(staff photos by JOHN DANIEL GARCIA)
The Ojinaga master adobe maker Don Manuel Rodriguez, left, his son Victor, far right, with Marfa adobe make Sandro Canovas.
By JOHN DANIEL GARCIA
johndaniel@bigbendnow.com
OJINAGA – In the eastern outskirts of Ojinaga, along a dirt road nestled between the old railroad tracks and a creek that spills into the Rio Grande, is the colonia La Estacion, home to three of the last mud brick craftsmen, the adoberos of Ojinaga.
Among them is third-generation adobero Victor Rodriguez, son of master adobero Don Manuel Rodriguez.
Victor lives in a small adobe house, measuring around 20 feet by 20 feet, he built himself. In the house is a bare bed, a wheel chair, and an electric oven, all resting on the building’s dirt floor.
“When I’m sick, this house feels like a jail,” he said of his house. “In the summer, it gets uncomfortably hot, and in the winter I freeze.”
Victor has been homebound for the past year after losing his toes in an amputation due to diabetes. The wound is infected, he said, taking off the shoes given to him by Marfa resident Vicente Celis, but he can’t afford the medical care he needs despite working along the carved-out hill, where he’s made adobes with his father and brother for 30 years.
“I love the work,” he said emphatically before shifting his gaze from the screens and adobe molds outside to the dirt floor of his home. “It makes me sad and angry that I can’t work like I used to.”
He hasn’t been able to work, he said, for almost a year, though still assists his father in mixing the mud for the adobe, using yard tools while sitting on a chair.
In his time making adobes, Victor worked for both his father and another Ojinaga adobero, Don Daniel Camacho, who lives on the other side of a hill from the Rodriguez clan.
Victor had a daily quota of making 250 adobes, earning 100 pesos – or around $6.25 in the current exchange rate – per day.
Each adobe, he added, is sold for between 6 and 10 pesos each, depending on size, though demand for adobes is currently low.
“We don’t have any orders right now, but we made around 500 adobes for Marfa [used for Los Angeles artist Rafa Esparza’s Ballroom Marfa exhibit] and 8,000 for El Povo,” he said, adding that, of the 8,000 pieces for the El Polvo order, only 2,900 were ultimately purchased.
Esparza, however, paid the adobe makers $1 per brick.
Don Manuel Rodriguez, a septuagenarian, still toils in the heat to make adobe. He began his career in the field when Victor, who turned 50 on September 2, was 6 years old.
“I’m still doing it, and I’ll keep working until all the riverbeds are gone,” the elder Rodriguez said.
The labor, however difficult, Don Manuel said, is one of passion.
“If you don’t have love for the work, you won’t learn,” he said. “But in other jobs, you just want to get out of there. Here you don’t. It’s the only job I can have, even though sometimes we don’t even make enough money to get tacos.”
Tools of the trade: the Rodriguez family adobe-making yard in Ojinaga.
The amount of labor it takes to make the adobes, he added, is often lost on customers and undervalued.
“People think that it doesn’t take work. They think that just because it’s dirt, they can just take it,” he explained.
The lack of orders, Don Manuel said, doesn’t stop the adoberos from their craft.
“There are times where there’s no work, but we always put in our hours,” he said.
The price of adobe, however, has been fixed, with U.S. construction contractors taking the adobes purchased for around twenty-five U.S. cents back to their cities and resold for around $2.50 a piece.
For Marfa resident Sandro Canovas – an advocate of sustainable earth building – the cost and resale at a higher price is exploitative of the Mexicans’ labor.
“I’ve known builders and contractors in Marfa that come to Don Manuel to buy his adobes and sell them for much more than they paid for it. I know they’ve bought adobes after Victor lost his toes and did nothing to help. They never even brought Don Manuel a torta, and they profit off of his work,” he said. “It’s just not ethical.”
Canovas is also in the process of garnering support for a community project in Ojinaga aimed at educating the populace of the environmental perks involved in earth building as well as give an appreciation for the labor it takes to make adobe.
The adobero has chosen a site in Ojinaga at a small colonia known as La Treinte-seis, where the residents, comprised of about 35 families, erect patch-work homes made of tin sheet metal and repurposed wood.
The families in the neighborhood, said colonia resident Manuel (no last name given), work to purchase enough concrete cinderblocks to build more permanent structures.
The land on which the homes are built, he added, are obtained through adverse possession, where the families squat on the land and build upon it to earn the property rights.
Makeshift homes cobbled together with discarded wood and sheet metal line the streets of an east Ojinaga colonia known as La Treinta y Seis
“These types of houses are like ovens in the summer and freezers in the winter,” Canovas said of the makeshift homes. “And the concrete blocks aren’t good. With adobe, one of the things people have to realize, is that it stays cool in the summer and warm in the winter.”
The environmental impact, he added, is also minimal in construction of adobe homes, as there are no petroleum products used in the making of the bricks, unlike concrete structures.
If the home is abandoned, he added, the adobe will eventually become part of the earth once again.
Another issue regarding adobe, Canovas said, is the rising taxable value on adobe homes in Presidio County.
The valuations have been rising yearly by over 100 percent, leading to some of the poorer residents struggling to pay the taxes.
“It has gotten to the point where some of the poor homeowners are forced to sell their houses because they simply can’t afford the taxes,” he said. “The wealthier ones don’t think about it. They see the taxes go up and just pay it. It’s a gentrification issue that we need to solve.”
Younger generations, Canovas said, are less likely to make adobe due to the economics behind the work, falling demand, and what he called “cultural amnesia”.
He hopes, however, the craft will live on.
“Having these people like Don Manuel still making adobe, it’s nothing short of a miracle,” he said. “To build with adobe, it’s not a hippy thing. It’s futuristic. It’s one of the first things that helped shape our culture out here. Adobe is one of the first things people used to build their casitas with.”
Sandro Canovas assisted Big Bend Sentinel/Presidio International reporter John Daniel Garcia with translating interviews.
By SARAH M. VASQUEZ
