From the north-facing portal of the Cathedral at Guadalupe, Mexico, I stood in the footsteps of the Jesuits and Franciscans, who 400 years before looked out to extend their reach across the vast Chihuahuan Desert to Nuevo Mexico. As a citizen of New Mexico, the irony of "civilizing" forces reaching northward wasn't lost on me.

Our view south no doubt possesses the certainty and hubris of the friars of old. Like them, we increasingly see our destiny taking us across the Chihuahuan Desert region to create a greater union. This time we cross political borders and barriers never thought of 400 years earlier.

TheCamino Real, or Royal Road, once the lifeline from Mexican civilization to New Mexico, could be born again as the symbol of a new unification for the region. Since coming to NMSU five years ago, my duties included building bridges with our colleagues to the south in a region that was very much part of my personal life as a Mexican-American with Spanish, Dutch, and Native American roots.

On this warm June day, I led a trio of modern-day Camino Real explorers from NMSU's College of Agriculture, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. Well supplied with pens, paper, and camera equipment, our group also included Terry Canup, agricultural communications department head; and Victor Espinoza, the department's photographer.

We met Francisco Valerio, a political science professor and student of local history from the University of Zacatecas, who guided us through the historical riches of the monastery adorned with 300-year-old paintings depicting the life of St. Francis of Assisi. While this was the religious heart of the Camino Real's southern terminus, the nearby silver mines of Zacatecas comprised the economic engine that pumped riches throughout the Spanish empire on four continents.

Francisco told of a Chinese professor he encountered, who knew of Zacatecas from the minting mark on an ancient Spanish coin he owned. Don Juan de Oñate, the father of New Mexico's colonization, was a child of Zacatecas.

Oñate's father Cristobal, a Basque by birth, was named the first regional governor of this northern frontier in the 1540s, having already founded the city of Guadalajara. Asked where we might find a monument to the Oñates, a blank and then quizzical look crossed Francisco's face. Conquistadors are not heroes in Mexico, he explained. Any monuments to them probably have long ago been toppled by the people.

That was a curious image considering the imposing monument to Don Juan de Oñate astride his horse at the Camino Real's northern terminus in Española, New Mexico. There, it is a symbol of Hispanic culture and pride. Another mounted figure in bronze did ride above Zacatecas atop the 8,000-foot peak called El Cerro de la Bufa, Basque for pig's bladder. The raised hooves of the horse indicated--by the standard code of war monuments--that the rider, Pancho Villa, had died in battle.

Villa was a hero to the people for his Chihuahuan Desert campaign in the Mexican Revolution. As a youngster, I was given a storied view of that campaign from inside the Villa camp, where my grandfather and his brother-in-law fought, though they hailed from California.

At my great-uncle's house in California, I remember sitting in silence outside the circle of men recounting stories of the Revolution until 5 a.m. They told their stories santo y sena, or in infinite detail, as they not only told the beginning and end, but painted an intricate picture of the events of that time.

Even my name, it turned out, was a product of the Revolution, as my grandfather changed his name from Trujillo to Gonzalez to avoid reach of the Federales, when he crossed the border back to the United States. I will probably never understand the pull of the Revolution to grandfather, except that he believed it was a just cause. I find myself equally comfortable with Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who still identify with that history and those who tend to identify themselves as products of another time and place.

My grandfather seemed a soldier until the day he died in 1958, always carrying his sidearm to handle any problems of the day.

Without understanding the Revolution, the forces that led to it, and how vested the power structure is in its legacy, it is hard to understand the outlook of most Mexicans. As we look down from La Bufa, however, we see the legacy of Baroque Europe. The city could well have been lifted from Old Spain with intricately carved cathedral spires punctuating the skyline every few blocks, a testimony to the tremendous presence of the church and its many orders bent on converting the New World inhabitants.

From this vantage point, we could see numerous mines still producing silver. An old hacienda south of the city houses a silver smithy. The road south to Mexico City was known as Camino de la Plata, the Silver Road. That route gave early traders a means to provide food, supplies, and other commodities to the mining areas. Ranching became the second most important industry in the region, and the first cattle growers' association was established in Mexico City in 1537. Large quantities of grain, mostly wheat and corn, came out of rich, fertile valleys near Queretaro and Guadalajara. Roads from the western area of Michoacan, another important agricultural center, helped provide much needed food supplies to the region.

