Kenneth Orona
We are . . . afraid of the wide powers of a conservancy district. Anyone familiar with recent articles in the Albuquerque Journal about the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy district understands by now that a district is a complicated and expansive and ever-expanding enterprise . . . Also their district down there has come to be managed by the Bureau of Reclamation instead of the people of the Middle Rio Grande Valley. Members of their board aren't even elected.
Editorial by the Tres Rios Association
Taos News, April 26,1972
Almost one year before this article appeared in the Taos News a small group of farmers and businessmen met in a school auditorium in northern New Mexico's Taos county to debate the benefits and drawbacks of a proposed $16 million dollar dam east of Taos. Proponents of the Indian Camp Dam -- mostly businessmen -- argued that the large-scale water project offered the community a chance to grow financially. The reservoir, more than a mile long, would provide tourists with recreational activities like fishing, jet-skiing, and sailing in a tourist area dominated by winter skiing and summer sightseeing. Supporters of the dam argued that surrounding businesses would benefit from an increased number of visitors during the summer months demanding more lodging, retail stores, and restaurants. Advocates of the project also believed that local farmers would benefit from the additional supply of water by expanding commercial agricultural opportunities in an area where landowners ranked among the nation's poorest.
Initially, farmers -- the majority of whom where Mexican American -- supported the construction of the Indian Camp Dam, but after learning the financial details of the plan they refused to support it. Their complaints focused on the proposed Rancho del Rio Conservancy District, empowered by the state of New Mexico to impose taxes on residents living within the district's boundaries. Farmers soon learned the proposed conservancy district required them to pay for a portion of the construction costs and one-half of the maintenance expenses for the dam. Farmers believed that they did not possess enough property to commercially benefit from the project and that their inability to pay conservancy taxes would result in the foreclosure of their farms and loss of their property. Finally, opponents viewed the District Court's appointment of conservancy officials making up the board of directors as undemocratic and an affront to their existing system of water management which relied on locally elected officials. Over the next five years Chicano activists and Anglo-American environmentalists joined the Spanish-speaking farmers in forming a grassroots organization called the Tres Rios Association which successfully fought the creation of the conservancy district in court.
The five year struggle soon became the subject of two anthropological studies, a comparative legal case study, a popular novel, and a Hollywood movie. The most popular representation of the event was John Nichols' novel, The Milagro Beanfield War, published in 1974. Although the novel focused on protagonist Joe Mondragon who decides to water his deceased father's beanfield by illegally tapping water belonging to the state of New Mexico, Nichols' story otherwise parallels the events that took place in Taos between 1971-1975. After a standoff with state and federal law enforcement officers, Mondragon earns the support of his community and together they challenge the Miracle Valley Conservancy District in court using petitions.
Nichols' story confirmed the best established assumption about New Mexican history: political resistance and struggles over land, water, and culture took place in the mountainous valleys of northern New Mexico, the area stretching from Santa Fe to Taos. The novel supports the premise that in the more rural north, Mexican Americans preserved their culture and in the more urban central part of the state traditional culture breaks down as Hispanos assimilated into mainstream American society. A look back at the Tres Rios editorial and a re-examination of John Nichols' work challenges us to rethink our most deeply held beliefs about northern and central New Mexico. The 1972 newspaper article reminds us that artificial constructions between regions and people often contradict the real- life political behavior and collective memory of local inhabitants. For example, in their successful effort to block the proposed conservancy district, northern New Mexico valley residents turned to the historical struggles of central New Mexico valley farmers with the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (MRGCD). Northern New Mexican farmers viewed the historical events in central New Mexico as a touchstone to draw upon in their own battles against a large-scale water development project.
In this chapter I argue that the collective memory of northern New Mexico valley residents provides scholars with the opportunity to explore alternative narratives and cultural connections between northern and central New Mexico. By exploring the 150 mile middle Rio Grande valley in central New Mexico, and focusing on Hispano resistance against the MRGCD in central New Mexico from 1923-1947, I examine why writers like John Nichols, scholars, and interested readers of land and water struggles along the Rio Grande valley primarily focus their attention on the northern part of the state.
The popularity of Nichols' fiction and the success of the movie adaptation of The Milagro Beanfield War peaked my interest. The subject of my work, the MRGCD, preceded the Taos project by nearly fifty years, was larger in size, affected more farmers, and underwent a longer period of protest than did the Ranchos del Rio Conservancy District. Yet, the MRGCD received only cursory examination by scholars and no attention from writers or Hollywood film-makers. So, why do we know far more about a proposed conservancy district than an existing one more than four times its size?
