Northern México tends to be forgotten when there is talk of peasant types and movements, which is a current imposture, largely attributable to the banality of intellectual fashions of not few scholars, now entranced with the “cultural spin”, result from which they only see indigenous people where before we saw peasants. The book by Esperanza Penagos Belman, With soil on their hands: Analysis of two peasant organizations in Northwest Chihuahua and their struggle for survival (Escuela de Antropología e Historia del Norte de México, Chihuahua, 2015), has arrived to correct this academic short-sightedness. The rural economic development implied in each region can induce to various responses in rural localities. The greatest has been migration, but it is not the only one. Another one is survival “with the arms of the weak”. Naturally, it has propagandistic visibility displayed - something that indigenous movements have been able to use in their favor since 1994 -, although it is essential that the central State conceive them as important for their own survival. Peasants are no longer, and will never again be, the “favorite children of the regime”, as the well-known study by Arturo Warman suggested. Therefore, researchers know that they will not be rewarded if they continue to insist on their visibility when what is desired is their invisibility as an underestimated multitude.

Penagos describes it in the following manner, contrasting between adjoining regions: while in the Sierra the Rarámuri peoples are a cause of preferential attention and exclusive benefit from churches and governmental and non-governmental organizations, in the state’s northeast there is a complete “devaluation and disdain for being a peasant or rancher” (pp. 101 and 151). The causes are economical and ultimately about prestige, and she devotes her first two chapters to proving this, from the agricultural crisis of 1965-1980, moving through the structural adjustment between 1982 and 1988, and lastly the agricultural reforms after 1991. It was precisely in this “indigenous shift” (and Neoliberal!) when the central State completely abandoned peasant regions throughout the country. We speak here of an agricultural region located in the municipalities of Temósachi and Gómez Farías (examined in the third chapter), which was selected by the author precisely because it is the scenario of peasant resistance struggles.

The author rebuilds, in chapter four, the peasant movements structured since the times of the structural adjustment, such as Alianza Campesina del Noroeste, Unión para el Progreso de los Campesinos de La Laguna de Bustillos, the Movimiento Democrático Campesino and Frente Democrático Campesino. Naturally this is a historical reconstruction made on the basis of the study of other researchers who followed closely these resistance movements. However, Penagos’ contribution are the oral testimonies of members of the Tienda Cooperativa de Mujeres Unidas in Temósachi and of the Organización de Productores Unidos de Cologachi, both located in the sphere of consumerism and commercialization. She does not hide that she expected to find a stronger social response. There was none. The testimonies indicated other responses, which began with the loss of the state tutelage and developments where the nearby regions restructured the labor markets, including the maquiladora established in Madera, Matachi and Gómez Farías; changes in productive patterns; day laboring in the municipality of Guerrero and in the United States. They had entered a phase of marked survival, that sort of implicit social Darwinism that took place coupled with restructuring (this idea is not mine, but rather of one of the ejidatarios in the study, who speak of the “first natural selection” of survivors of the disaster, p. 186).

The last chapter, where she addresses specifically these two organizations in Temósachi and Gómez Farías, is generous in quite blunt testimonies from the peasants who experienced the days of tutelage boom without foreseeing the fall. One of them states it rather clearly: “We ourselves are to blame (…) We did get organized, but slowly we were thrown into disarray” (p. 175). Someone else points out: “I believe we lacked vision because we are still insisting in why there was no support for the field; if we had understood, I think that maybe we would have withdrawn into the communities in rural production societies, I don’t know, small groups, even if later there could be coordination between them” (p.184).

Through this testimonial path, Penagos makes her own observations, also necessary because they influenced her field work. What she perceived as even more worrying is not the alleged absence of community - an issue that still preoccupies many scholars in Chihuahua - but rather “a generalized panorama of discouragement among the population” (p.194). This Hobbesian sentiment makes it difficult to present organized responses, not to speak of cooperation. The author does not delve into this phenomenon that Richard Sennett called the “psychology of isolation”, simultaneous to the weakening of cooperation. She frankly believes that it is not foreign to the War on Drugs, with bloody violent balances throughout the state of Chihuahua, albeit it is something deeper, “not only because of the current violence in the region but because of the rupture in social trust and establishment of social relationships linked to activities outside the law” (p. 194). And she adds, almost at the end: “With government supports gone, they didn’t know how to act or how to reestablish their ‘associative links’; thus, with the massive arrival of the migratory influx and the establishment of violence, the scarce links disappeared definitely” (p. 196).

Up to this point the order of the book and its central argumentation. There are other contributions that would deserve greater attention, such as the breakdown of the Randolph Hearst’s large estate (Orson Wells’ Citizen Kane), the indigenous communities guarded by the Colonial Jesuit estate, the surge of the ranching society, the neighborhoods as an alternative form of land ownership, in addition to the ejidos, etc. Because of space, I will resort to widely recommending the reading of this book.