It was the days of the Mexican revolution and Juan Cuevas had had enough. La Paz had grown too big and too political for his tastes so he set out to find someplace with no government and no people. A Sea of Cortez fisherman by trade, Juan tried living on the beautiful and unpopulated islands of San Jose and San Francisco; these experiences prompted him to add no mosquitos and no noseeums to his list of requirements. After years of defining his search by what he didn’t want, in 1923 he finally found what he did: El Pardito, a 2.5 acre rock in the Sea of Cortez, 45 miles north of La Paz. There were no structures, no gardens, no electricity, no people, no government, no mosquitos. It was just a rock, and Juan was thrilled. He brought his wife Paula out to El Pardito and in short order they built a wooden house, brought in chickens and pigs and produced 9 children. From that day to this, a Juan Cuevas has lived, worked and loved on El Pardito.
El Pardito. Photo by Carlos Gajon
When Juan found his dream location it was still almost two decades before Jacques Cousteau would declare the Sea of Cortez the Aquarium of World due to its great abundance of marine life. A fisherman living on a rock in the midst of such bounty smacked of genius, and Jacques Cousteau himself once paid Juan a visit on his rock. “Most fishing communities in the days of the original Juan focused on shark fishing as shark livers were the main source of Vitamin B around the world until other sources emerged during World War II. Demand was huge and the original Juan was a big part of this trade” notes Amy Hudson Weaver, a marine biologist with the conservation group Niparajá who lived on El Pardito for 8 months in 1995-1996 and continues to work closely with the family. “Juan was so successful that he was able to build a large house for the family on the Malecon in La Paz so they would have a place to stay during their periodic trips to the city.”
Wealth was not all that the Cuevas family accumulated. Notes Amy, “To successfully hunt sharks you have to know a tremendous amount about them. For example, you have to know when they are pupping so you don’t accidentally interfere with reproduction. That knowledge was handed down among the generations in the Cuevas family, and many shark biologists spend time at El Pardito because the family’s knowledge of sharks is so deep.”
Sharks are just one of myriad species for which the Cuevas family has profound knowledge. Don Croll, the former director of the School for Field Studies and current professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, has been going to El Pardito for 30 years, and has known the current Juan Cuevas, the 40-year old great great grandson of the original since he was 10 years old. “Juan and his brother Felipe didn’t have much formal education on El Pardito, but their knowledge is astounding. Lots of people can identify a turtle or fish species when they’re holding it in their hands, but Juan and Felipe can identify a species from the boat from really far away, and I rely on them for this. Their marine life capture skills are equally remarkable. When the Monterrey Bay Aquarium needed someone to help them live capture manta rays for their Sea of Cortez display, I didn’t hesitate to recommend Juan and Felipe.”
Luli Martinez with Juan and Felipe Cuevas. Photo by Luli Martinez
By the time Don’s doctoral student, Luli Martinez, started field work for her Ph.D. on El Pardito in 2014, the great abundance of the Sea of Cortez was a thing of the past. Notes Luli, “The 1970s to 1990s saw the highest use of resources, and sea turtle, shark and other marine life populations began collapsing. When I first started hiring Juan and Felipe to assist me with my conservation research, they were very passionate about marine species but conservation was not where their hearts were at. Then something happened that really changed their perspective. They were helping Don research a manta ray nursery in the mangroves of Isla San Jose when they discovered a population of hawksbill turtles. The Eastern Pacific population of hawksbills is the most endangered hawksbill population in the world, so this was really an important discovery. Hawksbills are not killed for their meat – they’re really not that tasty – but rather for their shells, which are used to make jewelry, and their skin, which is used to make leather goods. In the course of our research on this population Juan and Felipe really took note of the individual turtles, naming them and getting inside their personalities. They developed a sense of belonging to the hawksbill turtles. Now they are not just working for me for a paycheck, we are a team together. They now physically protect the estuary and mangroves of Isla San Jose. They quit fishing in the estuary to recover the population of commercial fish species, and they are proud because the fishing ban protects the turtles too.”
Juan Cuevas tagging and releasing a Hawksbill turtle. Photo by Luli Martinez
Says Juan, “All of us on El Pardito used to be the enemies of conservation. But now years of working with Don, Amy, and Luli has really changed our perspective. We no longer have the luxury of the previous generations of fishermen to catch everything without a thought. We now need to give back to the ocean. We don’t use nets anymore and we’re trying to spread artisanal, hook and line fishing throughout the community. Change requires a lot of patience, diligence and effort, and we’re committed to that. Now 70% of our income comes from conservation work and only 30% from fishing.” Now, rather than catching and killing sharks for the market as the original Juan did, Juan and Felipe use their deep knowledge of sharks and mad freediving skills to tag sharks for researchers like Dr. James Ketchum of Pelagios Kakunjá who is working to protect and recover shark species in the Sea of Cortez.
Estuary of Isla San Jose. Photo by Miguel Angel Aguilar Juarez of Rutafilms
Stephanie Rousso, a marine ecologist who works with Juan and Felipe notes just how far the El Pardito community has come in its relationship to the sea. “El Pardito forms part of the first ever multi-species Fisheries Improvement Project (FIP) initiated by Niparajá and ProNatura to create a system of fish refuge zones for monitoring improvements in fish populations. This FIP was started in 2017 to monitor 33 main species. Participating fishers harvest these species using the more traditional, more sustainable method of hook and line. It is wonderful to see the current generation of fishers in their 30s to 40’s working to replenish the fish stocks and help revive populations overfished by previous generations.”
Says Luli, “The success of my hawksbill project is due to the El Pardito community. When I’m invited to give talks in Mexico City by groups like the WWF I take Juan and Felipe with me, and of course the audience loves them much more than me! They are now so well respected by other conservation researchers and they are increasingly in demand.”
