Old Animosities, New Battles

The wood is beginning to rot.

High on a ridge called La Manga, blue stain fungus is appearing in pile after pile of magnificent centuries-old ponderosa, discoloring and devaluing the wood before loggers can sell it and reward a tiny Hispanic community that stood behind them in a bitter battle with white environmentalists.

The local woodcutters and their leader, the raffishly handsome Antonio “Ikie” DeVargas, rashly dropped the trees before building a road to get the wood to market. The logs have sat on the slope for nearly a year. Just this month, the loggers began cutting a road up to the 9,000-foot ridge where the wood is piled.

But none of that has seemed to matter to many in the mountain villages of Rio Arriba County, where DeVargas and his cutters were greeted as local heroes. Impulsive as it was, the logging was a way of defiantly celebrating a rare victory over outsiders.

A federal court ruling last year gave DeVargas and his crew the right to cut a million board-feet of old-growth ponderosa. Before environmentalists could appeal, the loggers began felling the trees. They were on federal land--but land the people in the region have always thought of as their own--and the fight over the La Manga timber had given a fresh impetus to a 100-year-old, sometimes armed struggle for local autonomy.

The story of La Manga and surrounding communities in Rio Arriba County is in some ways a familiar one in the modern American West--a conflict over the future of the land between rural people who have for years exploited it, and environmentalists, many of whom are urban-based.

But northern New Mexico is different, more volatile and violence prone. Fierce ethnic pride figures prominently in the efforts of Hispanic farmers and ranchers to get back millions of acres bequeathed to their ancestors by Spanish and Mexican land grants.

In the eyes of many residents, environmentalists are but the latest in a long line of white usurpers of the land--harbingers of an alien culture based on service and recreation.

“The whole agenda is to move us off the land and into the barrios,” DeVargas said.

“It’s part of the gentrification you see going on in Santa Fe and Taos. They want to make these mountains into a playground for the rich.”

Land or Death--”Tierra o Muerte”--proclaim hand-painted billboards along county roads, signaling a deep-seated resentment toward outsiders who try to take the land or dictate how it is used.

Roots of the Dispute

The anger has its roots in the years after the U.S.-Mexican War and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, in which the United States agreed to honor Spanish and Mexican land grants that conveyed the mountains and forests of northern New Mexico to Spanish-speaking peasants who settled here as early as the 17th century.

But the treaty was widely ignored and, over the next half-century, grantees were fenced out or forced to pay for access to the same land where their grandparents had been free to graze cattle and sheep, cut timber and collect firewood.

The U.S. Forest Service ended up owning a large chunk of the contested land. Its efforts over the years to reduce grazing, logging and even firewood collection, often at the behest of environmental groups, have been responsible for rising tension.

“We have been prisoners in our own land,” said Moises Morales, a Rio Arriba County commissioner who has used both guns and politics in a 30-year career as a land rights activist.

In the 1920s, insurgents calling themselves La Mana Negra--the Black Hand--ambushed forest rangers and cut the fences and burned the barns of ranchers who had moved onto the mountain pastures that had been the common grazing lands of Hispanic pioneers.

Decades later, after the Forest Service had revoked the last free grazing rights, locals fought back under the banner of the Alianza Federal de las Mercedes, a union of descendants of land grantees.

A series of “camp-ins” on Forest Service land led to mass arrests and ultimately to a gun battle in the summer of 1967 between state police and about 20 Alianza members, including Moises Morales, outside the county courthouse in the town of Tierra Amarilla.

Four lawmen were wounded. Morales and his companions fled, hiding out in the mountains for several days as hundreds of National Guardsmen and police searched for them. Eventually, Morales was arrested and spent six months in jail.

“It was worth it,” he said. “We accomplished respect.”

When the counterculture migrated to these mountains in the early 1970s and took up residence in dozens of communes and makeshift homesteads, many encountered threats and some were burned out. In the late 1980s, angry residents once again took up arms when a group of outside investors sought to subdivide a portion of the Chama Valley in northern Rio Arriba County. No one was shot this time, and the dispute ended in a negotiated compromise.

