A Gringa in Mexico

A couple weeks ago after work in the evening Claudia came with me to walk through the “mercadito” (little market) in the main street outside the office. In mercaditos people set up little tents and sell merchandise, clothes, toys, trinkets, fruit, etc. They’re quite common here in Mexico, and I like it! Also, SO many people sell food out of their houses, in little stands on the street, or out of cars driving down the street. I love it! You’re never lacking for a snack or dinner, and there’s even a couple people who drive down the streets selling bread and pastries (like an ice cream truck does, complete with music). And they have ice cream trucks too, which I swear are playing a slightly faster-paced Jingle Bells…I wish the US had more street food vendors. At least in Athens (GA) there are hardly any…At the mercadito I bought a bright pink drink that had fresh strawberries and watermelon in the jug. It was eerily pink but it looked yummy because of the fresh fruit in it, but it ended up tasting like bubble gum. Definitely some artificial stuff in there!

 The eerily pink drink that I bought in the

mercadito and that tasted like bubble gum...

When I got home I walked to the supermarket (about an 8-minute walk from my house). There was a cute little store outside it with women’s clothes so I tried some stuff on. It’s hilarious because in Mexico many clothing stores (at least the “cheaper” ones on the street) have “one size fits all” clothing. You either squeeze yourself into the item (which is 90% of the time made with LOTS AND LOTS of Spandex) and like the way you look, or you don’t like the way you look/can’t squeeze into it. There’s not much in between. It sure simplifies the process of clothes shopping! In the supermarket there were a TON of people.

A Whole New Meaning to "Salada" Kristen

One more field expedition under my belt! Claudia, Isra, Ana, and I headed back to Rayones for two days this week to do their (ESHAC’s) community development project with the women in the community and my bat/agave work and first focus group session with the folks who harvest/use agaves.

We got a slightly later start than anticipated since Josefo’s and Claudia’s Chihuahua, Maggie, had her puppies that morning (my first time seeing such tiny pups!). Once we left the office we headed to a garden supply place for the remaining materials for Claudia and Isra’s organic gardening workshop in Rayones. Unfortunately the rain also arrived at the place about the same time we did, and since we were using the truck with an open cab we had to scramble to cover everything with a tarp, and in the process got SOAKED. At least it was a warm day…We also had to make makeshift windows for both the driver and passenger windows, since neither one rolls up. With the truck loaded to the brim and contact paper windows, we headed out into more rain on our couple hour journey to Rayones in the mountains. Speaking of traveling, I have noticed on our trips so far that my travel companions very rarely drink water. I’m constantly guzzling water to stay hydrated (and feel crappy if I don’t) but they seem to not need to drink a lot. I just don’t understand how!

Finally Settling In

I finally feel like I’m getting into the groove, after five weeks here. I did my fourth community leader interview yesterday in another community, and it went really well. I’m learning SO much about the communities and their uses of agaves, their harvesting, etc., and it’s FASCINATING. At a very preliminary run-through of my interviews so far, it seems like the following things seem to be coming into play within some or all of the communities:

• Migration (mostly of younger people) out of the communities to look for work elsewhere;
• Tourism in some communities and the selling of land/homes to city-dwellers who come to the mountains to buy/use a second "vacation" home;
• The key role that the government seems to play in providing resources for programs/projects in the communities, including some agave planting programs for erosion control;
• The importance of other livelihood activities (like livestock or corn, beans, apples, etc.) and the implications this has for the continuation (or not) of agave use;
• The fact that even if the harvesting of agaves for products is decreasing, the desire to plant agaves for erosion control seems to be a common theme among communities

I sometimes catch myself getting so interested in the intricacies of agave use and harvest in these communities that I temporarily “forget” about my overall goal of tying this all into bat conservation somehow. My ultimate goal is for my work to have relevance for conservation efforts for the endangered Mexican long-nosed bat (and other bats that pollinate agaves), and I need to sit down and think through how all my community work relates back to the bats and benefiting them...

