One of the most significant cultural developments
I have seen this Season in the area around Loreto has been the progress the
Living Roots organization has made and the impact that it is having on the
ranchero community surrounding San Javier.
I have written about Raises Vivas and it’s dynamic Director, McKenzie
Campbell, earlier this season (http://livingloreto.blogspot.mx/2013/03/living-roots-planted-in-san-javier.html) and so I was interested when
I heard about a fund raising event for their benefit being held in the home of
Jesse and Dirk, who live within (but not part of) the Loreto Bay development.
It was a perfect calm day, with warm sun
and blue skies when about 50 supporters, mainly from Loreto Bay and the
surrounding Nopolo neighborhood, gathered to make a contribution to Living
Roots and learn more about what they have accomplished and what their goals are
for the future. Laid out in the
beautiful back yard of out host’s home were some light snacks and cold drinks,
as well as samples for sale of some of the Living Roots products including
leatherwork and embroidery as well as some ranchero made delicacies like Dulce
de Leche (a delicious caramel like topping).
During this event McKenzie made a very
interesting presentation about the beginnings and progress of the organization
she has been involved in building over the past few years and, rather than try
to summarize her words, I asked her permission to reproduce her text here for
you all to read for yourselves:
“Living Roots began in the 2010 as a Social
Enterprise with the purpose of working with Baja’s ranchero families to adapt
and thrive in a quickly modernizing world.
The Living Roots model is not about hand-outs, or traditional charity. We believe in empowering ranchers and helping
provide the tools to determine their own futures and success.
The picture
of who these Baja’s rancheros are
may be best painted by the first ranching family I met in the Sierra la
Giganta. In 2008, my husband Dave and I,
walked into the mountains scouting a new course area for the National Outdoor
Leadership School (NOLS) which we were both involved in. We were in search of the cowboy legend, Dario
Higuera, who Trudi Angel, owner of Saddling South had told us we had to meet.
After several long days of walking along
the Camino Real on mesa tops and over sharp volcanic rock, we finally arrived
at Rancho El Jarillal, where Dario Higuera and his family live. We were nearly out of food, dirty, stinky and
thirsty. Despite our showing up out of the
middle of nowhere, Dario and his family welcomed us in with open arms. They sat us down in the shade, served coffee,
goat cheese and squash sweets.
It was a Sunday, and while we ate and took
a bath, Dario put on his hat and saddled up his burro to guide us the several
kilometers up the arroyo that represent his life story. He had spent several years growing up in an
over hung cave next to a big tinaja,
water hole surrounded by rock art.
Then he went to boarding school in San
Javier for three years, broke horses for living, herded cows down to the docks
in Loreto, and eventually started to make a life for himself and his family
raising goats and cows, selling cheese as well as developing his skills as a
master leather craftsman. To me, the Higueras represent the essence of
the Baja ranchero culture; they are
welcoming, generous, proud, self-reliant, and incredibly devoted to their land
and to their family.
The following year, with NOLS, I brought
the first group of American students on an expedition through the sierra, where
we met other such genuine families living their lives intertwined with the land,
which we all appreciated and admired. However,
it was during our drive out of the mountains at the end of that first course, when
we first saw the bulldozers breaking way for the new paved road into San Javier,
that it struck me what a critical time
this is for rancheros like Dario.
While
modernization such as the new road, the arrival of electricity, and within the
last month, cell phone coverage, offers incredible opportunity, it also poses
significant threats to their traditional lifestyle. This is especially true
for a culture that has historically been quite isolated, has relatively little
education, and for centuries has been predominantly self-reliant. Never having
needed to participate in the broader economy, and often times, not having
ventured far from their ranches, these rancheros don’t know how to benefit from,
or even recognize these new opportunities.
They have expressed fear at being left behind as the modern-world
quickly overtakes them.
It was this realization that prompted me to
go back to school to get an MBA in Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise and
form a team that started Living Roots to help empower the rancheros to map out
their own future on their own terms. Community
empowerment is a lovely, lofty goal - which in practice is a long and
challenging road. First we had to really
listen to what the community of San Javier and surrounding ranches wanted for
their futures. In the summer of 2010 they
asked for assistance to achieve three
major goals:
·
Direct access to markets for their products
·
Protecting and rejuvenating unique traditional
skills
·
Locally managing tourism
The first
step in helping them actualize this vision was fostering local leadership
and we formed a Leadership Team of seven members, one from each of the ranch
communities that surround San Javier, to energize, organize, and make important
decisions for their community. Their
first challenge was to learn how to trust each other, outline objectives and
work toward them, and most important, openly communicate with each other through
the inevitable “small community” challenges they faced.
Next we created a Brand, “Living Roots”. The San Javier Leadership team, which
essentially represents a regional marketing association, decided the criteria
the Raices Vivas (Living Roots) Brand is to represent. They determined that to participate, products
needed to be hand-made, by people who have origins in sierra communities and
should be based on traditional skills.