Juan and Felipe Cuevas speaking at a WWF event in Mexico City with Luli Martinez. Photo by Alianza WWF Fundación Telmex Telcel
“In demand” seems to be a theme for the Cuevas family. The original Juan might have wanted to get away from crowds, but it seems he was still a social guy. Family lore posits that he had several “wives” in different ports, all of whom produced a good number of offspring. He also developed a strong connection with the community of Las Animas in the mountains of Baja Sur. Amy shares some of the family history she picked up during her 8 months of living on El Pardito. “The Cuevas family needed these large steel hooks for hunting sharks, so they would trade shark, fish and turtle meat with the blacksmith artisans of Las Animas who produced them. When the Las Animas guys were ready to trade, they’d go to the beach closest to El Pardito, light a bonfire to signal the family, then the whole community would sail over. Great parties would ensue on the beach, and this is how El Partido got not only steel hooks, but fresh fruit, vegetables and meats. The ranches in the Sierras were also where the younger generations of Cuevas men would go to find wives. They would sail across to the mainland from El Pardito, hike into the Sierras, then stay for a couple of weeks on the ranches while they courted their sweethearts. This was a very successful strategy.”
El Pardito. Photo by Miguel Angel Aguilar Juarez of Rutafilms
Living on a small rock with the Cuevas family might not seem compelling to all but it appears to be irresistable to most who get the opportunity. Recalls Don, “An American couple, Jaime and Heidi Schultz, were boating near El Pardito in 1976 when they got into trouble. The Cuevas family rescued them and sheltered them on the island. The Schultz’s loved the family and El Pardito so much that they built their own house on the island, and would come down for extended periods every year.” Don, Amy and Luli all understand the pull. “The Cuevas family is my family. My kids have grown up with their kids,” says Don who still brings groups of students to the island every year. “Juan and Felipe are like my brothers” says Luli. “They are my family.” Amy is all in too. “El Pardito is one of my favorite places in the world. I love this family.”
Juan is open to seeing you too. “We are available to anyone who wants to know how to survive in the world. Today so many people live in their phones, not in the world. We have a lot of things to teach people about how to survive outside a city, so please leave your phone at home and come visit us.” The original crowd-shunning, people-embracing Juan couldn’t have issued a better invitation himself.
In the 17th and 18th centuries the Jesuits were on a global roll. In China, the emperor prized them for their knowledge of astronomy, western science and mathematics; the Jesuits were trusted advisors to the court. In France, Spain and Germany the kings prized them for their supreme education and administrative acuity; the Jesuits monopolized the role of royal confessor. In Baja California Sur (BCS), the native Pericue and Guaycura Indians couldn’t quite figure out what to prize the padres for. Often, it was mutual.
Spain’s Ambitions and the Jesuit Theocracy
The Jesuits who established the first successful mission in Baja California in Loreto in 1697 were the latest in a long line of Europeans who had attempted to subdue and convert the peoples of the land they called California for the Spanish crown, starting with Hernan Cortez in 1535. Why such great effort with respect to Baja? The modern Jesuit historian Ernest J. Burrus puts it this way, “The extraordinary interest derived not so much from what Baja California was – an extensive and unproductive peninsula, almost completely uninhabited and uninhabitable – as for what it was believed to be – a land rich in pearls and precious metals, bordering on the straights of Anian…linking the Atlantic with the Pacific, shortening by thousands of miles the distance between Europe and the New World as well as the Far East.”
The Anian Straits were, it turns out, a mythical boundary between North America and Asia, and Baja was a peninsula, not an island as cartographers of the day held. But Spain’s interests were quite real, and one of the crown’s key drivers with respect to Baja was the desire to protect its Manila Galleon, a trading ship that traveled between Acapulco and the Philippines, bringing luxury goods from China and other parts of the East to Spain. The galleons were threatened by English and Dutch ships that were plying the waters of the Baja peninsula, using the harbors and bays of the southern tip of the peninsula as a base from which to plunder the Spanish ships as they attempted to transverse the Pacific. Moreover, the return voyage from Manila to Acapulco took 6 to 7 months, too long to maintain stores of potable water and fresh food. By the time the Manila Galleon was sailing past Baja, most of the crew and passengers were in the last stages of scurvy and beriberi; Acapulco was simply too far. They needed a place to go ashore to eat fresh food and recuperate. A safe harbor on the Baja peninsula was the only way to stave off death – and keep Spain supplied with the luxurious items from the Orient it coveted.
But Spain had no money to send a military force to secure the peninsula, and the Jesuits, keen to convert the Indians of California to Catholicism, saw an opportunity. Lead by the Italians Juan
Todos Santos Mission
María de Salvatierra and Eusebio Francisco Kino, the Jesuits struck a bargain: if the crown would give the Jesuits permission to settle in the peninsula and convert the Indians, they would pay for the whole thing themselves. In return for funding the enterprise, the Jesuits would manage all aspects of local government themselves, religious, military, civil and economic. The crown agreed, with the result that the group that was finally able to secure the Baja peninsula for Spain was, as Crosby notes, “the least impressive of armies.” When the Jesuit galley the Santa Elvira anchored off the coast in the Gulf of California on October 19, 1697, the crew it landed to conquer the shore included an Italian missionary, a Spanish soldier, a Portuguese ranch foreman, a Sicilian seaman, a creole muleteer, a Maltese artilleryman, a Peruvian sailor, a Yaqui warrior, a Mayo herder and an Indian boy. And with that multicultural force, the history of California was changed forever.
The Geography of Hope
The Baja peninsula is a piece of continental crust that was torn from mainland Mexico by violent, sustained, tectonic forces six million years ago. As naturalist Exequiel Ezcurra explains in The Camino Real and the Baja California Peninsula, “The folds and crests that have formed as a result of this intense tectonic activity are the principal cases for the uneven topography of Baja California, causes which in turn drive the local climate.” The Jesuits, despite their advanced level of education, were “Misled by their ignorance of the peninsula’s natural environment and their inexperience with peninsular people,” says Crosby. It was a steep learning curve.
From their base in Loreto the padres set out to establish a series of missions from which they could save souls, and initially chose areas where the Indians appeared to congregate. Their experiences in mainland Mexico had led the padres to believe that the California Indians would have strong emotional ties to certain locations, and they completely failed to grasp that the terrain of Baja meant that the Indians practiced their semi-nomadic, seasonal hunting and gathering regimen over a wide geographical area, with no particular attachment to any one place. The Indians depended for their survival on a deep knowledge of tinajas, or bedrock cachements, that held rain for a substantial period of time after a rainfall. The Jesuits were unaccustomed to operating in a land with no rivers and no consistent annual rainfall. They gradually gained a better understanding of the land and its peoples, but, as Crosby notes, “The Jesuits initially failed to realize that supporting a mission’s people on irrigated agriculture required many times the volume of water that the same group used in their traditional lifestyle. Their education was expensive. Of nine missions founded in the first 24 years of the conquest, one was abandoned and 5 had to be moved to better sites.” It was not a stellar start.