Our narrow views of landscape as oppositional categories, "rural" and "urban" places, cloud our understanding of New Mexico's history. One reason why the Ranchos del Rio controversy sustained wide popular appeal was the event reinforced existing perceptions of northern New Mexico as predominantly "rural," "pre-modern," and "culturally distinctive," whereas central New Mexico is seen as "urban," "modern," and "culturally American." According to journalist and urban scholar V. B. Price the architecture of both regions reinforce these contrasting images. When Price compared Santa Fe in northern New Mexico with Albuquerque in the central part of the state, he could have easily replaced Santa Fe with Taos when he wrote, "Santa Fe chose to be a specialty city, a distinctly New Mexican place, capitalizing on its exotic qualities and committing itself to the economics of tourism." Certainly, the fictional town of Milagro fits that description.
During the filming of The Milagro Beanfield War film critic Stephen Schaefer visited the movie set in Truchas, NM a small community southwest of Taos, and was amazed to see the movie's commercial appeal for tourists. Schaefer wrote, "Copies of John Nichols' novel are for sale in a nearby gift shop. The one-road thoroughfare is clogged with tourists. It's incredible they're here at all since Truchas is 7,500 feet above sea level -- and remote." In stark contrast, V. B. Price describes the urban part of the state as failing to contain the same mythic appeal. Price writes, "Albuquerque [center of the MRGCD] chose to become the state's progressive city, an American place, modern and up-do-date, committing itself to an eclectic economy, keeping its options open for any kind of growth that came along." Whereas members of Tres Rios Association made the connection between struggling farmers and their historic experiences in central New Mexico, fictional writers and film-makers failed to capture the true complexity of the region's history and human behavior.
Nichols work falls under a long list of works, both fiction and non-fiction, that draw artificial and contrived impressions of both regions of the state. One of the first scholars to construct a dual image of the Rio Arriba (upper river) and Rio Abajo (lower river) was author Harvey Fergusson. In 1933 Fergusson argued, "Some small landowners took up homesteads, mostly in the less desirable sections north of Santa Fe where the valley is narrow and rugged. But in the South, where it is wide and fertile, nearly all of it was owned by a few rich men . . . . and the geographical division became more and more a social one." Writing in the 1960s, anthropologist John R. Van Ness was eager to move beyond studies that portrayed Spanish Americans as a homogeneous group. Van Ness maintained that the environmental distinctions between the Rio Arriba and Rio Abajo helped explain contrasting economic, social, and political patterns between both regions. "Generally speaking," wrote Van Ness, "Rio Arriba can be characterized as a region where small landholders settled, as opposed to [the] Rio Abajo where large landholders dominated socially and economically dependent villages." The meaning we can draw from these works is that both places do not always conform to the scholarship and fictional setting that define them in the public discourse. Historian William deBuys identifies a distinction between the Rio Abajo and Rio Arriba in economic terms by arguing that in the Rio Abajo Hispano farmers "possessed abundant farmlands and the capacity to grow cash crops," which tied them to a market economy. He writes of northern Spanish-speakers: "Tucked away in isolated valleys and rangelands of the ejido [community land], the mountain communities offered little to the capitalist world."
Somewhere between these polar extremes in perception of northern and central New Mexico lay deeper and more complex cultural and environmental connections between both areas. The northern part of the state is more urban and culturally "American" than state boosters, artists, tourists, and some scholars acknowledge, and the central part of the state is more rural and culturally linked to northern New Mexico. Yet, dichotomies between both regions persist both in popular perception and scholarly works. Using the MRGCD and its primary location, Albuquerque, as a case study, this work hopes to blur artificial divisions between northern and central New Mexico as entirely distinct places -- divided by the categories of rural/urban, pre-modern/modern, culturally distinctive/progressively "American." Both popular and scholarly constructions of the regions have prohibited scholars from identifying common land use and water management practices, as well as recognizing the geographic realities of struggles over land, water, and culture which scholars typically associate with the northern part of the state. By exploring historically generated depictions of both regions and peoples as opposites, we can learn more about region and national constructions of space, regional and national identity.
No where have these popular constructions of place been more sharp than in the studies linking physical proximity to political behavior. In northern New Mexico, rural isolation, harsh environmental conditions, and numerous community based land grants fostered a greater community spirit and social independence which were conducive to political mobilization. Scholars argue that northern Hispanos historically displayed the capacity to unite in times of social, economic, and political turmoil and a flexibility "in which a village organizes itself tightly to meet a crisis, then gradually falls back toward looser modes (including atomism and factionalism) when the crisis is past."