With this brand promoting authenticity, Living Roots began to help
rancheros improve product quality and discover new markets for traditional
products such as olive oil, leatherwork, preserves and embroidery.
With Living Roots help, the San Javier
community built and opened the long awaited dream of an information center, which
provides the rancheros as well as San Javier residents a space to directly sell
products, organize tourism, exhibit their culture and lifestyle and serve as a
central information and community hub.
Each ranch community contributed to the building, which was constructed
in the traditional way with adobe walls, a stone floor and a thatch roof.
The university in La Paz will provide a
computer and library to make available resources such as best agricultural
practices and literature that has been previously written about sierra families
and the ranchero history. For the past
several months we have been working hand in hand with the leadership team and
the two representatives in charge, Jesus Martinez and Trinidad Castro, to teach
them inventory management, accounting, pricing and other business management
techniques.
The group’s hope for the future is to
incorporate as a Community Enterprise, similar to a cooperative. Living
Roots is walking them through this process toward autonomy, providing the tools
to ensure the committee is sustainable from an organizational and economic
standpoint, and that they are prepared to run and grow the business
independently.
Key to the enduring longevity of the
ranchero culture is keeping young people excited about it. We have done this in two ways. First we went to the schools and asked what
the kids what like to learn from local masters.
Their answers were across the board: how to plant, how to ride horses,
how sew, and learn leather work and embroidery skills. This sparked a program called Sierra Heritage
Workshops where resident experts in their field come into the school to teach
traditional skills.
Also this spring, we began our Jóvenes Documentalistas,
or Young Documentarians program which is helping preserve valuable cultural
history by training teenagers to use multi-media techniques to record and share
the life-stories of their grandparents and local legends. A couple of weeks ago, with a group of
secondary school students, ages 12 to 17, we once again walked the long trail
to Rancho El Jarillal, to talk Dario Higuera and his family. But this time their niece and nephew and
several other friends from surrounding ranches, got to prod them with questions
about their lives, learn how to make their own leather belts and were able to document
it all, to display soon at the Cultural Center.
Our next goal is to establish
Community-Driven Tourism. We have begun
to create the community organization needed to run a medicinal plant and interpretive
trail through San Javier, past the mission and into the orchard. Ensuring that this is truly community driven
means more meetings and capacity building just to get to the step of making a
brochure and finally putting in signs and infrastructure.
This year we were fortunate to break a
three year severe drought, but who knows what next year will bring. In preparation for this unknown future, the ranchers
have identified their most critical need as food security. For them, this translates into planting more
gardens, ideally organic, and increasing income apart from their traditional livestock. As our next major objective, we would like to
help rancheros begin to plan for the day the next drought hits, through organic
gardening, income savings and water conservation plans.
We chose to begin working in San Javier
both because of its historical importance, as being the oldest continuously
cultivated orchard in the Californias, and also because the community is on the
brink of major change. As they take on
more and more ownership, and are increasingly able to move ahead independently,
Living Roots is beginning to think about what other sierra communities we will
begin to work more closely with in the future, such as Martha and Juan Pablo’s
family just north of here, or Chema’s family in the Sierra San Francisco.
All of this would not have been possible
without the Loreto community and Loreto Bay. You have supported us and given your
encouragement to the committee in San Javier by seeking Raices Vivas branded
products, visiting the Cultural Center and being “guinea pigs” on medicinal
plant tours. Your contributions in 2011 helped
develop local leadership and the marketing association, your contributions last
year went directly into building and opening the Cultural Center and
Marketplace. Today we are asking you to
take the next step in your commitment to supporting locally envisioned and
driven development by becoming a sustaining member of Living Roots.
As we were trying to come up with a name
for this special group of supporters who pledge their commitment to the long
term process of community empowerment and Cultural longevity, I asked Chuy, who
is now president of Raices Vivas in San Javier, what this group should be
called. He recommended calling you “Cabanuelos”,
which is the spring rain that helps maintain life in the hills throughout the
dry months of summer. Your contribution
today will go to strengthening San Javier’s ability to local manage tourism,
help rancheros grow organic gardens and prepare them for the next drought. To do this, we are seeking contributions of $30,000
for the next year, and we are already a third of the way to that goal. Thank you for your support and investment in
a vibrant future for ranching families.”
For those of you not fortunate enough to have
enjoyed this presentation first hand, you too can become a supporter of Raises
Vivas, possibly even a Cabanuelos, by visiting their website www.livingrootsbaja.org where you can
learn more about their fascinating story and the exciting works they are
supporting in the ranchero community.
Giving something back to enrich the historic culture of this special
place by helping to grow “Living Roots” is one of the privileges of “Living
Loreto”.