The business of saving souls proved equally complex. In the northerly central areas around Loreto, they found the Cochimi Indians somewhat welcoming. But further south, the Guaycura and Pericue Indians were proving much tougher customers. In the early 1700s there were probably about 5,000 Guaycura in the area between Magdalena Bay and Todos Santos, and 3,000 Pericue in the area south of Todos Santos to the Cape. They were not friendly, even with each other. The Guaycura roamed their territory in small groups who spoke different dialects and constantly battled with each other, the Cochimi and the Pericue. For their part, the Pericue spoke a common language and battled less among themselves, but they were accustomed to a great deal of independence, a character trait which did not square well with the Jesuit desire to lure them into mission life. Indian distrust of the padres was likely fueled by the English and Dutch pirates who stalked the Manila Galleons from their bases in BCS, and who, as Crosby notes, “had reasons to instill in the local people their own fear of any representative of Spanish authority.” And the Jesuits had made the bargain to be the sole representative of that authority in all matters
El Camino Real
Poor welcome notwithstanding, the Jesuits pressed on with their plans to build and maintain a camino real. The term “Camino Real” or “Royal Road” has its roots in medieval Spain and referred to roads that were built and maintained at the behest of the king. In colonial Mexico, the phrase was used to refer to roads that connected major settlements, and in California, the phrase came to mean the system of communication that facilitated the constant flow of people and provisions that were required for the colonization of the Baja peninsula. Generally, there was very little that seemed royal about the roads that the padres built with the labor of their Spanish soldiers and neophyte Indians. In many cases road building meant simply moving large obstacles out of the existing Indian footpaths that provided the most direct route from one site to another. But they did succeed in building impressively straight roads over tough terrain, and El Camino Real eventually connected the mission in San Jose del Cabo to the mission in San Francisco, California, covering almost 1,400 miles and over 50 missions built by Jesuits, Dominicans and Franciscans. More than any other, it is the route the ties together the histories of the United States and Mexico.
But at no time in their 71 years in the Baja peninsula did the actual number of European Jesuit padres on the ground total more than 17 men. It proved to be a dangerously low number. In the first third of the 1700s the Jesuits remained a most unimpressive army, and as they built their roads and missions in the hostile south to secure a safe port for the Manila Galleon, the Spanish crown refused to pay for more soldiers to protect them. And the natives were definitely restless. Raging epidemics of measles and smallpox had decimated the Guaycura and Pericue populations, reducing their populations by half in a single generation. Years passed in which the Jesuits and their converts did little more than tend the sick, bury the dead and attempt to procure food from the mainland; years of drought and plagues of locusts had severely limited their ability to support a settled community through agriculture on mission lands.
Against this backdrop, in 1733 the Jesuits of the southern missions, led by Padre Nicolás Tamaral, began an effort to eradicate polygamy amongst the Pericue. With their missionary zeal and Eurocentric outlook, the Jesuits had been working for years to quell the ancestral customs of the Indians, but the attack on polygamy appears to have been the tipping point for the Pericue. As Crosby states, “The subject of women was particularly sensitive among the Pericue at that time. Diseases, most notably syphilis, were disproportionately reducing the female population. Neophytes in the south were deeply disturbed by a growing lack of mates.” Amongst all the Indians of the Baja peninsula, women were the chief procurers of food, so the more wives a man had the higher his status; important men like chiefs and shamans had several. In a pointed challenge to local leaders, Padre Tamaral made explicit efforts to attract young women as neophytes. It was missionary vs medicine man, and the unprotected missionaries were vulnerable while the traumatized Pericue were deadly focused; they were able to unite the warring factions of the southern Baja Indians against what they saw as an alien invader who had unleashed ravaging disease against their people and wanton destruction against their culture. The pirates likely fueled their rage.
On October 1, 1734 the body of Padre Nicolás Tamaral of the San Jose del Cabo mission was found clubbed, mutilated and burned. The same thing happened to padres and their servants at the missions in La Paz and Santiago. The revolt grew, the Pericue consolidated their hold on the tip of the peninsula, and when the Manila Galleon landed at the Cabo port established by the Jesuits in January 1735, the Pericue killed all 13 men in the longboat that had been sent ahead to seek help from the mission.
It was the beginning of the end for both the Jesuits and the Indians in BCS. Salvatierra and Kino’s dream of a theocracy was lost, as was California’s isolation as others came in to settle the land. By the time the Jesuits were expelled from California in 1768, the Guaycura and Pericue were linguistically and culturally extinct – perhaps their genes live on in the world and their souls reside in heaven. The Jesuits were suspected of harboring hordes of gold, silver and pearls that they were not sharing with the king, but when the inspector came from Spain after their expulsion, he was shocked at the poverty of the missions. The Jesuits had barely survived, and producing food to keep the missions and their neophytes alive in the harsh Baja landscape was almost all they had time for.
It was not an accident that the first people to come ashore with Padre Salvatierra at Loreto in 1697 included a ranch foreman, a muleteer, and a herder. These Jesuit recruits were chosen for their skills in building a community based around agriculture and ranching. When the Jesuits were expelled from California, many of these “soldiers” and their families stayed on and became the backbone of the vaquero, or cowboy culture that replaced that of the native Indians, a culture that – unshackled from the poorly chosen mission sites – still thrives in Baja to this day. In fact, this culture was exported north along El Camino Real, and the Baja vaqueros are now honored in the western USA as the cultural ancestors of the American cowboy. To celebrate El Camino Real and its role in the cultural connection of the peoples of the Baja peninsula and the US state of (Alta) California, several organizations are working to have the entire 1,400-mile corridor declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
What Ezcurra calls “the savage and seductive landscape of Baja California” has lured many to its shores, and changed the fates of all. The Pericue, who quite possibly sailed to Baja from Polynesia, survived on the peninsula for roughly 12,000 years. The Jesuits only 71. Human survival along El Camino Real can still prove tenuous, and it is perhaps for this reason that the writer and naturalist Wallace Stegner refers to the wild landscape of Baja as the “geography of hope.” Writes Ezcurra, “Baja California, more than any other place on earth, deserves this description: the peninsula is a vast corridor of hope, a world where untamed nature may still be able to survive in all its splendor. Or, as Octavio Paz wrote, it is a place where, “the world still has beaches, and a boat awaits you, always.” And that is a royal road indeed.
