22 Uses for the “Commons” in Guanajuato, Mexico

El cerro (the hill) began a hundred yards or so above the street where I lived for ten years in the city of Guanajuato, capital of the state of Guanajuato. 

The name was given to the slopes covered with dry grass, cactus, and huizache (acacia), that ran across much of the state around 6-7,00 feet above sea level, so not what would normally be called hills in the United States.

Below the cerro was the Bajío, a plateau of the relatively low agricultural land at about 5 or 6, 000 feet. Once it had been the , of the Bajío the bread basket of Mexico and the source of food, mules, and leather needed for the mines of Guanajuato. Now it is the fruit basket of the United States.

Above was the Sierra (the mountain, high and wooded, and between 7 and 8,000 feet above sea level.

I was never sure of the exact legal status of the cerro above Guanajuato. It was not commons in the preferred technical sense of the word today to mean land used by a group of individuals or families with the conditions of use regularly renegotiated to prevent depletion of the resource.

Perhaps because it was too rocky, too barren and often too steep to be claimed by anyone for commercial purposes, it was ground that anyone and everyone used. It was as a result overgrazed and covered with scrub, more a Garrett Hardin tragedy of the commons than an Elinor Ostrom community-managed success.

Even so it played vital functions for the city and for the many small villages above the city as a place of transit, as a source of raw materials, as a place of recreation, and as a dump.

Every weekday at 8 am on the dot, a group of neighbors and I left to walk the old camino minero (mining road) that ran along the contour of the cerro, 2 ½ kilometers around the curve of the valley leading down to the city, 2 ½ kilometers back, passing multiple different users.

Before I left the city, I jotted down the people I had seen using the cerro. And yesterday, clearing out a drawer I found the list. Sadly I have photos of only a few of the users and all of those taken in the glorious months of August and September when the rains had fallen, and the cerro had greened, and turned golden with flowers.

Users of the cerro

Vaqueros (cowboys) on horseback cutting across the taking a direct route to join pilgrimages to El Cristo Rey or the church of San Martin, patron saint of horsemen, a framed glass box containing a sacred relic or statue strapped to the back of the saddle of the lead rider.

A bird catcher crouching in a hide in a patch of scrub, waiting for songbirds to enter the open door of the cage containing a female. These he would put in individual bamboo cages, stack them on his bicycle, and make his way to market.

Charro riders training their horses, skidding to a halt from a gallop and throwing up clouds of dust. Charro is the origin of rodeo but has a quite different status. Their appearance always provoked one of my companions to reminisce about how her mother-in-law had to unpick and then re-attache the silver ornaments on her husband’s charro trousers every time they were washed.

Men and boys from the high Sierra walking the long route to the city, their donkeys laden with sand, charcoal, firewood, or (before Christmas) moss for the nativity scene. A crushingly hard life.

Middle class men and women jogging, walking, biking. That’s my group.

Children wobbling along on their new bikes after Dia de los Reyes (6th January, King’s Day), urged on by anxious parents.

Mothers from remote villages taking their children riding pillion behind them on horseback down to the city for school.

Police recruits being brought up to required fitness levels by jogging along the camino minero.

Hunters with guns at the ready to pot rabbits.

Housewives after young nopal cactus shoots.

Curanderos or their employees collecting medicinal herbs.

Geology students from the School of Mines at the University learning how to survey.

By night, owners of dead dogs or cattle to throw them down to the arroyo (My neighbor three doors up kept cans of gasoline to burn these when the smell got too bad).

The poor collecting discarded soft drink cans to sell.

Market vendors collecting logs to make Christmas nativity scenes (nacimientos).

During the rainy season, children splashing in the water now running in the arroyo and families picnicking beside it.

Old men crouched on the camino minero picking out bits of quartz from rocks in the track to put in miniature mining trucks to sell to tourists vising La Valenciana.

Early morning and late evening, shadowy figures you did not want to know dealing drugs.

The city band practicing before Independence Day on September 15th.

Teens and twenties making out with their girlfriend or boyfriend, car radio blaring.

Campesinos who owned a few cattle as insurance to sell in hard times or a mule to help plant the corn corralling those skinny cattle and mules.

And everyone gathering garambullos, cactus fruit, the central Mexican answer to blackberry picking.

The cerro in world history

The hard surfaced track we took was a wonder to me.  It was the old camino minero (mining road) that led from the great mines along the veta madre (mother vein) down the old refining town of Marfil a couple of miles away. 

As a geology student, I had listened to lectures on the mine of Valenciana, one of the richest in the world, center of a major industrial complex, and key to the globalization fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Now, if I took a path to the right off the camino minero, I was right in front of it just half a mile straight up the hill, with its imposing walls facing the mining church, San Cayetano, with its wonderful eighteenth-century organ and gold-plated altarpiece.

From Valenciana, for the better part of two hundred years the refined ore went west to Acapulco and then by galleon to Manila in the Philippines and then on to China.  And it went east to Veracruz and from there to Spain. This area was, the historian John Tutino argues persuasively in Making a New World: Founding Capitalism in the Bajío and Spanish North America, the birthplace of modern capitalism.

And all along the camino minero were signs of the past: glimpses of the great mining haciendas, channels to move the water from the mines, tracks where the muleteers had driven their mules laden with ore. I’m left, as always, marveling at the multiplicity of places, the intricacy of their use, their layering over the centuries.

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