The story Nichols presents not only fits stereotypical images of northern New Mexico, his work congers up images of one-dimensional rural "peasants" whose only recourse against government injustice and capitalist oppression is to engage in spontaneous acts of banditry and revolution. Scholar Chris Wilson was quick to identify the movie's confusing and contrived message: "At first the 1988 motion picture The Milagro Beanfield War was difficult for many New Mexicans to swallow. Imagine the misgivings of local audiences as the movie opened to unfamiliar accordion music and an aged figure dressed in a serape and sombrero . . . . Here was a character in the stereotypic Oaxacan peasant costume worn by Marlon Brando at the beginning of Viva Zapata!, playing a Mexican variation of Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof, with the music from Fellini's Amarcord, in the background." The dominant American cultural perceptions of northern New Mexico tell us more about the people who create these mythic images than it does about the residents who live there.
Anthropologist Paul Kutsche devised a model for the historic economic, social, and political differences between both regions. Extrapolating from Van Ness's work, Kutsche identified clear class divisions in the Rio Abajo which historically separated the social life of Hispanos in the middle Rio Grande valley from their northern counterparts. Kutsche believed that these class distinctions existed in the patrón-peón relationship between the landed elite and landless laborers. Kutsche wrote that, "In pure form. . .the paired terms [patrón-peón ] apply only to the Rio Abajo." Because Hispanos predominantly settled on small community land grants due to the rugged mountainous terrain and harsh environment of northern New Mexico, he argued the region offered limited opportunities for patrónismo to flourish. In central New Mexico, however, Hispanos primarily settled in large haciendas owned by prominent individuals providing an ideal setting for the patrón-peón relationship to develop. In northern New Mexico, rural isolation, harsh environmental conditions, and numerous community based land grants, according to Kutsche, fostered a greater community spirit and social independence which were conducive to political mobilization.
Author Richard Gardner supported Kutsche's thesis:
[the] Rio Arriba was and is a special place, a rare pocket of cultural and economic retardation, with a long history of covert resistance and a folk tradition that has always considered violence to be the manly and logical reaction to intolerable frustration. Virtually forgotten in their northern villages, the people had clung stubbornly to their language, culture and fierce racial pride through a century of reduction and loss. They were an independent, homogeneous, predominately rural people, and they were deeply discontented.
The two groups who exemplified this flexibility in New Mexico history were Las Gorras Blancas, a fraternal organization that engaged in covert acts of protest in retaliation to the expropriation of their land in northern New Mexico between 1870-1900 and the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, a grassroots movement led by Reis Lopez Tijerina in an effort to win back community land grants in the northern part of the state during the late 1960s. Historians Robert J. Rosenbaum and Robert W. Larson reach the same conclusions in their study of New Mexico land grants. They argue that "prior to Tijerina, the coordination of Las Gorras Blancas represented the greatest degree of unity attained (anywhere in New Mexico). Nowhere did it approach the commonality of focus achieved in a jacquerie, let alone possess any driving ideological force." By associating political resistance and mobilization with the northern and "rural" parts of the state, however, these scholars completely overlooked resistance movements in other parts of New Mexico. Hispano protests against the expropriation of their land were not confined to the mountainous regions of northern New Mexico, but took place in the "urban" middle Rio Grande valley as well.
The period between the late 1890s when Las Gorras Blancas protested against encroachment on their land and 1968 when Tijerina took up arms against federal park officials, Hispano political behavior was not characterized by indifference, inactivity, and quiescence to American conquest. Yet, scholars like Enrique R. Lamadrid insist that, "In the Alianza, resentments repressed for more than a century and a half found their first collective expression since late nineteenth century land grant defense groups like the Gorras Blancas (White Caps) used the direct and desperate tactics of arson and fence cutting." Although Lamadrid believed this was the "first" communal expression of resistance, another examination of the central valley of New Mexico between 1923-1947 challenges us to reassess Hispano political activity involving land and water rights.
Arguing that Spanish-speakers of central New Mexico during the Progressive Period, 1880-1930 were victims of American conquest, historian Robert W. Larson writes, "The Spanish-speaking people of the Territory were faced from the very beginning with new and confusing institutions imported into New Mexico and imposed upon them by their American conquerors. Handicapped by a lack of language skills in English and unfamiliar with the new Anglo ways, New Mexico's native element was extremely vulnerable to economic and political exploitation by shrewd and ambitious newcomers." Similarly, sociologist Clark S. Knowlton depicts Hispanos as victims of American conquest whose only strategy for confronting American cultural contact was to take refuge from institutional authority "by withdrawing from all but essential social, political, and economic contacts with the dominant English-speaking group." Drawing on the work of sociologists who studied Mexican American villages in the central valley during the 1930s and 1940s, Knowlton identifies the following political characteristics of Mexican Americans in central New Mexico during the first half of the twentieth century: a voting pattern that conveyed a blind allegiance to patróns; a concerted effort to seek out dependent relationships with powerful ethnic leaders; a propensity to avoid solving political problems by postponing decisions until the last possible moment; a dislike for competition; and, a preference for informal relations with authority figures and institutions.
