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SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS
July 6, 2008
Ranchers feeling alone
MARATHON — When an underground pump began failing late last month,
threatening to leave cattle on the 82,000-acre South Pope Ranch high and
dry in summer heat, Debbie O'Neill found herself in a familiar tight
spot.
Not until Red Wagner, a neighboring rancher, came over a couple of days
later and helped her replace the defective pump was water restored for
the livestock and O'Neill's latest ranch crisis resolved.
“It's tough. I'm doing every job. I'm doing Mike's jobs and I'm doing
the hands' jobs. But I can't do it all. When I get into a big problem
with the wells, I get Red to come over,” she said.
O'Neill, 54, never planned to end up as a solo performer in the harsh,
high desert near Big Bend National Park and about 20 miles overland from
Mexico.
But almost three years ago, her husband, Mike, died in a horse accident
while rounding up heifers in some bad country to the north. Late last
spring, her three trusted Mexican ranch hands were caught on her
property by the U.S. Border Patrol, deported and told never to return.
When O'Neill protested, “they told me if I was ever caught again, they'd
press charges against me. I'm upset now. I was more upset then,” she
said.
And now, 20 years after she and Mike began leasing the vast South Pope
Ranch, O'Neill works alone, with about 15 dogs and 900 head of hoofed
stock for company, but not by choice.
Her circumstances give her a unique perspective on one aspect of the
ongoing, often acrimonious national debate about foreign labor and
immigration reform.
“They say Mexicans are coming over and taking jobs from Americans. But
there are people across the border down here who are starving. We have
work for them, and you cannot find anyone else to do it,” O'Neill said.
In May, the latest congressional attempt to create an ambitious guest
worker plan — one which would have given temporary legal status to 1.35
million foreign farm workers — died quietly in a parliamentary maneuver.
Javelina-scarred hounds
Out here, where many spreads are measured in tens of thousands of rocky
acres covered with lechuguilla and greasewood, and where rainfall often
is measured in tenths of inches, ranching life is glamorous only from a
distance.
O'Neill said trying to find a legal way to employ Mexican hands proved
futile, as did attempts to hire local American help to do work the
Mexicans once did willingly and well.
“I'm so burnt out on people who come to work and don't know ranching,”
she said. “You have people who come out here and want to be a cowboy.
But it's so desolate they don't last, and anyhow, most of what I do is
checking water lines.”
Every day starts and ends at the metal barn, where loitering crows and a
loose pack of javelina-scarred hounds watch O'Neill do chores. Here,
amid her husband's dusty saddles and bridles, she feeds and doctors the
calves and horses held in ocotillo stick pens.
Except for Sunday, her midday hours are spent creeping along rocky roads
in a Ford pickup, tracking endless miles of buried lines to make sure
water is flowing to more than 100 troughs and tanks.
“Mike used to joke about cowboys carrying wrenches, and almost every day
I go out, I find a leak,” she said.
Until last May, when her top hand Gonzalo was arrested, he and his two
comrades did much of this routine. But even before he was caught and
deported, Gonzalo — who had worked for the O'Neills for about a decade —
was a bit of an anomaly.
Employing unauthorized Mexicans once was a common and legal practice on
vast West Texas ranches. But in the past 20 years, the practice has
almost disappeared.
The national immigration reforms of 1986 made such hiring unlawful. The
post 9-11 escalation of the Border Patrol in the Big Bend area virtually
ended it.
“Certainly we're not going to say we looked the other way,” Bill Brooks,
a Border Patrol spokesman in Marfa, said when asked about policing ranch
employment in the years before 2001.
“We've always been vigilant. The difference is the additional resources,
especially in the Marfa sector. We have probably double the agents we
had 10 years ago,” he said.
Broader, unrelated changes in ranching in the Big Bend, in part caused
by a lengthy drought, also have reduced the need to keep an eye out for
unauthorized ranch hands.
“Out here, the ranching business has changed. They're just not running
cattle on a lot of these ranches like they used to, and we don't see as
many ranch hands,” Brooks said.
Ben Love, who ranches just south of O'Neill, said a scarcity of hands
has become the norm around the region.