Sources: Interviews with Harry W. Crosby, David Richardson and Trudi Angell. Several books including Antigua California: Mission and Colony on the Peninsular Frontier, 1697-1768 by Harry W. Crosby; Jesuit Relations, Baja California 1716-1762 by Ernest J. Burrus, S.J.; The Camino Real and the Missions of the Baja California Peninsula/El Camino Real y Las Misiones de la Peninsula de Baja California by Miguel Leon-Portillo, California’s El Camino Real and its HistoricBells by Max Kurillo; and Californio Portraits: Baja California’s Vanishing Culture by Harry W. Crosby.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. That may be the fate of the mortal coil, but humans have never had much truck with letting flesh have the final word. “Rock, stone, mosaics, ceramics. These are the lasting materials of any civilization,” says Donna Billick, the founder of Billick Rock Art in Davis, California and Todos Artes in Todos Santos, Baja California Sur. “Rock art is the only uninterrupted communication throughout human history of who we are culturally. It is a statement of who we are in our time as well as the transmission of ourselves through time. When you look back across the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Greece, Rome, China, Mesoamerica, you will find ceramics and mosaics embedded in the culture, still informing us today in vibrant and dynamic detail about those ancient lives lived.”
In fact, ceramics – clay hardened by heat – are so durable that NASA incorporates the material into present-day spacecraft engineering. The space agency actually has a page on its website devoted to “Superhero Ceramics!” noting that ceramics are “stronger than aluminum, fireproof and able to withstand meteoroids.” Among many other uses, the entire lower surface of a space shuttle orbiter is covered with ceramic tiles as part of the spacecraft’s thermal protection system. But there is another material that is equally compelling to NASA and that is “pound-for-pound more effective for shielding against cosmic radiation than aluminum.” Plastic. In fact, the same material used to make household trash bags, polyethylene, can be chemically modified into a material that has three times the tensile strength of aluminum and is 2.6 times lighter.
That type of durability is highly desirable for space travel, particularly for any humans interested in traveling to Mars who would have to endure high levels of radiation for up to 30 months. But the very durability that makes your plastic trash bag seem like Superman’s cape in space, makes it a more of a Lex Luther-grade menace when it simply envelopes your trash in a landfill on earth. It can take up to 1,000 years to decompose, and in the process it can release toxic pollutants into the air, ground and water that threaten our very existence on the planet. It is probably safe to say that we would all rather have our first trip to Mars be by personal choice then by mandated evacuation order.
Donna, who has a degree in genetics in addition to art, started the Art & Science Fusion Program during her tenure as a professor at the University of California Davis. It is therefore not surprising that she and her Todos Artes “quaranteam” of artists, surfers and environmentalists Isabel “Issy” Von Zastrow and Will Worden, saw their two worlds happily collide around the durable properties of ceramics and plastic. It all started with the ecobrick. Explains Will, “An ecobrick is a plastic container like a Coke bottle or a garafon (large water container) stuffed to the brim with non-biodegradable plastic waste. This makes a very strong, reusable and long-lasting building material that can be used to make many things including furniture, garden walls, and sculptures. Issy and I were working on ecobricks for our new home, when we happened to observe Donna giving a ceramic mosaic workshop. The lightbulb kind of collectively went off for all of us, and we all saw a great way to mitigate the extremely negative impact of plastic waste’s durability, with the culturally positive impact of ceramic’s durability. When we take the ecobricks and encase them in concrete and ceramic mosaics, it makes a beautiful and enduring piece of art. From the basic building block of an ecobrick, you can make lamps, tables, chairs, really all kinds of beautiful, functional pieces.”
When Donna got out of graduate school in the mid-1970s, the governor of California at the time, Jerry Brown, mandated that 2% of the budget for all public buildings be devoted to art. For Donna, this was the answer to her father’s daily question during her childhood, “so what is your big idea?”, and she’s spent the last 42 years producing large scale art for public spaces. But having her art enjoyed by everyone, not just a few private collectors or gallery owners, is only part of Donna’s Big Idea. “Community build is really where it’s at. Jerry Brown saw public art as a key component of an enlightened, vibrant and thriving society. And when the community itself participates in making a piece of art, it creates a sense of collective ownership and pride in the art that is simply not possible any other way.” Donna, a founding member of the Community Built Association, brought community build to Todos Santos through Todos Artes and her annual Heaven on Earth workshop. Two of her ceramic mosaic pieces built by Todos Santos community members, the Aztec Calendar just off the Todos Santos town plaza, and the Los Todos Santeños wall along the well-traveled route of lower Topete, are now some of the most-photographed, most-loved, and iconic images of the town.
Issy outlines how the ecobricks can fit into a long-term community build program for our tourism-driven area. “There is a difference between impact and influence. One way that the communities of Baja California Sur can influence the impact of tourism on our towns is to invite all travelers to contribute to the ecobricks. Each hotel, restaurant and Airbnb rental can have an old garafon in a central area and invite travelers to stuff it with their plastic waste. When the garafon is full, either we at Todos Artes will come pick it up to turn it into functional art, or we can share with the proprietors how to do it themselves. We invite visitors into our communities to experience the area’s great natural beauty, and this is a great way for them to help ensure that the place will be just as beautiful the next time they visit. They can influence the impact they have on the community in a lasting, beautiful way.”
There is a group called The Long Now Foundation that is in the process of building the 10,000 Year Clock – a clock it expects to keep time for 10,000 years – with the help of ceramic bearings of course. The clock is a monument to long-term thinking and Alexander Rose, the executive director of the project notes, “It is not the engineering [of the clock] but the civilization around it which we hope to shape as one that cares for both the present and the future. We hope that by building such things…they challenge us to become better ancestors.” The Todos Artes team sees ecobricks in much the same light. Says Donna, “The ecobricks are a great way to increase the environmental literacy of our community, to engage the current generation in a completely fun way in the preservation of the stunning nature all around us for future generations.”
