Trouble in Paradise : Lifestyle: A mecca for artists, skiers and New Agers, Taos teeters on edge of a boom. Traditionalists fear new projects will disrupt the good vibrations.

To Alfred Trujillo, the Broncos and Jeeps zipping through the small northern New Mexico town of Arroyo Hondo on their way to the Taos Ski Valley have a destination that is “almost a foreign country.”

It’s a country from which Trujillo feels he has to protect his community. As a ditch commissioner in Arroyo Hondo, he is a “caretaker of the river”--a human component of a hand-dug, 200-year-old irrigation system for the swiftly flowing Rio Hondo.

What worries Trujillo is the need every skier brings for water, be it for drinking, showers or toilets. This makes him uneasy: He’s downstream. All he gets from the ski area, he says, is “exhaust and pollution.”

Until recently, Arroyo Hondo was relatively protected because Taos is arduous to reach--most of the skiers and other tourists who pour into the area must fly to Albuquerque and drive three hours north.

Then came a proposal to expand the tiny Taos Airport so that 737s and DC-9s--full of tourists, no doubt--could land. Trujillo swung into action, leading the opposition in an increasingly contentious legal battle.

Last summer, a court-ordered environmental impact study delayed construction of an 8,600-foot runway for at least a year. But this appears to be only a pause.

“They say they need the airport so they can compete with Aspen,” Trujillo says. “That’s their trip. Don’t let that change our lives.”

Trujillo has placed himself at the center of a fight over the airport, but it’s just part of a larger skirmish going on in the Taos area over the future of a place once isolated from the mainstream of American life.

After centuries of isolation, Taos has become too famous for its own good. Anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million tourists--many of them Californians--visit each year. Artists in particular appreciate Taos’ legendary beauty and lifestyle, from D.H. Lawrence to R.C. Gorman. Indeed, it’s one of the few American towns with a population of 4,000 that’s well known in European art circles.

Perhaps development battles are felt more intensely here because so many people feel there’s so much worth saving. Even developers say they want to protect the qualities that make Taos special--its 1,000-year-old Indian community, clear mountain air and ethnic mix.

But Taos County is a Shangri-La in transition, pulled by divergent interests, from golf-course developers who envision putting greens at 7,000 feet to Pueblo Indians who have managed to survive for more than 1,000 years without golf.

It’s a place New Age believers liken to an American Jerusalem. Where pickups with gun racks pull up alongside Volvos with crystals hanging from rear-view mirrors at local stop lights. Where a Pueblo woman at Allsup’s convenience store speaks in Tiwa as a Texan skier asks directions of a Latino clerk, who takes food stamps from an Anglo in leather headband.

Somehow, they all mesh here. And as culturally diverse as it is, the one thing everyone seems to agree upon is that they love Taos.

“What struck me as soon as I arrived here,” says Tomas Jirik, a Czechoslovak carpenter, “was how quickly people become possessive about Taos.”

The problem is, as the song goes, you always hurt the one you love.

“The development of Taos is no different from what’s going on anywhere else in the Western world. It just got here later,” says novelist John Nichols, who wrote “The Milagro Beanfield War” about the region.

“What you’ve got here is progress, American style. (Author) Edward Abbey once said, ‘Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.’ The airport and the golf courses are just symbolic of that kind of insane worldwide development.”

Already, progress has taken its toll. On some winter days a haze from car exhaust and wood fires hovers over the town. Traffic jams occur regularly as cars inch along a highway that passes through town.

And always, there is concern for water. There’s plenty of land in Taos County--the sagebrush seems to reach endlessly over the horizon. There’s even more sky. But there’s by no means enough water.

“This whole thing is about water” is a phrase heard over and over. It’s invoked when discussing the airport or the proposed building of a $100-million resort development known as Las Sierras, which would cover 450 acres and include an 18-hole golf course, a 400-seat performing arts center and a 180-room hotel. It’s always about water.

Over the years, many Latinos have either lost or sold much of their traditional land--and with it have gone the water rights. With the arrival of newcomers, the local Latino community, which prides itself on Spanish roots reaching back to the 15th Century, has seen much of its cultural heritage erode.

