Copyright

Kathleen Ann Myers

Published On

2024-03-05

Page Range

pp. 128–151

Language

  • English

Print Length

24 pages

4. Inheriting a Farm

Marta Moya Espinosa, Castillo de las Guardas (Seville)

  • Kathleen Ann Myers (author)
Chapter of: A Country of Shepherds: Cultural Stories of a Changing Mediterranean Landscape(pp. 128–151)
This case study focuses on Marta Moya Espinosa, a landowner in Huelva, who provides a perspective on the key role of land use in sustainable pastoralism. The chapter discusses the many problems facing landowners, including increased government regulations, natural disasters, volatile markets, and absentee landownership. Her story reveals the complexity of changes and challenges that landowners face, as well as the arduous work required to revitalize not just a family business but an ecosystem itself. Marta helps us understand the difficulty of being an urban career woman with little practical experiences, faced with reviving her dehesa after years of neglect. Her case highlights how, even with a lot of capital, a valuable and working farm and flock, and some knowledge of how to oversee them, it is still an enormous challenge to make the farm profitable over the long term.

Contributors

Kathleen Ann Myers

(author)
Professor of Spanish and History at Indiana University Bloomington

Kathleen Ann Myers is Professor of Spanish and History at Indiana University-Bloomington. She received her doctorate in Hispanic Studies from Brown University. She has published widely on a variety of topics, including books about women writers in colonial Mexico (Liverpool 1993, Indiana University Press 1999, Oxford 2003) and the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas (Texas University Press 2007). Her recent studies include books on cultural geographies and coloniality in contemporary Mexico (University of Arizona Press 2015, University of Toronto 2024). This research has been generously funded by a variety of organizations, including Indiana University, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Scholar Program, the Spanish Ministry for Education and Culture, the Centro de Estudios de Ciencias Sociales (Mexico), the American Philosophical Association, the Huntington Library, and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas of Spain (CSIC).