Perhaps when the 10,000 Year Clock strikes its last hour all those centuries into the future, and the archaeologists are writing their books on the ancient artifacts of the 2020s in Baja California Sur, they’ll be struck by the care that society took to turn one of its most enduring problems – plastic waste – into some of its most enduring works of art. Rock, stone, mosaics, ceramics. With ecobricks we’ll be transmitting who we were culturally to all the generations to come. We’ll be proving ourselves good ancestors. And, if all goes according to plan, those receiving the message will still have the option to live on a vibrant, thriving and enlightened Earth.
Chito. In Baja California Sur, if you’re talking about Chito, it’s the same as if you were sitting in the offices of Rolling Stone talking about Sting or Bono. Surnames are simply superfluous. Chito is the owner of Rancho Santo Domingo, 2,500 hectares of spectacular land in the Sierra La Laguna mountains that has been in his family since the 1700s. Like most rancheros in Baja Sur, Chito (christened Alfredo Orozco Castro) has all the skills he needs to thrive in a remote area: he knows how to build houses, run a business, train horses, lasso cows, deal with snake bites, make cheese, handle poachers, distill plant-based medicines, fight forest fires, roast pigs and track missing hikers. And that’s just for starters. Ranching has been his way of life, all his life, and when he looks to the future he sees, well, something different.
“Around 35 years ago things started changing,” says Chito. “We used to have rains every January and February, sometimes three times a week, but now we really only have rain during the summer hurricane season. Water, of course, is life, and with this much longer dry season we can’t have as many cows, we can’t make as much cheese, we don’t grow as many vegetables – the impact on the ranching way of life is huge.” Right now selling cows is Chito’s main source of income but, at the age of 60, he’s ready to embrace a post-cow future. “I really see the future of Rancho Santo Domingo in ecotourism.”
In 2019 Chito started working with Todos Santos Eco Adventures (TOSEA) on a luxury tent camp in the avocado, grapefruit and mango orchard that his grandfather planted for his grandmother at the ranch. (Disclosure: the author is a co-owner of TOSEA). With his own hands he built a traditional ranch kitchen with a beautiful brick, wood-burning stove that is the heart of the camp, and this is complemented by walk-in tents throughout the orchard that feature locally made furniture, real beds, rugs, lamps, rocking chairs and other details that make staying on Chito’s ranch not only incredibly fun, but super comfortable. Chito often guides guests on hikes and mule rides throughout the mountains, and loves chatting with folks around the campfire at happy hour afterwards. His incredibly accomplished 7 year old grandson Alfredito often accompanies him, always making sure that there is enough wood for the stove and always ready to share a laugh with camp guests. Together they demonstrate a truth that has been known in the area for centuries: the ranchers of Baja California Sur are some of the most gracious and welcoming hosts on the planet.
They are also accomplished artists. Using the tools handed down from his father, Chito is a master leatherworker and his beautiful saddles, bridles and other leather items are highly sought after. He is also a natural teacher, and a leather working workshop with Chito is the highlight of many guests’ stay at Camp Cecil de la Sierra, the luxury tent camp on his property.
Chito inspires his fellow artists as well. Renowned ceramic mosaic artist Donna Billick, the founder of Todos Artes in Todos Santos, was so impressed by the time she spent with Chito that she created the BioSphere, a magnificent ceramic homage to Chito, his ranch, his cowboy roots and his ecotourism future. And she’s not stopping there. Todos Artes artists Isabel “Issy” Von Zastrow and Will Worden will be working with Donna to lead plein aire watercolor workshops at the camp, where visitors can seek inspiration and subject matter from the ranch and the fantastic natural beauty of the area. Alfredito took one of Issy’s first watercolor classes at the camp. He was so impressed that he came back the next day with his cousin Damian and demanded another one. Alfredito’s stated goal in life is to follow in Chito’s footsteps. With his natural gifts for people, ranching and art, we can all look forward to Rancho Santo Domingo’s continued success as a joyful place where visitors can seek respite and inspiration. In the generations to come, ranching ecotourism may well come to be encapsulated in just one name. Alfredito.
Mahi mahi straight from Agustin’s boat, strawberries with crème freche right out of Agricole, Nasturtium-adorned salads fresh from Jan’s farm, zillions of mangos, right from your own tree. This is the type of food security enjoyed by many residents of Baja California Sur (BCS). All fresh, all delicious, all healthy – and always obtainable in season.
BCS is the fastest growing state in Mexico, with vast sums of tourism-driven dollars flooding the state. This growth, rapid and seldom interrupted over the last few decades, has acted as a beacon to people across Mexico, drawing thousands of immigrants seeking economic opportunity. The Ministry of Economy reported a population increase in BCS of over 25% between 2010 and 2015, a rate which does not appear to have slackened. Yet BCS does not have the infrastructure or resources to adequately feed and house all the new arrivals, a fact that has given rise to a slew of informal settlements across the lower part of state, many without even the most basic of public services. Not coincidentally, the government agency CONEVEL states that in 2020 roughly 29% of the population in BCS was living in extreme poverty, with almost 35% of the population suffering from social deprivation, including deprivation of food access. In this land of plenty, accessing fresh, nutritious food is an extreme challenge for many.
“The International Community Foundation (ICF) founded the Alianza Para la Seguridad Alimentaria (ASA, or BCS Food Security Alliance) in 2014 as an alliance of nonprofits, business owners, government agencies and individuals committed to addressing food insecurity in southern BCS” notes McKenzie Campbell, a program officer with the ICF. “When the pandemic slammed into Mexico in March 2020, BCS was one of the hardest hit states because of its heavy reliance on tourism. Food assistance groups exploded across the state, and by December 2020 many of these groups were serving more than twice their pre-pandemic population.” Because BCS did not have a state foodbank, these groups were spending precious time and resources sourcing ingredients. ASA mobilized to effectively become a mobile food bank for these groups, supporting their efforts with the distribution of despensas (packages of donated food and hygiene essentials) to the informal communities. Continues McKenzie, “It was when we were actively distributing despensas that we realized that without a formal government safety net or a reliable food supply, these communities would be in a constant state of crisis. The pandemic really showed that we needed a permanent solution to addressing food security in BCS.”
