Candelaria & Salt Cedar

Candelaria
 
Candelaria (USA) is a village of about one hundred inhabitants, including almost sixty children, located where the road stops in the Chihuahuan Desert. It's situated across the Rio Grande from San Antonio del Bravo in Mexico, but there's no direct transport link between the two villages.
In the 1990's, the American government closed down the school in Candelaria, officially for financial reasons. On the Mexican side, there's no school or school bus, as the dirt road linking the village to the only town in the area, Ojinaga, is very bad. The only possibility for the children to receive an education in Mexico would be for them to move to a town in the region, but most of the families have land in San Antonio del Bravo and don't want to leave their village. So the children have to travel three and a half hours every day by bus to attend the school in Presidio (USA), another frontier town. Most of the menfolk live in San Antonio del Bravo. At weekends, the residents leave Candelaria to join their families on the Mexican side.
In the 1990's, the inhabitants clubbed together to construct a footbridge, creating a permanent link between the two villages. Passing from one country to the other was still illegal, but it was tolerated by the US government until 2008, when the bridge was destroyed by the authorities. Inhabitants wishing to cross the frontier legally then had a five-hour drive to reach a village two kilometres away as the crow flies.
 
Salt cedar
 
The salt cedar, a kind of tamarisk (a species of tree from North Africa) was introduced by the American authorities in 1920 in order to reduce erosion in the Rio Grande valley, which posed problems for the US government. Given that the river delineates the boundary, the constantly-shifting river bed of the Rio Grande also meant that the frontier kept changing. The salt cedars were intended to stabilize the river bed and so establish a clearly-defined boundary. After their introduction, the authorities noticed that the trees were enormous water consumers and a highly invasive variety. This tree species secretes salt into the ground, hence its name. It was discovered that this characteristic inhibits all other sorts of trees or plants from growing in proximity to a salt cedar. The region gradually dried out and the salt cedar soon became the only variety of tree left in the valley.
In 2010, the American government tried to eradicate the salt cedars by introducing a species of beetle from Tunisia. The trees do appear to have died since the arrival of the insects, but the latter have also wiped out another sort of tamarisk, a tall, evergreen variety, not invasive or destructive like the salt cedar, which was planted to provide shade near houses and ranches. These trees were much appreciated in this desert region and their disappearance is problematic for the valley's inhabitants. The other negative consequence of the introduction of the beetles is the creation of a forest of dead trees that often catches fire in the spring (sometimes five times a month).
The cause of these fires is still a mystery. According to the region's American inhabitants, they are accidentally started by local farmers on the Mexican side, where there are no regulations. However, some Candelaria residents think that the fires might be deliberately lit by American border patrols to prevent Mexicans from hiding in this dead forest. It's rare that the firefighters come to extinguish these frequent fires as Candelaria is too isolated. And so the valley is known as "the forgotten valley".

> Conversation avec Pascal Beausse (en français)
> information on the exhibition (pdf)