Shill alert - On "Old Mexico" and cattle

Disclaimer: This is a self-serving post as it discusses the release of my first book.
So, finally, Private Revolutions is due out this month. You can find it at the press site itself, of course, but also at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, or Powell's too (usually a little cheaper at the first two).

The premise of this book is fairly simple, even if the years of work that went into it were not simple at all: Ranchers are not an amorphous body of rural evil-doers oppressing communal farmers and ranchers in Mexico. Aaron Bobrow-Strain has also made this argument for Chiapas, Mexico, in his own book. In fact, many "private" ranch owners are also still communal farmers and herders, contra the work of so much social science in Mexico (and Latin America in general). I also give some attention to the larger context of ranching, such as gender, economics, and the ecology and management of private ranches in northern Mexico (read: Sonora).

I'm happy it's out, and I have my advance copy which looks pretty good though I cannot bear to actually read it. The first word in the glossary, by the way, is....(drumroll)... "acequia."

So, first the land issues, and now the water...a logical progression in my mind. While I do not focus on water issues extensively in this book, it really could have been expanded into its own book outright, since ranchers in Sonora (MX) worry more about water for livestock than "feed" most of the time. And their groundwater tables have dropped precipitously in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, so their concerns really are not that different from fellow "ganaderos" in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California (etc). By the way, all of the royalties (up to $4K) are getting funneled back into my own institution (Colorado College) and the research division that generously supported this publication.

End of the hard sell.