Today, village residents insist that control of their own lands is vital to the survival of one of the oldest intact cultures in an increasingly homogeneous nation.

Slightly larger than Connecticut, Rio Arriba County spreads out across three mountain ranges and two of the most fertile river valleys in the state--the Chama and the Rio Grande.

Beauty and Poverty

Geographically, it is a country of startling contrasts. To the west, sandstone canyons immortalized in the paintings of Georgia O’Keefe step up to the green, terraced uplands of the Chama Valley. To the east, the land rises steeply from the Rio Grande Gorge to the 13,000-foot peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

Most of the county’s 38,000 people live in semi-isolated towns and villages, some as small as Vallecitos, with only a few hundred inhabitants. Many of the villages have clung precariously to life since the 18th century, when the inhabitants used clubs and spears to ward off raiding Comanches.

About one-quarter of Rio Arriba’s population lives below the poverty line. Unemployment hovers around 11%.

Traditional livelihoods remain a major part of the local economy. People continue to tend small cattle herds, grow alfalfa, make furniture, and weave blankets, rugs and clothes from the coarse wool of churro sheep, brought here from Spain 300 years ago.

The fast-growing towns of Santa Fe and Taos are only an hour away, but they are a world apart from places like Vallecitos, where cows find shade under the eaves of ancient jacal (mud) houses and a young man still must ask permission from a girl’s father before he can escort her to a school dance.

Here, beside ancient irrigation ditches under the shade of wizened cottonwoods, it is easy to forget that the mountain West is being altered by urban growth more dramatically than any other region.

Here, it’s easy to pine for the dying West whose muscular virtues and rough-hewn charm often masked cruelty to people and the environment. And it is tempting to sympathize with the villagers in their struggle against outside influences.

But that struggle still has a hard edge. To this day, the Forest Service warns hikers--whom residents associate with the environmental movement--against leaving their cars unattended at remote trail heads.

And conservation groups like the Santa Fe-based Forest Guardians, who led the court fight against logging La Manga old-growth trees, find themselves tarred with the same brush as the Yankee politicians and real estate speculators who preyed on the original owners of the land.

Members of the Forest Guardians, including its president, Sam Hitt, have been roughed up, hung in effigy and decried as racists.

Tall, slightly stooped and professorial-looking, Hitt as a young man lived in rural Rio Arriba County.

Now in his 50s, he speaks with a weary, slightly bitter edge to his voice when he talks about his connections with a culture that has come to revile him, at least publicly.

“I was part of the back-to-the-land movement of the ‘70s,” Hitt said. “I wanted to raise my kids in the country, grow my own food, live the good life and all that.”

In northern New Mexico, Hitt worked for a federal rural energy assistance program. He helped residents build solar greenhouses, heating their homes with less propane or firewood and allowing them to qualify for conservation tax credits.

It was the stories his neighbors told about the disappearing wildlife--songbirds, goshawks, prairie chicken, native trout and river otter--that awakened him to the frailty of the natural world around him.

“The people I lived with knew about the damage done by grazing cattle near streams. They knew what birds nested in the dead trees people chopped down for firewood. It’s their leaders that are in denial.”

On a blustery summer day, Hitt trudges along one of the places he worries about. Stream banks are bald. Dust devils swirl around clumps of cholla and prickly pear, about the only vegetation left in what was once a green bosque thick with willows, cottonwoods and migrating songbirds.

Hitt, who is running as a Green Party candidate for state lands commissioner, comes here to make a point about desertification, a process more commonly associated with Africa and Asia. Experts believe that, over the past century, the pace of land degradation has been more rapid in the fragile greenbelts of the American Southwest than in most Third World areas.

This little valley, along Ojo Caliente Creek, was once part of the historic commons open to untold numbers of livestock for hundreds of years. In the last four years, it has been fenced off by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. But there are breaks in the fence, and it is clear from the fresh tracks and the absence of greenery that the cows still know their way in.

Conditions in the nearby mountains often are no better.