“People used to live off the land when I was growing up,” says Priscilla Cruz, 50, who has lived in Taos all her life. “They’re not doing it anymore for the lack of water.”

Many of the newcomers pressuring for development are from California, equity-rich emigrants from the West Coast’s past land boom.

“I think there’s got to be some resentment that land values have been driven up by California money,” says Tom Snow, an Oscar-nominated songwriter who has homes in Los Angeles and northern New Mexico.

One real estate appraiser estimates that home prices in the Taos area have risen 5% to 15% each year for the past three years. The median price of a home today is nearly $130,000.

“People who grew up here can’t afford it,” Snow says. “In the four years we’ve been here, the land we bought has gone up to where we couldn’t afford to buy it now.”

And that transformation has engendered a tension that’s not far below the surface. It’s common to hear talk about villages where “gringos aren’t welcome” or stories of stones thrown at tourists’ cars on the back roads.

“I don’t like to say this,” notes Trujillo, “but it seems like it’s always the Anglos who are pushing for development. It’s the Anglos who are pushing for the airport, for expansion of the ski area, for the golf courses.

“The Hispanics and the Indians have things in common. They like the good life of family, having a garden and an orchard. It’s not necessarily something you sell. Our people aren’t turned on by development. In fact, they’re turned off by it. To them, it’s nothing but greed.”

Still, some believe the Latino and American Indian lifestyle has been romanticized--that in reality, raising beans has given way to watching MTV. The old ways were hard ways, they argue, and few would be willing to give up central heating, indoor plumbing and a chance to send their kids to college for a return to subsistence farming.

“Everyone refers to us as an agricultural area,” says Ken Blair, a local hotel owner who is also chairman of the airport commission. “We hear all this talk about the agriculture raised in Taos. In whose mind? Get the figures on what’s actually raised and shipped to market. There isn’t that much.”

Blair and other business leaders say development--and the tourism that goes with it--will create jobs and help alleviate local poverty. Taos County has the second-highest rate of unemployment in New Mexico, 14.7% in December.

“I don’t think (expanding the airport) is going to do anything but give some people some jobs,” says actor-director Dennis Hopper, who first came to Taos from California in 1967. “Being against it is a backward idea. I find that people who are against it have other motives. They want to keep Taos quaint. But to go on with the idea that everybody should be backward and live in poverty, I find it ignorant.”

“People are coming here,” adds Blair. “Whether they’re coming by car or by dog sled or by jet, they’re coming here. The airport is just going to make it more convenient.”

One problem is that most of the jobs created by tourism pay minimum-wage salaries. Still, some, like Blair, ask if it isn’t better to have a tourist-related job than no job at all.

“You don’t have a diverse economy here and you never will,” Blair says. “Everybody cries out about (how) tourist-related jobs are minimum-wage jobs, but even the dishwasher jobs have put a lot of kids through college.”

Others contend that prices in Taos are more in line with those in Los Angeles or New York.

“One thing about a tourist town is we pay tourist prices,” says Cruz as she cleans vases at the flower shop where she works. “Everybody pays the price, whether you can afford it or not.”

One group that found the price of progress a bit too steep was the Taos Pueblo Tribal Council. The Taos Pueblo, with about 1,400 residents, has a respected position in the community because of its adherence to traditional ways and its vast land holdings and water rights.

The council has come out against airport expansion. The turning point came when a small plane repeatedly buzzed the tribe’s annual pilgrimage to a mountain lake they consider sacred.

But despite their position on the airport, the Indians are sanguine about the inevitability of change.

Vince Lujan, the pueblo’s lieutenant governor, works in an office building 100 yards from the 15th-Century pueblo complex. For authenticity’s sake, the four- and five-story communal adobe houses have no electricity or running water.

Only in offices outside the pueblo’s grounds are there machines and telephones for dealing with the outside world.

“We cannot be what our forefathers were,” Lujan says as fluorescent lights flicker overhead. “We can never go back.

“I think we’d be kidding ourselves if I said we’re going back to the old ways. I think the joke would be on us. We just have to make ourselves very comfortable and be prepared to accept some of the changes. We can never turn back the years.”

Growing Pains

A proposal to expand the small local airport is just one of the skirmishes being waged over the future of Taos, N.M.