Luis Garduño, the director of ASA who was in charge of distributing despensas during the pandemic, says that the ICF doubled down on its commitment to food security during the pandemic. ASA had been formalized as an independent Mexican nonprofit in 2019, so it was the perfect platform from which to accelerate food security efforts in the region. Says Luis, “The first thing we did was conduct a series of diagnostic studies looking at all facets of the food system in BCS from producers, to distribution points, to consumers. Based on what we learned through these studies, ASA is focusing its efforts in three main areas: creating a Sudcaliforniano food bank, fostering community health and resilience, and piloting local foodsheds.”
The food bank program is a remarkable testimony to ASA’s focus. Says Luis, “We are really excited about the progress that’s been made with the Sudcaliforniano food bank, and we expect it to be fully functioning with a presence in La Paz and Los Cabos by the end of 2022. We have secured warehouse space in both locations, and we’re working hard to source necessary items like trucks and cold storage.” The core of the food bank program is food recovery and redistribution, salvaging food that is deemed unsellable or unusable by producers and getting it to vulnerable populations. Notes McKenzie, “Around the world 40% of all food produced in the world is wasted and all those inputs lost. In Mexico, 20 million tons of food are wasted every year, enough to feed 70% of the population living in poverty. One of ASA’s first efforts was to assess food waste hot spots in BCS, then implement recovery, redistribution and prevention strategies.” Continues Luis, “In 2021 ASA provided 34 tons of recovered food to 5,800 individuals. Our goal is to be providing recovered food to 12,000 people on a regular basis by the end of 2022.” The Sudcaliforniano food bank is now affiliated with BAMX, Mexico’s national food bank program, and partners with its prepared food donation program, Al Rescate. It also receives and distributes regular donations from several Walmart-affiliated stores, Carl’s Junior and Earth Ocean Farms.
“Another thing we found when distributing despensas to the informal communities during the pandemic was that women were taking leadership roles and doing what needed to be done to protect not just their own families, but also the most vulnerable in their communities” recalls McKenzie. ASA’s second key initiative, community health and resilience, is designed to amplify that leadership, and give these women the tools they need to be even more effective. Continues Luis, “This program is multifaceted. Not only do we work with these women on leadership skills like decision-making, negotiating, effective communication and teamwork, but also on personal finance skills and small business administration skills. We help develop their skills to determine what is the most nutritious food they can buy for their families with the money that they have.” The program also teaches hurricane and emergency preparedness and response, including basic first aid, fire management, hurricane alert and preparedness systems and control centers for emergency response.
One of the key focus areas of the community health and resilience platform is nutrition and healthy cooking. Local groups like SINADES in Pescadero are at the forefront of this effort. Under the leadership of founder Inés Melchor Pantoja, with assistance from her husband, Julio César Rivas García, SINADES has been working with women in the community for almost two decades on a Conscious Cooking program, making healthy foods affordable, desirable and an integral part of family life. So that they could procure organic produce at a reasonable price, SINADES and the 18 women of the Conscious Cooking program started building greenhouses at their homes a decade ago. The greenhouses have given these women and their families much greater food sovereignty and economic stability, and 3 of them are now expanding into raising chickens. They are currently looking to formalize a point of sale for their chickens, eggs and chicks, and to expand the program to other women in town. SINADES is attacking food insecurity at its source.
Raíz de Fondo is another community force based in La Paz. Founded by Erika Goetz 12 years ago as a community garden in a dirty, abandoned lot in downtown La Paz, Raíz de Fondo is now a driving force for nutrition, food security and sustainable living across the city. The group provides workshops to schools and communities on how start their own gardens, providing garden kits as well as on-going instruction on composting and nutrition. The program has been so successful that when the Secretary of Education (SEP) decided to launch a nutrition and wellness curriculum in elementary and preschools, Raíz de Fondo was tapped to train the teachers in their school garden program to deliver the curriculum.
Another key Raíz de Fondo program is “Cocianado para la Colonia”. Based at the outdoor kitchen of one of their community gardens, Jardin Guamuchil, chefs prepare meals made with ingredients from the garden, as well as rescued food, to support community kitchens with limited resources. Erika says they plan to support 3 groups this year with a total of 3,000 meals. The team is further using this platform to teach healthy recipes to cooks from participating institutional kitchens. To support these programs, Raíz de Fondo has created a network of vegetable farmers who often have perfectly edible food that they cannot sell. They are thrilled to have Raíz de Fondo redistribute this food to those in need, and even get a tax deduction for their donation. Because of their extensive experience with local producers, Raiz de Fondo is a key partner in ASA’s food recovery and distribution program in La Paz.
The third pilar of ASA’s food security platform in BCS is creating thriving local foodsheds by boosting the capacity of small and mid-sized farmers to produce healthy food for the local market. In June 2021 ASA started an “Agroecological Learning Collective” focused on the transition to a regenerative production model, employing farming techniques that improve soil quality. Currently 7 producers from 3 farms are participating in the pilot collective and have received 60 hours of technical assistance and 30 hours of regenerative management consulting. There is a great deal of excitement around this project, and local businesses like Sueno Tropical, Rancho Cacachiles and Baja Regenerative Farms are all pitching in with invaluable advice on production planning, crop selection and marketing. ASA’s Food Hub goal is to be the currently missing link of aggregation, distribution and marketing between local small and mid-sized producers and regional buyers and consumers.
How can you help ASA implement this comprehensive approach to food security in Baja California Sur? Connect with these programs and lend your time, money, expertise, and enthusiasm:
By Bryan Jáuregui based on research by Dr. Shane Macfarlan. This article first appeared in Janice Kinne’s Journal del Pacifico.
He really was just a good Catholic boy trying to make the padres proud, but suspicion and cruelty transformed him into something they foolishly feared he was all along, the vicious leader of a rebellion.
It was 1734 in Baja California Sur and the indigenous Pericue and Guaycura peoples had dropped their grievances with each other to join forces against their common enemy, the Jesuits. Promises of eternal salvation did nothing to alter the Indians’ view that the byproducts of Jesuit rule – physical decimation by measles and smallpox and cultural devastation by Christianity and monogamy – were assaults that demanded a resolution in the here and now. But the Jesuits, who had been the ruling arm of the Spanish crown in Baja since 1697, did have some faithful converts among the native peoples. Among them was a young Pericue named Fabian, a member of the Todos Santos mission. Dr. Shane Macfarlan, professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah, has painstakingly pieced together some key elements of Fabian’s life and this account is based on his research.
