El Ro: Culture and Environment in the Rio Grande/Ro Bravo Basin
By Pech, Linda Ho
El Ro: Culture and Environment in the Rio Grande/ro Bravo Basin. Traveling exhibition and catalogue, curated and written by Olivia Cadaval and Cynthia vidaurri, and produced by the smithsonian Institution, Center for Folklife and Cultural heritage. El Ro was inaugurated at the smithsonian in washington, D.C., in 2003. It has since traveled to the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg, Texas; the Museo del Desierto in saltillo, Coahuila, semilla; Museo- Centro de Ciencia y Tecnologa in Chihuahua City, Chihuahua; the Centennial Museum at the University of Texas- El Paso; and the Maxwell Museum at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.
The El Ro exhibition greets visitors with a panoramic view of the river that anchors the Ro Grande/ro Bravo Basin and extends two thousand miles across varied terrain. From the headwaters of the river in Colorado to its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico, the river flows through mountains, deserts, plains, and delta in the states of Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas in the United states and the states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Nuevo Len, and Tamaulipas in Mexico. The exhibition explores the relationship between the people who live in this diverse region and its equally diverse environment. As Juanita Elizondo Garza, project consultant and exhibit host at the University of Texas-Pan American, explains, “From the headwaters in Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico, every region of the Rio Grande/ ro Bravo Basin faces its own issues of history, language, culture, religion, and sustenance.” Like the river, this traveling exhibition also crisscrosses social, political, and environmental borders.
El Ro continually focuses on the complex identities of individuals and communities in the basin. Often a highly contested site, the river is a culturally arbitrary political border, a place of both traditional communities and modern industrialization, and an ecologically and economically sensitive environment. Curators Olivia Cadaval and Cynthia vidaurri chose a case-study format to structure the exhibition as a collection of stories, each told with particular voices and perspectives. The goals are to depict the relationship between culture and environment and to address the region’s diversity through three interrelated themes: traditional knowledge, sustainable development, and cultural identity.
How does traditional knowledge contribute to managing land and water resources? visitors encounter the “Traditional Knowledge” segment by entering a cabin of a shrimping boat, complete with a captain’s chair, while Julius Collins speaks out through a video about shrimping in Brownsville, Texas. “You can put the best of everything on a boat-radar, global positioning, even television-but your experience in running that technology is what counts. You get the knowledge of where the shrimp is from years and years of experience.” This understanding of traditional knowledge is again invoked in the “Ranching” section, where visitors can relax in a ranch-style sala, or den, complete with deer horns and leather furniture. Juan Luis Longoria speaks about how ranchers all over south Texas often pass along skills and ranching culture to the younger generation through rodeos, cookoffs, and trail rides.
In what ways does a community’s environment nurture its cultural identity? The “Cultural Identity” segment addresses how cultural practices shape and give meaning to the physical environment and how people who have lived in the river basin for generations are often in conflict with newcomers about this community- environment relationship. The section about the Rarmuri from Ciudad Jurez, Chihuahua, focuses on how people whose livelihood and culture once depended on the land and its resources now must try to survive on the margins of cities. As Jos Guadalupe Bautista explains in a video panel in the exhibition, “It’s a bit tough for us, because in our homeland there is hardly any work. In the city, we do what we can to eat, to survive.”
How do local knowledge and cultural practices contribute to sustainable development? The “sustainable Development” segment highlights how the wool weaving traditions in Los Ojos, New Mexico, have created sustainable economic opportunities. Tierra wools, a local business, has provided jobs to local residents, revived weaving traditions, and rescued the almost-extinct churro sheep. visitors touch the brightly dyed wool and handmade textiles in a shoplike wooden structure.
The El Ro exhibition has a binational and bilingual identity. The voices of individuals from the region are central, and the text styles are conversational. English and spanish texts are given equal importance. The case-free environment and format allows for a freer, handson experience-sit in a captain’s chair, touch the textiles, and weave the “palmito” plant fi- bers. video and audio stations also enhance the experience; conjunto, huapango, and indigenous music are featured in the “Music and Place” section.
El Ro had a life before becoming a traveling exhibition. First in 1998 and then in 2000, it was featured as a program at the annual smithsonian Folklife Festival. After that, many of the participants and researchers wanted to find ways to use some of the research and presentation work in their own communities. A series of three-day meetings held between participants, researchers, and El Rio’s curatorial staff developed the idea of a traveling exhibition. several of the festival participants are featured in El Rio. The participants acquired or donated objects, decided how to exhibit and interpret them, and provided expertise that was incorporated into the exhibition’s production. Professional and personal ties were built and woven into networks that lasted beyond any one project. The collaboration between scholars and communities is at the core of what makes this exhibition special.
The smithsonian curators have demonstrated their commitment to move out of the nation’s capital and into communities underrepresented in the museum world by “bringing El Ro home.” The exhibition was well received in the communities. In Edinburg, at the University of Texas-Pan American, the exhibition became a sort of local showcase, with visitors pointing out their family members or neighbors in the video clips and photographs. One family drove sixty- five miles from Brownsville to see the exhibit and said they felt a strong connection to the ways of life that the exhibition highlighted. Many visitors felt proud that their communities and traditions were given attention by the smithsonian Institution. According to the curators, this production has been a personal journey as well as a literal one. Developing the exhibit “has brought us closer to appreciating the force of collaboration and made us humble before the wealth of spirit and commitment with which our colleagues helped tell their stories. we hope this exhibition does justice to their work and culture” (p. 15). According to many of the participants and visitors with whom I spoke in Edinburg, Texas, the telling of the stories of the region were well worth the work and well worth the journey.
LINDA HO PECH
The University of Texas at Austin
Copyright American Folklore Society, Inc. Winter 2007
(c) 2007 Journal of American Folklore. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.