Zacatecas was not always so naked of trees. As a local professor told me, "I'm not sure which disappeared most rapidly, the Indians or the timber. Both were critical to the development of mining throughout Mexico, and we nearly did away with both completely."

From the mountain, we could see the hacienda of the conquerors Cristobal and Don Juan de Oñate. Unlike how we surround our homes with yards, colonial Spanish architects surrounded their yards with their houses. An inconspicuous nameplate on the outside wall is the only reminder that conquistadors once lived here.

Certainly grand in size, the hacienda once stood on the outskirts of the city, but now is just one of a host of 16th and 17th century structures lining the narrow cobblestone streets of the central city--a place of Old World charm that is still best enjoyed on foot. Strolling Zacatecans fill the streets on summer nights until 10 p.m. or later. Today, government offices fill the conquistadors' hacienda. Day-to-day business is matter-of-factly carried on within the walls of structures that would be hallowed historical treasures north of the border.

Such was the case for Antonio Valenzuela, dean of academic affairs at the University of Zacatecas, whose office is off the patio of one of the many old buildings the university occupies in the central city. One of my American companions comments on the style of meetings in Mexico. They are initially formal with each major player completing his thoughts at length without interruption. My message was a desire for our College of Agriculture and Home Economics to develop a strong working relationship with the university. Since 1992, the College has revisited its relationships with institutions in Mexico. The opening of the Mexican economy in the 1980s and the NAFTA treaty fed a fever of excitement about Mexico among private businesses and public institutions north of the border. A new emphasis on relationships to the south would spawn opportunity in the College, we reasoned. New agreements for joint research and student and faculty exchanges were signed with the Autonomous Universities of Chihuahua, Zacatecas, and Sinaloa; and the post-graduate college with branches in Chapingo, Puebla, and Salinas.

Some of the institutions across the Chihuahuan Desert joined us in support of the Consortium of Arid and Semiarid Research Universities, and they offered support for the construction of NMSU's Center for Sustainable Development of Arid Lands. The project's Spanish acronym is CEDESZA.

While the fever cooled north of the border when the peso devaluated in 1994, I was determined to stay the path on these relationships. Today, I invited Antonio to send faculty to NMSU to complete graduate work.

We were hardly alone in seeking such relationships, it turned out, as major institutions in Spain, England, and other countries had trained Zacatecas faculty. Antonio's response was overshadowed by the recent peso devaluation, which made sending faculty to the U.S. almost impossible, he explained. Government support for faculty training would likely concentrate on what could be done at home.

The peso devaluation and the accompanying recession was ever-present in conversation. Four hundred years ago, those seeking riches, social standing, and a new way of life traveled the Camino Real out of Zacatecas to the fabled cities of gold to the north. Today, Jorge Bernal, graduate dean at the University of Zacatecas, tells us that people stream out of Zacatecas to the U.S. labor market, like no other place in Mexico. Jesus Delgado, an out-of-work electrician and cousin to our photographer Victor, confirmed that the road to Los Angeles is well-worn by Zacatecans who have no options but to leave their lovely city to find work.

It was my turn to ride the Camino, which I would do by air-conditioned coach, complete with videotaped Hollywood features for my entertainment. I mused about what it must have been like for Don Juan de Oñate to leave this place on Jan. 26, 1598. His entourage included more than 500 soldiers and settlers, a few friars, 83 carros or carts drawn by oxen, and more than 7,000 head of livestock. All were readying for a 1,000-mile journey. Six months later, the two-mile long column would reach Española, New Mexico.

The Chihuahuan Desert

The coach would take me through Nueva Viscaya, as it was known to the colonists, the vast Chihuahuan Desert region between Zacatecas and the Rio Grande. It was down this road that settlers would establish the agricultural traditions of the entire region. We started on a four-lane highway, but soon changed to an old-fashioned, two-lane road that took us through small farming and ranching communities. Famous mining towns would be found on a parallel route that went through the mountain towns of Sombrerete, Durango, Santa Barbara, and Hidalgo de Parral.

We instead went through endless miles of desert like that of the Jornada del Muerto, or March of the Dead, between Las Cruces and Socorro, New Mexico. The region was sharing New Mexico's woes of drought. A startling amount of the land in the basin north of Zacatecas was plowed. Irrigated lands were thriving, but dryland crop fields were barren.

