This essay addresses Mexican villagers who sustain community amid social dissolution that accompanies poverty and U.S.-bound migration. Villagers manage signs in behavior and discourse to foreground feeling and thought of pastoral life and create emotional and intellectual detachment from the effects of a modern one. This management shows how people mitigate contradiction to produce a context that supports how they feel and think collectively. Narrative represents participants’ speech, behavior, and setting to highlight poetics and approximate a cultivation of community, a performance-based approach to ethnography.