Manuela's ranch was the first home I visited in the Santa Catarina ejido mountain area, and it was the first time I laid eyes Manuela. I took the above photo as our 1990 Chevy Suburban 150 pulled into her remote mountain top rancheria.

I decided to lead this online photo documentary with the above image of Manuela Aguiar, Ko'al Kumiai Paipai, weaving a basket outside the front door of her Santa Catarina mountain ranch home.

This was the first home I visited in the rural Santa Catarina community area, and it was the first time I laid eyes Manuela. I took this photo as our 1990 Chevy Suburban 150 pulled into her rural mountain top rancheria.

Loading up the truck with Manuela's payload, 2005.

JB Kingery's and Eva Salazar's world:

I made all of my trips to the Baja ejidos with JB Kingery (Baja guide and importer), most of them in this blue Chevy Suburban. He was married to Eva Salazar at the time and they operated Shumup Ko Hup with Jane Dumas in Old Town State Historic Park.

JB didn't like his name or photo to be in my published photos or writings, though he loved to be in family pictures. It was part of our conversation -- but now that he's passed (2024) -- I can finally give the man the credit he deserves for his substantial guide and translating services.

My Baja documentaries are JB's world.

Manuela lives on the top of a mountain with her sister, Teresa, and brother, Selso Aguiar, in this small Indian village community. The sisters, the Aguiar family, are well-known for their pottery, basketweaving, doll making, agave fiber net bags, medicinal plants, and traditional knowledge ... Manuela Aguiar has Contributed her old Aguiar historic family picture collection for restoration and presentation on KUMEYAAY.INFO.

JB's 1990 Chevy Suburban stopped to open the gate leaving the Aguiar ranch -- perimeter fence and gate constructed of tree branches and barbed wire. This is common-style fencing construction in the tribal ejidos.

JB's above light blue 1990 Chevy Suburban was a welcome familiar sight to the tribal community artists back in the day. This is the vehicle JB used on all the trips we made to the ejidos in 2004, 2005, 2006 to buy ethnographic art from the Mexican Indians and export it to the United States for resale in his Old Town Indian store and www.howka.com website. I believe this is the gate leaving the Aguiar ranch, but that's a pretty unique ridgeline, a landmark, in any case. The camera data (for this image) calls out the time, date, exposure and digital format. From the looks of the pixel dimensions (3008x2000) it was shot on my original Nikon D-70. The D70 was my first digital camera, and I quickly moved up to D-200 and D-300 bodies for my tribal documentaries and assignments when I saw the social significance of this work as an historical project. In comparison, my current D-810 captures at 7360x4912 pixels and has much improved photographic qualities. But this is the tool I had available at the time. I always shot digital in the Mexico ejidos in professional RAW format, opened my .nef in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) in 16-bit AdobeRGB or ProPhotoRGB, edited in Photoshop adjustment layers -- and archived my master files in layered .psd in 16-bit with adjustment layers intact for anyone working on my stuff downstream to maintain the best possible color and pixel quality from my original edits.

THIRD WORLD LIVING STANDARDS:

By the United State's living standards in 2004, the Kumeyaay Pai Pai people of Santa Catarina are poverty stricken, closed out of most modern-world conveniences. I cannot recall any of the rural Santa Catarina homes I visited (2004-2005) having wired electricity or running water -- a trip to the restroom still meant either looking for a bush or an outhouse.

Photo confirms the date electrical wire was installed on the light poles in Santa Catarina ejido (April 2006), rual scene documents dirt roads, donkey resting, outhouses, cinderblock housing, rocky high desert indigenous landscape. This is the tribal city life compared to the ranch compounds.

The roads from the main highway into Santa Catarina are eroded unpaved dirt that wind for miles off the main highway into the back country and branch off into remote mountainous scrub brush high desert countryside.

The Baja 1000 Race route runs right through Santa Catarina.

Snippets of my initial on-line research:

• Santa Catarina is located approximately 50 miles east of Ensenada, about a three-hour drive from San Diego.

• Their Kumeyaay Paipai ancestors have been in this area, including Southern California, for thousands of years. The Mexico-U.S. "border situation" has effectively alienated the (now) southern Kumeyaay Paipai from their (now) northern Kumeyaay Paipai relatives to the point where many of the families are no longer familiar with each other.

Some tribal leaders and private individuals are working to de alienate these relationships, but the governments' paperwork to cross the border remains an effective obstacle to most southern Indigenous Indian people wanting to cross the border into their Southern California ancestral lands to visit their relatives, attend funerals, participate in ceremonies, to sell their art or for any reason whatsoever.

• The Mexico Kumeyaay Pai Pai Indigenous people have retained much of their traditional knowledge, and many of the people here provide for their families, as they have for thousands of years, by harvesting natural resources from their land like yucca, pine nuts, honey, firewood, and by raising livestock and crops. Some of the Paipai Kumiai people earn their living by making traditional arts and crafts for sale such as pottery, bows and arrows, and by weaving willow, pine and juncus baskets, including agave fiber carrying nets. Some of the men also work in Guadalupe Valley as cowboys or farmers as well as on their own ranches.

• KUMEYAAY.COM writer Mike Wilken (link broken) writes some very interesting information about the Santa Catarina community.