From the archive – Southwest Center Researchers / Jeffrey M. Banister
The Caminos of Mexico have no beginning and are without end.
—Howard Scott Gentry(1995:135)
Beginning in late 1933, the American naturalist Howard Scott Gentry made extensive explorations of Northwest Mexico’s Río Mayo drainage, recording his observations in unusually poetic prose (Yetman and Martin, 1998). His book, Río Mayo Plants (1942), might have offended the dispassionate sensibilities of his contemporaries. Today, however, its nomadic musings seem far less worn for wear than the arid accounting that typifies “Royal Science” of the period.1 Writing before construction of the Mocúzari Reservoir, in the lower drainage, Gentry described the Río Mayo as a powerful living organism. Flowing from the deep canyons of the western side of the Sierra Madre Occidental, in a robust rainy season the Mayo could float giant boulders as if they were small pebbles. Dropping in elevation, moving through the semi-tropical tierra caliente of the foothills and then onto the coastal plain, the Mayo’s waters brought with them coarse mountain gravels, shaping them into narrow bars that pushed westward with the rushing stream. As it neared the Sea of Cortéz, in some places the river disappeared altogether, moving underground, replenishing aquifers, while along other portions of the journey bedrock forced its waters to the surface, forming narrow pools stretching for a mile or more and reaching 30 feet deep. In good years, overflow from heavy rains deposited pockets of fresh sediment in the low-lying vegas of the coastal plain.
In Gentry’s words, here was a small “Nile river, enriching the adjacent agricultural lands” (1942: 2–5) of a landscape that is known today as federal Irrigation District 38–El Valle del Mayo, comprising nearly 100,000 cultivable hectares. Río Mayo Plants speaks eloquently to a moment in time just before that river would succumb to the twin objectives of “maximum yield and maximum profit” (Kalin 2006: 13). This was also before water would become abstracted and extracted as “resource,” as a measurable quantum, and, largely, as naturally “scarce” or, in the case of floods, naturally “disastrous.” Regardless of how one views the legacy of agricultural development and federal hydraulic control on the lower Río Mayo, it is indisputable that most of what Gentry saw in the lower watershed no longer exist […]