Cocky the Cockroach (and Junior, and The Third)

Now for a little change of pace from my previous few blog posts…I have an unwanted visitor (or three or four) to my house in Monterrey. I first encountered this visitor when I was in my kitchen, and I turned and saw a GIANT cockroach sitting on the window curtain. He was the biggest cockroach I have ever seen, at least 3 ½ inches long, with antennae about four inches long. I reacted quickly and was able to push him back through the window (most of which don’t have screens) and shut the glass pane quickly. Phew!

But then a few days later I was sitting in my living room and saw a dark shape moving in the middle of my kitchen floor. I went over and it was the giant cockroach again, this time flipped over on his back trying to right himself and scurry away. He REALLY creeped me out. I can deal with spiders, bees, wasps, snakes, mice, whatever, but for some reason the big cockroaches just creep me out. The weird thing is that I think they are kind of cute, and I know they can’t do any harm to you. I just can’t get over their size and how they are able to fly, but really erratically, and run really fast. Despite my horror at this giant cockroach being in my house (mere meters from my bedroom!) I just couldn’t bring myself to squash him. I’m usually not one to kill things in my house, although I have gotten desensitized to killing the smaller cockroaches that are very numerous in my house here (and when at home in the US I’m fine with others killing the bigger cockroaches, as long as I don’t have to see it). However, with Cocky (as Tom later called him) I think his bigger size prevented me from squashing him. I think it’s partially a squeamish thing (that would be a lot of guts to clean up!) but also somehow the bigger the thing is the more “sentient” it appears to me. Completely irrational, I know, but I just couldn’t kill him. Which left me with one choice: catch him and release him outside.

First Bat!

I just got back yesterday from another 2-day excursion into the field, this time to the north to Ejido Estanque de Norias, about a 2-and-a-half-hour drive from Monterrey (about 2 hours on the highway and another half hour or so on dirt roads to the community). This ejido is near Rosillo Cave (a suspected maternity cave for Mexican long-nosed bats), and I was there to do an interview with the comisariado (leader) and set up my infrared cameras to monitor agaves for bat feeding at night. Despite a HOT drive (in the upper 90s, with no AC in the truck) and the crazy driving here in Mexico, we arrived in one piece and met with the comisariado in the ejido’s “town hall” for our interview. This was my third leader interview, and overall it went well. I’m learning the ropes a bit more with this whole interviewing thing, although there was definitely room for improvement. I did feel like I did a better job of “tailoring” my questions to better follow up on things that he said, which in my previous two interviews I didn’t do very well (probably because I still wasn’t very familiar with the ordering of my questions or comfortable with “probing” more). However, I still need to get better at asking for clarifications. There were a couple times during this interview when I didn’t quite understand what he meant, and even after hearing the translation I was still confused or wanted more information, but didn’t ask for clarification. I think I was nervous about somehow offending him by seeming like his answers weren’t “good” answers, but I know in the future that’s something I need to work on.

Ecologist Goes to Washington Podcast Interview and Blog!

You may recall from one of my earlier blog posts (“PlayingCatchup”) that I went to D.C. for a few days in April to participate in the Biological and Ecological Sciences Coalition Congressional Visit Day to talk with members of Congress about the importance of federal funding for science. Well, after the awesome experience I wrote a blog post for the Ecological Society of America Blog, and I was also interviewed for the Ecologist Goes to Washington podcast that ESA hosts.

Here are the links if you're interested!

ESA Blog, "'Putting a face' on science funding, Lear reflects on congressional visits experience:

http://www.esa.org/esablog/research/putting-a-face-on-science-funding-lear-reflects-on-congressional-visits-experience

Ecologist Goes to Washington podcast interview: 

http://www.esa.org/egwash/putting-a-face-on-science-funding-lear-reflects-on-congressional-visits-experience

(To listen, scroll down below the photos of the other folks and below all the sharing icons, and you’ll see a little Audio MP3 button to click on.)