Although Larson and Knowlton are correct when they point out the negative impact that American institutions and culture had on Mexican Americans, they overstate the degree to which Mexican Americans were "victims" of American conquest and fail to address Spanish-speakers' ability to adapt, contest, and sometimes alter American authority. Reducing the roles of Hispano political actors in the central valley to "peóns" underestimates their ability to act independently, fashion an identity apart from ethnic leaders, and use political leaders as power brokers to achieve their objectives. Likewise, elevating the status of political leaders to "patrónes" takes away from the dynamic relationship that developed between farmers and elected officials and reduces political authorities to insincere, corrupt, and power-hungry politicians who felt no compassion for the plight of Hispano farmers. My work explores the relationship between the majority of farmers in the middle Rio Grande valley and the leaders they collaborated with to challenge the formation of the MRGCD and its policies. By focusing on the alliances farmers made with Anglo and Spanish-speaking leaders alike, my narrative challenges historical interpretations that view Hispanos as incapable of creating an identity independent of patrónes.
Unfamiliarity with powerful democratic structures, complex legal systems, and expansive capitalist markets might explain the emergence of violent bandits and revolutionary heroes who take the rule of law into their own hands, but this over-determined political behavior of Hispano farmers in New Mexico is misleading and inaccurate. All too often scholars of political resistance in New Mexico use historian Eric Hobsbawm's model of violent and archaic forms of resistance to buttress their arguments about political activity in New Mexico. According to Hobsbawn's peasant groups lack the cognitive make-up and political skills necessary to effectively instigate change when a social crisis arises. Peasant responses to societal change often results, argues Hobsbawm, in inarticulate, violent, and spontaneous acts of banditry and mob rule. Almost always peasant groups' displeasure with novel political, economic, and social change results in short-term, backward looking political goals, with the intended outcome of mobilization to restore order and the balance of life to the way it was before.
At the time Nichols wrote the Milagro Beanfield War, northern New Mexico was rife with the violent political activity of Reis Lopez Tijerina in an effort to legally or by violent means win back land guaranteed under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. But Tijerina's political behavior was preceded by a long and protracted pattern violent political activity in New Mexico. Writing about a rebellion in Rio Arriba in1837 which resulted from the Mexican Republic's take over of New Mexico following independence from Spain, historian Janet Lecompte identified the forms of political expression in the northern reaches of the Republic as relegated to, "the humblest of human beings. Isolated for over two hundred years from the government of their country, remote from centers of learning or civilization, ignorant of almost all past human endeavor , . . ." and whose acts of banditry were conducted by "Wildly angry , . . men of Rio Arriba, both Hispanic and Indian, [who] rose in a mob against what they saw as oppression, declaring their reasons for revolt in a barely literate statement." After a failed attempt to instate a governor and his failure to "control the mob that had elected him . . . the rebels returned to their farms." By contrast, Lecompte presents central New Mexico as "the home of the ricos, the rich and educated men, the ruling class . . ." who "lived in many-roomed adobe houses or walled plazas along with their peons, who tended their houses, fields, orchards, and sheep, and were in debt to their masters." The system of debt peonage characteristic of the middle Rio Grande valley and "mob rule" endemic to the harsh and rugged terrain of northern New Mexican belies a more complex set of social relations and political rule. Even if such political strictures existed, would it make sense that Hispanos of central New Mexico would work all the more to break the bonds, embrace and exercise their rights as United States citizens.
In keeping with Hobsbawm's "Primitive Rebels" model, peasants who leave the country-side in search of economic opportunity and democratic freedom in the city, they are susceptible to the patron/peon cycle. In New Mexican historiography the "mob rule" of the country-side sub-comes to political patronage in the city, particularly following the US/Mexican War. Even contemporary anthropologist Edward P. Dozier missed the political, economic, and technological adaptations Hispanos made in central valley made. Writing in 1969 Dozier wrote: "All Mexican American groups in the Southwest have a fairly recent 'peasant' background despite their present locations in predominantly urban areas. This does not mean that Mexican-Americans are urban peasants, but that historic roots in a peasant culture continue to have important influences on contemporary Mexican-American society and culture." But does this "peasant" background predetermine the outcome of resistance or relegate such activity to spontaneous, violent, and archaic forms of banditry? In retaining the best of their cultural traditions, which included a close economic tie to the land, Hispano farmers of the central valley did not limit their options for political protest to "archaic and inarticulate forms of banditry" or patron/peon relations? Answering these questions help explain why Mexican American farmers of the central valley worked within existing political, economic, and legal structures of the United
States and asserted their "American-ness" in fashioning an identity. Ultimately, Hispanos of the central valley acheived political, economic, and social freedoms denied them under the previous Spanish and Mexican governments.
