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Outside Magazine, August 2004

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El Último Vaquero Habla Español (The Last Cowboy Speaks Spanish)

By Nick Reding


	RANCH HANDS: FROM LEFT TO RIGHT, FAULKNER; GAUCHO JORGE SILVA; NICANOR AND GABRIEL (Joshua Paul)

THAT A GAUCHO WOULD TRAVEL all the way to Idaho in pursuit of the cowboy myth is ironic, given that the number of people we think of as real cowboys in the U.S.—people who spend long periods on horseback working with herds—has dwindled to almost nothing, thanks to the brutal economics of ranching and what can only be described as loss of habitat: the fencing of the range.

On many ranches, trucks have replaced cattle drives, roads have replaced trails, and four-wheelers have replaced horses. While there's still a need to break horses and drive cattle across the West's biggest ranches, there's really only one job that requires spending months at a time following stock on horseback: sheepherding on millions of acres of leased federal land.

The fact that South Americans now do the work is part of a larger phenomenon, the Latinization of the American West. In towns like Gooding, Idaho, and Ely, Nevada, Latinos—predominantly Mexicans, here both legally and illegally—have taken low-paying jobs in construction, road building, restaurants, and ski resorts. Those hidden deepest from view are people like René and Nicanor, the gaucho and the city kid, riding the range like Americans did a hundred years ago. Or like Latinos did 250 years ago: The word cowboy, after all, is a translation of vaquero; the western saddle is actually a Mexican saddle; and much of the West once belonged to Mexico. Five hundred years after the conquistadores, history has come full circle. The last cowboys speak Spanish.

The U.S. Department of Labor describes the situation less mythically. In its lexicon, René and Nicanor are not horsemen at all; they are "nonimmigrant guest workers," as designated by a portion of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act known as H-2A. Under H-2A, American farmers and ranchers offer contracts every year to some 45,000 workers, mostly Mexicans, the bulk of whom pick produce from California to Florida. Around 1,200 of them, however, come to herd sheep in 13 western states, from Oregon to South Dakota. Almost all are from Peru, Chile, and Mexico—though in Gooding, I met one Mongolian H-2A herder.



	FROM LEFT TO RIGHT, GOODING SHEEP; NICANOR TAKES A SWIG, RANCH DOG (Joshua Paul)

Since 1955, the H-2A program has given two companies—Western Range and the Mountain Plains Agricultural Service, an outfit based in Casper, Wyoming—wide leeway to act as middlemen between ranchers and the Department of Labor. And since it imports the vast majority of herders, Western Range has been the target of criticism from labor advocates who find the entire arrangement abusive and unfair.

"H-2A is the last American frontier of exploitation," says Bruce Goldstein, co–executive director of the Farmworker Justice Fund, a nonprofit advocacy group in Washington, D.C. There is, he alleges, essentially no public control over this system: The companies, not the government, administer the workforce. This dearth of oversight, activists argue, has led to several well-documented cases of abuse. One family outfit near Craig, Colorado—John Peroulis & Sons Sheep Inc.—was investigated by the Department of Labor six times between 1993 and 2000. The most recent investigation involved the beating of a Peruvian herder named Remigio Damián, who was hospitalized after wandering for four days with head and neck injuries. Eight Peroulis employees deposed in U.S. District Court in Denver recounted a slew of alleged abuses. Although the Peroulis family has paid fines and back pay in the past, and in 2001 agreed to a civil settlement of the Damián case with the Department of Labor, they have repeatedly denied mistreating foreign workers.



	RANCH HANDS: FROM LEFT TO RIGHT, INSIDE THE FAULKNER BUNK HOUSE, RENÉ RIDES; GABRIEL (Joshua Paul)

Sheepherders are basically powerless in such situations—if they quit, they can be deported—and the pay's not much, either. In 1999, René was making $700 a month, the equivalent, based on a 40-hour week, of $4.37 an hour for a job defined by the government as "being on call to protect flocks from predators 24 hours a day, 7 days a week." Considering that he was on duty around the clock, René's hourly wage was more like $1.50.

With the harsh conditions and pay scale, it's not surprising that, every year, 5 to 10 percent of H-2A contractees "irse mojado"—"go wet." René realized almost imme- diately after arriving in Idaho that he could make money faster as a dishwasher or a carpenter, even if it put him outside the law. He also learned that there's one legal way to void a contract without the Immigration and Naturalization Service looking for you: marrying a U.S. citizen.

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