“I'm sitting here in my office, on a large ranch, looking out my window
at mountains in Mexico, and I don't have a single employee on the ranch
right now,” he said.
“It changed dramatically with the Immigration Reform Act of 1986. For
the first time it was unlawful for employers to have undocumented
people. The result was ranch labor along the entire Mexican border just
evaporated,” he said.
Like O'Neill, Love once gave steady employment to Mexicans who came over
from border villages, hiring the same hands year after year, and
building relationships that benefited both rancher and employee.
“Personally I can't see why we can't have an agricultural guest worker
program. I know these families. They worked for me a long time and I'm
having a hard time without them,” he said.
“This would be a natural place to prove up the concept. If I want to
hire Mexican nationals, I register them with the Border Patrol and I'm
responsible for them, and for taking them back to the port of entry and
signing them back into Mexico,” he said.
One result of the labor shortage, said Love and others, is a
deterioration of ranch infrastructure throughout the region.
“You can get people to help you working cattle, but we just can't hire
American nationals to work on fences, roads and pipelines. And the
Mexicans don't mind doing it,” he said.
Border Patrol informants
Rancher Rick Tate, whose roots go back five generations in the Big Bend,
recalls a time when the Border Patrol didn't bother much with Mexicans
who had no plans to go farther north.
“Twenty years ago, there was quite a bit more illegal help from Mexico,
and it seemed like the Border Patrol was not quite so interested in
people who were working in the area and (who) would go back home on
weekends or once a month,” he said.
“They weren't going to Chicago or Dallas. They never got north of I-10,
and that was kind of a demarcation,” Tate said.
Back then, he recalled, the Border Patrol would make special allowances
for some Mexican hands who provided useful information about large
groups passing through the backcountry. In exchange for sounding the
alert about unauthorized immigration, the informant could continue to
work on the ranch without fear of deportation.
“There was a program where if you were in a pretty busy passageway (for
immigrants) you might get a paper for a man who was illegal. He wouldn't
get rounded up with all the others,” Tate said. “It didn't get them any
closer to citizenship but it kept them from getting hustled off.”
After doing a little research, Border Patrol spokesman Brooks said the
informant program is still on the books but is rarely used anymore.
“The Border Patrol had the option to parole an illegal alien for the
benefit of the government — not the alien — to be an informant,” he
said.
James Graham, 60, who recently retired as a Brewster County sheriff's
deputy, used to patrol the border on horseback, and often would
encounter Mexicans coming through the backcountry.
“I caught those carrying narcotics and I caught those coming here to
work. But when you catch 'em, they won't tell you where they were going
to work. They'd just say ‘the rancho,'” he recalled.
And he suspects O'Neill may not be the last rancher in the Big Bend to
have used unauthorized labor.
“It's real easy to come across the border and work for a while, and go
back. The country down there is so vast and not well traveled. You could
bring an individual in for two or three weeks, before anyone would even
think about it,” he said.
“I'm not scared”
O'Neill was an Ohio teenager when she met her future husband at a rodeo
as a dashing bronc rider, married him and came back with him to Texas.
Today, she doesn't know how long she will continue.
Folks ranging from her two daughters to Border Patrol agents keep asking
her if it might be time to quit. She says she'll know it's that time if
it comes.
“I don't feel like I'm doing it for Mike. This is what I know and what I
do,” O'Neill said. “I guess I can say I'm proud of myself having gone
this far, being able to be out here alone. I'm not scared. It just gets
lonely.”
Bumping down a ranch road in the pickup, two dogs in back and another
riding cab, rolling past clusters of wide-eyed cattle and skittering
quail against the distant backdrop of Santiago Peak, it once again came
into perfect focus.
“You'll probably have to pick me off this place to get me out of here.
When I go to town it drives me crazy. Just being here makes me feel
free. Everywhere you look there is beauty,” she said.
Once in a while O'Neill talks by phone with Gonzalo, whom she met a
dozen years ago when he came wandering through the brush, a skinny
teenager looking for work.
After his job in Texas ended last year, Gonzalo and his family moved
away from the border to Musquiz, Mexico.
“He's working in a factory there. He hates it. He keeps asking if he can
come back home. He says everything will be OK,” she said.
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