“It’s clear from the heavily eroded terrain around many old mountain villages that the people there weren’t any better stewards than any other European Americans,” said William deBuys, author of “Enchantment and Exploitation,” the most comprehensive history of the region.

Abuses of the Land

Local leaders are quick to blame outsiders for the environmental damage that has been done, and there are plenty of culprits to point to--from the Texas cattle herds of the late 19th century to the British timber company that had logged the mountains around La Manga heavily for years, leaving the island of old growth that became the object of so much controversy.

“We’ll end the abuses when we have regained control of the land,” said Morales, who has endorsed a plan in Congress that calls for a commission to devise a remedy for the land grant inequities.

The most realistic resolution under discussion, Morales said, would give local people substantially more authority over the 2.5 million acres of ancestral lands now in the hands of the U.S. Forest Service.

“It would be good for us and for the land,” he said.

“If we hadn’t taken such good care of [it], people wouldn’t be fighting over it today.

“There wouldn’t be all the interest there is in wilderness recreation. People wouldn’t be moving here. Real estate prices and property taxes wouldn’t be going up.”

Morales is working on two environmentally beneficial ordinances, one to curb the spread of unregulated subdivisions and another to stop logging on mountainsides where erosion can damage streams that local communities depend on for irrigation and drinking water.

The ordinance would apply only to private lands, and would not curb logging in places like La Manga, which is in a national forest.

“Land is not a commodity,” Morales said. “It is your mother who will nourish you if you do the same in return.”

An aging ex-rebel, Morales at 50 is regarded by many of his constituents as something of an elder statesman. But his hectic schedule reflects the commonplace demands of a rural, working-class life.

He divides his time between his auto repair shop, his family’s cattle herd, the county commission and a local economic development corporation that is trying to find markets for local products--wool, lamb and beef, furniture and the logs from La Manga.

“It’s a balancing act between two worlds, trying to participate in the mainstream economy and raise our children in a traditional culture,” Morales said.

In Canjilon, the village where he lives, the two worlds unfold along dirt streets, among chicken coops and outhouses, fancy pickup trucks and satellite dishes.

Canjilon is one of many parts of the county not yet served by natural gas lines, and many people still heat their homes with firewood. Fire hydrants are insulated with the wool of recently shorn sheep. The head of an elk stares balefully out from a backyard basketball hoop, where it’s been hung by its antlers.

For now, at least, Canjilon is too far off the tourist routes to feel the impact of outsiders who are beginning to push north into Rio Arriba County from Santa Fe, opening galleries, bed and breakfasts and transforming pastures into nonworking, weekend ranches.

But the migration is very much on the minds of Morales and his neighbors, the Bacas, as it was one recent weekend when both families were engaged in an annual rite--the branding, ear docking and castrating of young calves in preparation for driving the herds onto high pastures, or “allotments,” managed by the Forest Service.

“No offense, but by outsiders, we are talking about Anglos, city people, animal rights activists,” said Paul Baca. “People who don’t understand our culture or who are out to get us.”

In a cold, mountain rain, the Bacas and the Moraleses drove 80 cows toward high pastures on Forest Service land just south of town. The drovers worked on foot, with dogs, and in all-terrain vehicles and pickup trucks.

Morales followed the herd in an old Dodge power wagon, his 10-year-old daughter beside him, his 20-gauge “gopher gun” slung across the dashboard.

“There is where I shot my first deer,” he said, pointing to a patch of woods. “Over there, on the road, is where the forest rangers falsely accused my grandfather of stealing a lamb.”

On the way home, he stopped at the ranch of Tobias Leyba. The ranch was a sanctuary for activists during the heyday of the Alianza.

Morales and Leyba reminisced, then talked about the Forest Guardians’ latest move--a lawsuit that has already forced thousands of cows off riverside allotments in national forests to the south.

The two men talked beside an old mud and log shed where Alianza leaders met before the courthouse raid.

“Something like it could happen again,” Morales said. “We are fighting against policies that tear at the taproot of our culture.”

“They are trying to throw us away,” Leyba said.