Rather than Hispanos of central New Mexico looking backward to a previously established harmonious political, economic, and social existence, the historical subjects I encountered displayed the flexibility and willingness to accommodate to American rule of law. Although farmers of the middle Rio Grande valley often found themselves on the opposite sides of justice and equality before the law, they seldom resorted to violence. Hispanos of New Mexico's central valley worked within existing economic, political, and social structures to accommodate and when necessary instigate change. In addition to staging protests, they used subtle forms of resistance such as newspaper editorials, blockades, petitions drives, and legal challenges. A re-examination of New Mexico's central valley challenges us not only to think more deeply about Mexican American political behavior, but to re-evaluate our assumptions about their ability to function within existing channels of American society.
In one of the few studies of the MRGCD authors McDonald, Tysseling, Browde, and Brown argue that "In the continuing tradition of western politics, there were armed confrontations between the district's [MRGCD] Board of Directors and disgruntled irrigators when construction threatened to temporarily curtail supplies of water to those irrigators' lands." Historian Suzanne Forrest wrote, "armed conflict broke out between conservancy officials and Hispanic farmers when the latter resisted the destruction of their irrigation ditches at the start of the planting season." But neither scholar comments at length on the far more common and less romantic everyday forms of protest used by farmers in the central valley which included petition drives and legal action. By examining subtle forms of resistance this work shows how Hispanos contested the formation of the MRGCD and its policies at levels scholars who study political resistance in New Mexico seldom identify as "political."
I divide this study into three broad sections: Creating a Meaningful Space, A Machine in the Desert, and Managing Nature and Governing Culture. Each section subdivided into shorter chapters. In part one I explore the historic meaning Pueblo Indians, Spanish-settlers, and Anglo American newcomers give the middle Rio Grande valley. I examine how Native, Mexican, and Anglo American historically adapted to the central valley and how each group constructed a meaning for the area based on each culture's political, economic, and social mores. Not only does each groups' perception of space get filtered through economic, political, and social prisms, their understanding of place emerges by exploring the dominant rituals, signs, symbols, and images of each cultural group.
In part two I provide an institutional history of the MRGCD and situate its development within the framework of other flood control projects in the American West. In addition to examining the formation of and reaction to the MRGCD, I explore how residents of the central valley challenged the legality, financial policies, and political practices of Conservancy District. In the final section of the book I assess the original objectives for the MRGCD in 1923 and compare them with its financial demise in 1947.
Within the broader context of water development in the American West, the failure of conservancy officials to transform Pueblo and Mexican American subsistence farmers into commercial agriculturists shows the difficulty of not only changing deeply rooted and established perceptions of land, but "legally" forcing an inherently flawed, government-sanctioned institution on groups obligated to pay for it. Although founders of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District modeled it after other western conservancy districts, the unwillingness to fully cooperate in the MRGCD's flawed economic plan and undemocratic practices contributed to the district's bankruptcy in 1947.
Author John Nichols was intrigued by Hispano farmers' triumph over the Rancho del Rio Conservancy District, viewing the successful movement as unique in western history. "I'll wager that this was one of the few times in modern southwestern history," Nichols wrote, "that a people as poor and politically 'powerless' as the Taos farmers had managed to organize successfully against a state--and federally-- supported irrigation project of such magnitude." According to director Robert Redford commenting on The Milagro Beanfield War, "whatever gain is made in this film, or this story, is a battle being won. Maybe not the war. But that's what I would like to focus on: the value of battles being won."
Western American history is not that simple. It is incumbent on writers and scholars to sometimes grapple with the less romantic, more complex, events of history as well as the consequences of failure and unforeseen outcomes. I disagree with Nichols' and Redford's conclusions and argue that the "unsuccessful" battle waged by farmers of the middle Rio Grande valley was equally as important as the victory farmers obtained in Taos county. The redeeming outcome of the unsuccessful efforts to block or alter the structure of the MRGCD was ultimately a point of historical reference for the Tres Rios Association to draw upon in their successful fight against the Rancho del Rio Conservancy District. More importantly for my work, the collective memory recorded in the Taos News editorial connected the experiences of northern and central New Mexico in accurate and profound ways that defy simple and one-dimensional story telling.