavishes on corporate landholders. Like corporate groups, co-residing families can only be taken mislead­ ingly as natural units, or as givens. They, too, change their form and function in response to historical, ecological, and, indeed, national political constraints and stimuli (Roseberry, 1986). One is grateful, nonetheless, for the way in which the author’s insistent qualifying of his subjects’ motives succeeds in humanizing them. In their stubborn combination of intricate ecological knowl­ edge and rough-hew n political adroitness, Cucurpenos are remarkable. Sheridan sees the (currently unlikely) encouragement of such people as an unrealized key to a revival of agricultural and live­ stock production in Mexico. Threatened people in unforgiving environments raise their voices as well in Laura Pulido’s Environment and Economic Justice. This University of Southern California geographer proposes to compare the protests of the United Farm Workers (UFW) pesticide campaign in the San Joaquin Valley (1965-1971) with those of the currently operating Ganados (sheep and textile) Cooperative in the Chama Valley, northern New Mexico. Her overriding aim is to throw light on the meaning and uses of environmentalism for subaltern (i.e., eco­ nomically, racially, or ethnically subordinate) groups, and to compare them with the often conflicting meanings of similar issues for main­ stream (predominantly white middle-class) environmentalists. Pulido’s theoretical introduction initially threatens to pile up race, poverty, class, and identity simply as one factor heaped on another, rather than showing how each is systematically related to or at odds with the others. Nevertheless, her well...