First Bat Monitoring: A Tale of Frozen Batteries and Beautiful Scenery

First infrared bat monitoring and agave survey: done! Earlier this week I traveled with Claudia, Temo, Gehu, and Isra to Tepozanes and El Refugio, two ejidos in southern Nuevo Leon about six hours south of Monterrey. This year ESHAC is doing a community-based project to develop community and individual organic gardens for produce and other useful plants in several communities in Nuevo Leon and Coahuila, and I am going along on most of their trips to do my own work with the communities (doing group discussions and individual interviews (household surveys) about agave uses and harvest) and with the bats and agaves (doing infrared camera monitoring of flowering agaves to measure bat foraging and doing agave surveys). 

While Tepozanes and El Refugio are not near current known roosting caves of Mexican long-nosed bats and are therefore not my “top” priority sites for my research, these locations are still worthwhile to visit and do my work, for several reasons. First, there are caves and mines in the area and historical records from the 1960s and later of Mexican long-nosed bats in these caves/mines. Second, these communities are in the southern part of the mountain range that Mexican long-nosed bats likely migrate through on their way to the known roosting caves farther north, and therefore working with communities in these areas (that have many agaves) to investigate the potential for “bat-friendly” management is worthwhile to pursue. Third, there is another species of bat that feeds on agaves (the Mexican long-tongued bat, Choeronycteris mexicana) that is found in the area and is listed as Threatened by the Mexican federal government and Near Threatened by the IUCN, so any conservation work for my target species (the endangered Mexican long-nosed bat) in this area will benefit this species too. Finally, given the limitations of my current funding and the logistics of traveling here (aka needing a field vehicle and needing to go with others and not by myself), at least for this year it is necessary for me to coordinate/coincide trips with ESHAC’s trips, and Tepozanes/El Refugio is one of their project sites this year.

Into the Realm of Social Science I Go!

Well, I’ve officially taken the plunge into doing social science field research! A few days ago I completed my first two key informant interviews with two ‘comisariados’ (leaders) of two of the ejidos I’m working with for my project. And man has it been a tough learning experience! I feel like none of the classes I have taken on social science methods/field work, no matter how much we talked about doing interviews, etc., has fully prepared me for all of this. The one thing that my classes definitely prepared me for was the feeling of exhaustion that I felt after doing my first interview, and the feeling that I simultaneously completely failed and learned a lot.

During the first interview I decided to try to ask the questions in Spanish (I had written them out in both English and Spanish) but I was really nervous and I ended up fumbling a lot with easy words and getting flustered overall. The interview got started off with some basic questions (“How long have you been the leader of the community”, “How many people live in the community?”, etc.) but then I asked a question about community wealth “criteria” and how people in the community can tell if someone is wealthy, which kind of caused some confusion. After that I felt even less like I knew what I was doing and continued to fumble along to the end of the interview.

The Balancing Act (aka Struggles of an Interdisciplinary PhD)

I’ve been working on my methodology for the social component of my research (which is, in a nutshell, working in local communities to understand their harvest of agaves and how bat conservation efforts could potentially be incorporated) and I feel like I don’t know what the heck I’m doing. I’ve taken several classes in anthropology and geography on qualitative methods (e.g. interviewing, focus groups, questionnaire surveys, etc.) but I feel that all my in-class training hasn’t truly prepared me for the real world. For example, I’ll be writing something about a method I’m proposing to use, like interviews, and realize I don’t really understand why I’m proposing to use that method or why I’m proposing to ask a certain question. Or I get to a point where I feel like I have an idea of what’s going on in my own mind, and then I get sidetracked with more information and more possibilities of methods to use or questions to ask. I’m finding it hard to keep myself narrowed down, I think because I don’t truly understand how “much” I’m supposed to be doing for a dissertation, how much is too much or not enough, etc. It all seems so interconnected and everything seems important to know and ask about!

I’m also struggling with the tug-of-war between “theory” and “real-world application”. I feel that my research and my interests are much more applied (I want to understand community management and harvest of agaves not so much to inform anthropological theory but to understand how bat conservation efforts could be incorporated), but since I’m doing a PhD my research also must be based in theory. I’m having a hard time balancing these two different components of my research, and understanding how to integrate the two in a way that will pass for a PhD will still having application to conservation efforts in the real world.