The Weedy Possibilities of Mother Mesquite

“We live in a world of weeds—a world of human ecological disturbance that stretches around the planet,” writes Anna Tsing. In this world, imperial conquest, capitalism, racism, and authoritarianism have inadvertently created the conditions for weeds to thrive. These weeds are creatures of empire. They are the plants, animals, microorganisms, and fungi that prosper in the disturbance caused by the ultimate weedy invader: humans.

Within these weedy worlds, we trace our relationship to one such organism, the honey mesquite tree (Neltuma glandulosa), across time and space on the Llano Estacado, a vast semi-arid plateau stretching from West Texas into eastern New Mexico.

Mesquite-human relations have flourished for millennia on the Llano Estacado, yet, within the region’s contemporary land-use regimes of cotton monocultures, cattle ranching, urban development, and oil extraction, it is labeled a nuisance.

The Mesquite Mile project is a hyperlocal, community-based form of ecosocial art that acknowledges disturbance as a prevailing ecological condition. We utilize art to reframe the weedy mesquite tree, a victim of ecological forgetting, as a cultural and ecological partner for a livable earth.

Mesquite Migration

Mesquite Migration, 2022.
A weedy mesquite tree travels through human-disturbed landscapes on the Llano Estacado: a cattle ranch, peri-urban cotton fields, and finally the urban streets of Lubbock, Texas.
Video courtesy of Erin Charpentier, Kim Karlsruud, Daniel Phillips and Travis Neel. Videography by Andrew Ina.

From 2021-2024, the Mesquite Mile project relocated mesquite trees and other drought-tolerant plants from rural and ruderal sites, where they are considered weeds, into the Heart of Lubbock neighborhood, where they contribute to biodiversity, urban habitability, and local quality of life. The project transformed over an acre of urban streetscape, converting private water-intensive lawns into green infrastructure-based mesquite prairie and distinctive living artworks.

The Mesquite Mile Site 3 Walkthrough, 2024.
Video courtesy of the authors.

Entanglements Big and Small

Humans and mesquite have been entangled on the Llano Estacado and its surrounding ecosystems for millennia. The mesquite tree arrived north of the Rio Grande River thirteen thousand years ago when their first vertebrate partners, the now extinct megafauna of the region, dispersed their seeds as they ventured north from what we now call Mexico.

Before their extinction, these herds of giant mammal grazers profoundly impacted the evolutionary history of mesquite. The co-evolution of mesquite and these megafauna influenced the size and sweetness of their seed pods, their tenacious ability to resprout after trampling, their ability to germinate in dung, and their geographic distribution. If it weren’t for this partnership, mesquite’s spread would be limited by an entanglement with a much smaller being—the bruchid beetle, whose larva devour the seeds that fall to the ground, preventing germination.

Studies of prehistoric diets of people living at the confluence of the Pecos and Rio Grande rivers reveal that they consumed mesquite as far back as the Late Archaic period (500 B.C.E – 800 C.E). Mesquite beans are high in protein and carbohydrates, and over millennia, the mesquite tree was culturally selected for the edibility of its seed pods. It was a significant source of food and medicine for Indigenous people throughout the now Southwestern United States from Texas to California. Today, mesquite beans are milled to create flour for baked goods, tortillas, and beverages.

Disturbance-loving and Disturbance-making

Honey mesquite is endemic to the American Southwest and Central America but now grows as far as Australia and South Africa. Both globally and locally to the Llano Estacado, mesquite is considered an invasive weed.

Mesquite’s spread is closely tied to modern ecological and economic changes to the Great Plains. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Great Plains were home to a bison population numbering upwards of forty million. The slaughtering and disappearance of bison alongside the development of iron railways created the conditions for a livestock-based economy to emerge on the Llano Estacado.

The arrival of ranchers and the expansion of railroad infrastructure transformed the Southern Plains into the hinterlands of Chicago. Mesquite made use of the damage to shortgrass prairie ecosystems enacted by the economic forces that commodified meat. The cattle that replaced the buffalo, in turn, helped mesquite proliferate. Cattle consumed mesquite beans, their digestive tracts scarified the seeds, and their dung deposited those seeds into fertile pockets of disturbed soil, where prairie dogs and native grasses (mesquite’s competitors) had also been displaced.

