For us, Mexico has been an unending adventure into the lives of many beautiful people that often provide many of the pieces missing in contemporary American life. The rural countryside, with its small towns, ranches and farms, is no exception. Some of our most memorable moments have been spent on the Rio Sonora, just south of Cananea. Traveling through its small towns, with their pristine plazas, historic missions and cowboys on horseback, one is transported into the past.

We have learned a great deal by observing how people live in that landscape, from their rich use of native plants and food, to ingenious ways of cultivating crops without ruining the natural riparian environment. Their subsistence-based agriculture gives meaning to the phrase “living locally.”

Some of the people we respect most come from that part of the world. They are not subject to the kind of modernized poverty that comes from over-dependence on the commercial market place. They depend more upon the free solar economy than the one driven by fossil fuels. One of these people is Socorro Madero who lives, along with his wife, in a tiny adobe house near the town of Chinapa. His life revolves around two plots of cultivated land, one that is irrigated and the other fed by floodwaters that may or may not fill the arroyo adjacent to his field. This second field, the “temporal,” is dependent upon the summer monsoon rains. Socorro has constructed, what you might call, a very sophisticated but complex set of weirs made of branches and brush that diverts the tumbling, rushing water from the arroyo, slows it down and carries it gently to his field. When the rains aren’t heavy enough to bring the flood waters, there is no harvest, but he has factored these inevitable dry years into his farming cycles.

One would guess Socorro to be somewhere around 70 years old and showing no signs of slowing down. He rides his horse to work, about a two-mile stretch between his house and the temporal, the place where his floodwater field is located and his small herd of cattle resides. “I don’t have any money, but I’m rich,” he says. We feel the same when we are with him and his wife. They roast their coffee in the traditional Sonoran country style, glazed with sugar. There is no better compliment to one of their meals of beans he has grown than salsa from his chiles, paper-thin flour tortillas and the white crumbly “queso ranchero” he has made from the milk of his cows. In the fall, his wife makes an exquisite salsa from chiltepines, the local wild chile, and membrillo (quince) that grow abundantly in the region. Socorro doesn’t drink, but if he did, he would have bottles of Sonora’s famous mescal, Bacanora. He has only gone beyond a 15-mile radius of his house twice: once to the hospital, the second to Hermosillo which he described as a very bad day.

The beauty of his life is in its diversity and the seasonal pattern that it follows. There is no one term in English that describes the kind of life he leads. He is part farmer, part cowboy, part dairy man and builder. The same is true for many others who live a similar lifestyle.