desierto. (charles bowden)

“He is old enough to pre-date the modern border. Until about 1930 it was a line on a map, not on the earth, and Don Pedro remembers cattle drives from the valley up to Tubac in Arizona. The same kind of border the Yaquis knew and crossed in their endless comings and goings for refuge and guns and bullets. For these people at some level it is all a piece of ground and the ground is absolutely connected.”

Bowden’s book is an account of a land that transcends the border humans have imposed on it. This land is the territory that exists between the hills of Sinaloa, the wastelands of Texas and the coastal reaches of Southern California. Within this territory live Mexicans, North Americans, and the indigenous people whose forefathers predated the arrival of either. It is also the home to coyotes and lions. It is a territory whose modern economy is dominated by the exploitation of the desert and the narcotics industry. Bowden’s book, reporting back from the front line in the nineties, is the godfather to Cormac McCarthy and the stepson of Edward Abbey, whose influence he acknowledges in the opening pages. Thereafter it’s a ride of remarkable brilliance through the highways and byways of the territory. Bowden hangs out with the Sari fishermen, the Sinaloa narcos, and the gringo entrepreneurs who get swallowed by the savings and loans scandal that prefigured the crash of 2008. All of this against the backdrop of the desert, that immutable space which contextualises all human actions and puts them in its cruel shade. Bowden possessed the unusual capacity for a gringo, firstly of having curiosity for the Mexican and native cultures, and secondly of being able to gain their trust sufficiently to write about these worlds with the authority of a quasi insider. His voice, little known, is that of a poet-journalist who understood a land which can never be understood within the conventions of human power, no matter how much that power seeks to scar its landscape.

Nb. I remember in Michoacán when the elder of the community, Don Esteban, told us how when he was younger he would head to the US and there was no demarcated border. For generations the border wasn’t even an idea. Then it became an idea, but nothing more. Now it is a frontline. However, the land and nature, Bowden suggests, know no border and his remarkable book offers a glimpse of this alternative geography.