Weeds love and make disturbance, and mesquite, a weedy opportunist, thrived in this human-disturbed ecosystem.

The colonial project on the Southern High Plains revolved around new land enclosures. By fencing in property, ranchers and settlers established a new regime of fire suppression that further interrupted prairie ecologies and enabled mesquite to spread unabated. If mesquite are weedy invaders, it’s because of their entanglement—with us.

The 1930s brought more drastic changes in land use through advancements in hydrological engineering. Access to the vast Ogallala Aquifer, which spans from Texas to Nebraska, transformed the Llano Estacado into one of the largest regions of intensive agricultural production on Earth. Today, the Ogallala Aquifer is depleting at an alarming rate, mostly driven by extractive petroleum-based industries in West Texas. As climate change threatens livability on a human-damaged planet, our continued survival demands that we learn how best to live and die with the entanglements we have, even the weedy ones.

Current climate-change models suggest that mesquite’s range will continue expanding northward and eastward, likely covering two-thirds of the Southern Great Plains’ non-agricultural land by the end of the twenty-first century. Ironically, research from the field of rangeland management identifies mesquite encroachment (rather than successive waves of human disturbance) as a significant threat to grassland ecosystems, water supply, and livestock carrying capacity. Weeds are organisms that are never fully integrated into capitalist designs.

In 2024, while cotton farmers and ranchers in the Southwest were suffering record losses from extreme heat and drought, the mesquite trees of the Llano Estacado continued to flower and fruit. In drought years, the tree provides much needed shade and nutrition for the deer, buffalo, and cows of the Llano Estacado.

A cow uses a mesquite branch to scratch an itch. Video courtesy of the authors, 2022.

Future Nature

Anna Tsing reminds us that, “One is not born but rather becomes a weed.”

Weeds are auto-rewilders. They insert themselves into landscapes in surprising and unexpected ways.

When mesquite inserts itself into the damaged landscape of the Llano Estacado, it does so with companions—the migratory oriole that builds nests in its branches, the symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi and nitrogen-fixing bacteria in its root system, the Christmas cholla that grows intertwined with its trunk, and the wild grasses and wildflowers that thrive in its nitrogen-rich understory.

In a hotter and drier Southwest, is it possible that the honey mesquite is a collaborative partner for a future nature? Can mesquite compost what has become “second nature” (that which emerges from capitalist ruins) into teachings about ongoing livability in a rapidly shifting climate?

Tsing uses the term “contaminated diversity” to refer to the cultural and biological ways of life that have developed through the last few hundred years of widespread human disturbance. Contaminated diversity is collaborative adaptation.

Mesquite Mile Site 5, 2024.
The Mesquite Mile: Site 5 Portrait highlights the first growing season on an urban site after seeding and the transplanting of a juvenile honey mesquite tree.
Video courtesy of the authors.

The Mesquite Mile, too, is collaborative adaptation: it enacts small-scale disturbances that might draw both people and mesquite out of alienation, building a world of overlapping lifeways in which mutualistic transformation might be possible. These small shifts aim to construct good-enough worlds. Always imperfect and under revision, these worlds-in-the-making emphasize interspecies neighborliness and mutuality.

For four years, our neighbors and friends donated their space and time to gardening with mesquite and its weedy companions, showing that social relations between species is essential to good living on the Llano Estacado.

Portraits of the Mesquite Mile: Sites 1-4, 2025.
Video courtesy of the authors.

---

Featured image: Future Nature, Digital C-Print. This is a proposal for the sixth Mesquite Mile site, but for now the site remains a parking lot. Photo courtesy of the authors.

The Mesquite Mile project is a collaboration with artist Kim Karlsrud and landscape architect Daniel Phillips.

Erin Charpentier and Travis Neel are artists that work at the unruly edges of art and ecology to explore the possibility of collaborative survival within the weedy entanglements of human-disturbed landscapes. Website. Contact Erin. Contact Travis.