As I watched cattle grazing on cactus by the road, I was reminded of the common bond between Nueva Viscaya and Nuevo Mexico. I remember, as a boy growing up along the border in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, my dad and uncles talking about the Chihuahuan lands north and south of the Rio Grande as one. My dad and uncles were born in New Mexico and grew up working on ranches and farms in Chihuahua, New Mexico, Arizona, and California in the 1920s and 1930s. My mother was born in the Coachella Valley of California and spent her teenage years in Delicias, Chihuahua, where my coach ride would end this day.

It wasn't surprising that my first adult job was trading cattle on and across the U.S.-Mexican border. Later, I managed several spice farms in Mexico and marketed the yields in the U.S. It turned out to be tremendous good fortune to be raised in a region where it was normal to be bilingual and bicultural, as I pursued a career in academia. Soon, I managed American educational programs in Latin America and became a bridge between academics from both cultures.

The terrain on this trip was tremendously familiar to a New Mexican. Dusty old towns gave way to the green of irrigation at the Rio Navas, where Don Juan de Oñate had his moment of truth by rallying, with a rousing speech, restless soldiers awaiting final permission from the viceroy to venture into New Mexico.

Further north, as we entered the State of Chihuahua, a Western flavor was on the streets with posters advertising bullriding competitions. Cowboy traditions were born on the northern frontier of New Spain where the most skilled and sophisticated horsemen in Europe, the Spaniards, made their mark on the West as vaqueros.

Some of my fondest childhood memories greet me as I pass through the territory of my grandfather's ranch where I visited in the early 1950s. I remember tagging along as my father, uncle, grandfather, and others worked cattle--they on horses, me on burro. The family had always moved back and forth across the border to pursue a living in agriculture. My father recounted to me how, as a youngster in 1926, he rode across the Yuma sand dunes on a wooden tie road to cross the border to the family's Mexican homestead. After my grandfather died, however, the ranch he worked left the family.

Near Delicias, our traveling trio found a virtual oasis. Except for minor differences and the fact that the area was four times the size, we might have thought we were at home in the Mesilla Valley. We saw miles and miles of fields with pecan trees, alfalfa, cotton, vegetables, corn, grain sorghum, and other crops. A huge dairy complex, complete with an on-farm processing plant located just outside Delicias, dwarfs even the largest dairy farms in New Mexico. Agriculture is big business here. Through my previous travels, I knew that the business elite of Delicias were barons of agriculture.

The region was an important agricultural center as early as the mid-1700s. Later, it became the primary marketplace for merchants to the north. The section of the Camino Real from here north became known as the Chihuahua Trail. The great ranches and irrigated farms of Mexico were forerunners of large-scale agriculture in New Mexico. The acequias of north-central New Mexico were designed by the Spaniards of the Camino, who borrowed the work of the region's Native Americans.

Today, agricultural education continues more formally. Delicias is home to some of the agricultural programs of the Autonomous University of Chihuahua. Several professors from NMSU have conducted courses over several weeks here, and many of the agricultural faculty are graduates of our master's and doctoral programs at NMSU.

A recent graduate of our doctoral program in horticulture, Victor Guerrero, maintains ties with NMSU, organizing his fellow Aggie alums in Chihuahua. Victor joined us and NMSU faculty the next day in Chihuahua City for a journey to the Sierra Madre to visit the Tarahumara Indians at the Jesuit mission of Norogachi. We planned to gauge NMSU's potential for helping the drought-stricken subsistence farmers. (See Our Journey Begins in this issue.) There, too, it seemed, trees and Indians were being depleted.

Upon our return to the city, true to form, we chose to fly over the 275 miles of dry country where Oñate nearly perished of thirst before reaching the Rio Grande. As I flew over Nueva Viscaya and across the border, I considered the tremendous purpose that motivated Oñate and his party. They had New Mexico fever in a bad way, facing perils that were all too real--parched deserts of climatic extremes.

Camino Real Economic Allliance

Today, we all too easily turn away from the Camino that could bring riches to both sides of the border. The greatest peril we face is a thin tolerance for change. There are signs of hope, however, such as the Camino Real Economic Alliance that is creating a forum for trade, industry, and agribusiness to benefit citizens from Mexico City to Santa Fe. If we develop sons and daughters who are multilingual, multicultural, and at the very least biliterate, the Camino Real will be their road to opportunity.