When the Indigenous Rebellion broke over the Jesuits with the bludgeoning deaths of Padre Tamaral in San Jose del Cabo and Padre Carranco in Santiago in October 1734, Fabian firmly sided with the Jesuits against the rebels, many of whom were Pericue like himself. He left behind his family and traveled with the founder of the Todos Santos mission, Padre Taraval, throughout the southern part of the peninsula to understand the full nature and extent of the rebellion. He worked with the Spanish military in 1735 during the retaking of La Paz and the reconnaissance of the south, and again in 1736 to locate rebels and gather more intelligence. The Indian rebels were stunned by Fabian’s fealty to the Jesuits. They attempted to lure him to the rebel side with promises of earthly gifts and rewards. When that failed they threatened to kill his family. Nothing worked and Fabian remained steadfast in his loyalty to the Jesuits. Noted Padre Taraval, “Nothing could move him; nor did all of this prevent him from talking to them, entreating them, and even upbraiding them for their ungrateful apostasy and misconduct.” (Wilbur, 1931)
By 1734 the indigenous rebels weren’t the only ones taking an unkind view of the Jesuits in Baja. The Spanish rulers of the rest of Mexico, and by extension the crown, strongly suspected that the Jesuits were harboring hordes of gold, silver and pearls in Baja that they were not sharing with the king. When the anti-Jesuit Spanish viceroy of Mexico sent the governor of Sinaloa, Huidobro, to quell the indigenous revolt, he urged leniency. Jesuit historian Father Peter Dunne notes, “For the tranquility and pacification of the uprising there was given to the governor of Sinaloa a commission to proceed against the rebels with propriety…but without offensive warfare.” Accordingly, Huidobro sought to pacify the rebels with gifts of food, clothing, tobacco and full pardons. For their part, the native groups who remained loyal to the Jesuits and the Spanish crown couldn’t win for losing. They were despised by their own people, yet their allegiance to the Jesuits and to the crown, which they were forced to demonstrate by working to the point of exhaustion each day, was regarded with great suspicion by both the Jesuits and the Spanish soldiers who considered many of them rebel spies.
By Padre Taraval’s own account, Fabian proved himself loyal to the Jesuits at every turn, even attempting to convert the rebels who threatened his family. But this allegiance did not afford him sufficient protection and Spanish soldiers attacked his wife. While the record is not clear, this attack likely involved sexual assault and when Fabian tried to intervene, he was forcibly restrained by the soldiers. It was this extreme provocation that caused Fabian, the most devoted of indigenous converts at the Todos Santos mission, to become the thing the soldiers had suspected he was all along – a rebel leader. Even though the Jesuits had already retaken the Cape region and reoccupied the Todos Santos mission by this time, Fabian put together a small contingent and planned an attack. But the plot was soon discovered and Fabian gave himself up so his compatriots could escape. While he had lived most of his life as a loyal friend to the Jesuits, his brief stint as a rebel lead rapidly to his trial, conviction and execution. Padre Taraval noted with some satisfaction that, like the true Catholic he was trained to be, Fabian repented on his way to the gallows.
This brief account of Fabian’s life is one of the few stories of an individual indigenous person on the Baja peninsula that is part of the written historical record. The few others mentioned by name in connection with the native uprising – Domingo Botón, Chicori, and Bruno – were all described as being of mixed race, a fate of birth that the Jesuits saw as a factor in the rebellion. Notes Jesuit Father Peter Dunne in his 1952 book, Black Robes in Lower California, “There was a mixture of breeds in the south: mulattoes, the offspring of Negroes dropped off here by the Manila galleons, and mixtures of white blood from the English and Dutch freebooters who had long known these coasts….A mixture of bloods probably explains the aggressive malice of some of the (natives), especially…of the leaders of the revolt.” Climate was also considered a factor. Continues Dunne, “Doubtless climate had something to do with the disparity in the quality of the southerners…A climate with no prolonged cold or vigorous winter often seems to dissipate the energies of men and sometimes even their virtue.” In other words, the Jesuits grasped at straws when trying to explain the revolt when in fact the reasons were remarkably clear. At the time the rebellion started, raging epidemics of measles and smallpox had decimated the Guaycura and Pericue populations, reducing their populations by half in a single generation. Moreover, just a year before the rebellion started the Jesuits had launched a campaign to eradicate polygamy among the native population. In all the Indian groups of the Baja peninsula women were the chief procurers of food, so the more wives a man had the higher his status, and important men like chiefs and shamans had several. In a direct challenge to local leaders, the Jesuits made explicit efforts to recruit young women as neophytes. It was these twin assaults upon health and culture that united the once warring factions of the southern Baja Indians against the Jesuits. It was a fight in which both sides won some battles and both sides lost the war. The Spanish crown expelled the Jesuits from the Baja peninsula in 1768, but by the time their enemies were vanquished, the Guaycura and Pericue Indians were essentially living ghosts, by and large culturally extinct. No more padres, no one left to convert. But the peninsula did retain its sense of independence, and the ranchero culture that followed that of the indigenous people definitely retains some of that spirit of rebellion that was sparked, however belatedly, in a Todos Santos Pericue name Fabian.
time for.
Chito. In Baja California Sur, if you’re talking about Chito, it’s the same as if you were sitting in the offices of Rolling Stone talking about Sting or Bono. Surnames are simply superfluous. Chito is the owner of Rancho Santo Domingo, 2,500 hectares of spectacular land in the Sierra La Laguna mountains that has been in his family since the 1700s. Like most rancheros in Baja Sur, Chito (christened Alfredo Orozco Castro) has all the skills he needs to thrive in a remote area: he knows how to build houses, run a business, train horses, lasso cows, deal with snake bites, make cheese, handle poachers, distill plant-based medicines, fight forest fires, roast pigs and track missing hikers. And that’s just for starters. Ranching has been his way of life, all his life, and when he looks to the future he sees, well, something different.
