UPCOMING EVENTS
Green Works
ARCHITECTURAL AND CONSTRUCTION PHASE SERVICES
Adobe Restoration
Sustainable Architectural Design
Rainwater Catchment Design
Handicapped Accessible Design
Solar/Wind Energy Consulting
Mike Green, AIA, Texas License #10917
LEED Accredited Professional
646-256-8112
mike@greenworks-architecture.com
Box 97, Marfa, TX 79843
Garden As Art/Art in the Garden — October 8
located on HWY 118
4 mi. S. of Fort Davis
closed major holidays
Open 9-5, Mon.-Sat.
www.cdri.org
432-364-2499
Butterfly Count—July 1
Desert North American after Dark Model Night for Hikes—July Wildlife Management 9, 16, 23, 30
What’s in a Name? Herpetofauna Lecture on Taxonomy
Lecture — October 27
and Status—July 14
What Lurks in the Dark of Night? Family Night
Summer Constellations, Saturn & the Milky Way
Stargazing—July
Program
16,
— October
30
28
Desert Fall Hike Rat in Club the Guadalupes Summer Day — Camp—July October 29 18–22
Annual Geology BBQ of Mexico & Benefit Lecture Auction—August — November 10 6
Change Thanksgiving your Open Perspective: House — Climb November Mt. Livermore 25 & 26
—September 10
Davis Mountains & Balmorhea Christmas Bird Count
Butterfly Count—September 17
December —17 & 18
Fall Bird Count—September 24
Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute, Est. 1974
P.O. Box 905, Fort Davis, TX 79734
OPEN JULY 4TH
Photo by Cindy McIntyre
Boquillas, Mexico from the Texas side of the Rio Grande.
¡ Viva Boquillas!
by Ron Payne
N ext spring a wall that has laid siege across
la Frontera will be breached. The crossing
at Boquillas del Carmen, Mexico into the
United States, on the far east side of Big Bend
National Park, will be reopened.
In the atmosphere of fear and suspicion following
Sept. 11, 2001, informal crossings of the
Rio Grande into Mexico were closed at Lajitas,
Texas and in the national park at Castolon/
Santa Elena and Rio Grande Village/ Boquillas
del Carmen on May 10, 2002. The Sierra Ponce,
a sheer escarpment extending from Texas into the
Mexican state of Coahuila, forms a natural wall,
created millions of years ago by a tectonic plate
shift of the earth’s crust. This shift raised the
Chihuahuan Desert plateau on the Mexican side
by 1,200 to 1,500 feet, almost defining the
Texas/Mexico border, making it unnecessary in
2002 to build a cement wall.
Our homeland was secured by erecting the
legal barrier that sealed-off the border. A Border
Patrol station within Big Bend National Park
enforces the closure. So immediate and secure
was the closing that residents on the Mexican side
who had cars parked as usual in a lot in the park
could not readily retrieve them. Mexican employees
of the park found it a very long way back
home at the end of a shift. The nearest legal
crossing was now 100 miles to the west at
Presidio/Ojinaga.
The park’s chief river ranger, in a Nov. 23,
2007 interview on National Public Radio’s “All
Things Considered,” summed up the opinions of
many when he told John Burnett: “What we have
done is created a hardship for those folks who
have legitimate reasons to be coming back and
forth across here or that have been part of the
community and the area here for a long time.
Those are the folks that we've impacted the most.
We haven’t slowed the bad guys beyond at all.”
Perhaps authorities at the time agreed with
Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” that “good fences
make good neighbors.” They failed, though, to ask
the question Frost raised about walls and fences.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.
What had been walled-out was a Mexican
rural-village culture that began along both sides of
Rio Bravo del Norte in the late 19th century. By
then the despoblado, the uninhabited land, emptied
of inhabitants by regular raids by Native
Americans down the Comanche Trail, had
begun welcoming settlers.
When Anglo miners and ranchers moved into
southern Brewster County in the early 20th century,
families with names like Acosta, Solis,
Villalbas, Garcia, Gonzales and Ybarra were
already registered landowners on both sides of
the river border. As early as 1894 merchants like
Cipriano Hernandez were operating small stores,
on the U.S. side of the river, keeping the early settlers
supplied with necessities, trading furs and
perhaps assisting in smuggling candelilla wax, the
export of which was strictly controlled by the
Mexican government.
Soon, on the U.S. side, settlements such as La
Coyota, Ojito, Castolon and Terlingua Abajo
stood opposite the Mexican towns Santa Elena,
San Vicente and Boquillas del Carmen. Traversing
the river border was an everyday event for people
on both sides, like walking across a street to trade
with a merchant on the other side or to visit neighbors.
Boquillas del Carmen had grown to a couple
16
Cenizo
Fourth Quarter 2011