In 2019 Chito started working with Todos Santos Eco Adventures (TOSEA) on a luxury tent camp in the avocado, grapefruit and mango orchard that his grandfather planted for his grandmother at the ranch. (Disclosure: the author is a co-owner of TOSEA). With his own hands he built a traditional ranch kitchen with a beautiful brick, wood-burning stove that is the heart of the camp, and this is complemented by walk-in tents throughout the orchard that feature locally made furniture, real beds, rugs, lamps, rocking chairs and other details that make staying on Chito’s ranch not only incredibly fun, but super comfortable. Chito often guides guests on hikes and mule rides throughout the mountains, and loves chatting with folks around the campfire at happy hour afterwards. His incredibly accomplished 7 year old grandson Alfredito often accompanies him, always making sure that there is enough wood for the stove and always ready to share a laugh with camp guests. Together they demonstrate a truth that has been known in the area for centuries: the ranchers of Baja California Sur are some of the most gracious and welcoming hosts on the planet.
Chito inspires his fellow artists as well. Renowned ceramic mosaic artist Donna Billick, the founder of Todos Artes in Todos Santos, was so impressed by the time she spent with Chito that she created the BioSphere, a magnificent ceramic homage to Chito, his ranch, his cowboy roots and his ecotourism future. And she’s not stopping there. Todos Artes artists Isabel “Issy” Von Zastrow and Will Worden will be working with Donna to lead plein aire watercolor workshops at the camp, where visitors can seek inspiration and subject matter from the ranch and the fantastic natural beauty of the area. Alfredito took one of Issy’s first watercolor classes at the camp. He was so impressed that he came back the next day with his cousin Damian and demanded another one. Alfredito’s stated goal in life is to follow in Chito’s footsteps. With his natural gifts for people, ranching and art, we can all look forward to Rancho Santo Domingo’s continued success as a joyful place where visitors can seek respite and inspiration. In the generations to come, ranching ecotourism may well come to be encapsulated in just one name. Alfredito.
“The International Community Foundation (ICF) founded the Alianza Para la Seguridad Alimentaria (ASA, or BCS Food Security Alliance) in 2014 as an alliance of nonprofits, business owners, government agencies and individuals committed to addressing food insecurity in southern BCS” notes McKenzie Campbell, a program officer with the ICF. “When the pandemic slammed into Mexico in March 2020, BCS was one of the hardest hit states because of its heavy reliance on tourism. Food assistance groups exploded across the state, and by December 2020 many of these groups were serving more than twice their pre-pandemic population.” Because BCS did not have a state foodbank, these groups were spending precious time and resources sourcing ingredients. ASA mobilized to effectively become a mobile food bank for these groups, supporting their efforts with the distribution of despensas (packages of donated food and hygiene essentials) to the informal communities. Continues McKenzie, “It was when we were actively distributing despensas that we realized that without a formal government safety net or a reliable food supply, these communities would be in a constant state of crisis. The pandemic really showed that we needed a permanent solution to addressing food security in BCS.”
The food bank program is a remarkable testimony to ASA’s focus. Says Luis, “We are really excited about the progress that’s been made with the Sudcaliforniano food bank, and we expect it to be fully functioning with a presence in La Paz and Los Cabos by the end of 2022. We have secured warehouse space in both locations, and we’re working hard to source necessary items like trucks and cold storage.” The core of the food bank program is food recovery and redistribution, salvaging food that is deemed unsellable or unusable by producers and getting it to vulnerable populations. Notes McKenzie, “Around the world 40% of all food produced in the world is wasted and all those inputs lost. In Mexico, 20 million tons of food are wasted every year, enough to feed 70% of the population living in poverty. One of ASA’s first efforts was to assess food waste hot spots in BCS, then implement recovery, redistribution and prevention strategies.” Continues Luis, “In 2021 ASA provided 34 tons of recovered food to 5,800 individuals. Our goal is to be providing recovered food to 12,000 people on a regular basis by the end of 2022.” The Sudcaliforniano food bank is now affiliated with BAMX, Mexico’s national food bank program, and partners with its prepared food donation program, Al Rescate. It also receives and distributes regular donations from several Walmart-affiliated stores, Carl’s Junior and Earth Ocean Farms.
“Another thing we found when distributing despensas to the informal communities during the pandemic was that women were taking leadership roles and doing what needed to be done to protect not just their own families, but also the most vulnerable in their communities” recalls McKenzie. ASA’s second key initiative, community health and resilience, is designed to amplify that leadership, and give these women the tools they need to be even more effective. Continues Luis, “This program is multifaceted. Not only do we work with these women on leadership skills like decision-making, negotiating, effective communication and teamwork, but also on personal finance skills and small business administration skills. We help develop their skills to determine what is the most nutritious food they can buy for their families with the money that they have.” The program also teaches hurricane and emergency preparedness and response, including basic first aid, fire management, hurricane alert and preparedness systems and control centers for emergency response. 
Raíz de Fondo is another community force based in La Paz. Founded by Erika Goetz 12 years ago as a community garden in a dirty, abandoned lot in downtown La Paz, Raíz de Fondo is now a driving force for nutrition, food security and sustainable living across the city. The group provides workshops to schools and communities on how start their own gardens, providing garden kits as well as on-going instruction on composting and nutrition. The program has been so successful that when the Secretary of Education (SEP) decided to launch a nutrition and wellness curriculum in elementary and preschools, Raíz de Fondo was tapped to train the teachers in their school garden program to deliver the curriculum.
The third pilar of ASA’s food security platform in BCS is creating thriving local foodsheds by boosting the capacity of small and mid-sized farmers to produce healthy food for the local market. In June 2021 ASA started an “Agroecological Learning Collective” focused on the transition to a regenerative production model, employing farming techniques that improve soil quality. Currently 7 producers from 3 farms are participating in the pilot collective and have received 60 hours of technical assistance and 30 hours of regenerative management consulting. There is a great deal of excitement around this project, and local businesses like Sueno Tropical, Rancho Cacachiles and Baja Regenerative Farms are all pitching in with invaluable advice on production planning, crop selection and marketing. ASA’s Food Hub goal is to be the currently missing link of aggregation, distribution and marketing between local small and mid-sized producers and regional buyers and consumers.
