Jake Kosek is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. He is a coeditor of Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference, also published by Duke University Press.

UNDERSTORIES

THE POLITICAL LIFE OF FORESTS IN NORTHERN NEW MEXICOBy JAKE KOSEK

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2006 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3832-1

Contents

Preface……………………………………………………………….viiAcknowledgments………………………………………………………..xviiIntroduction…………………………………………………………..1ONE The Cultural Politics of Memory and Longing……………………………30TWO Sovereign Natures…………………………………………………..62THREE Passionate Attachments and the Nature of Belonging……………………103FOUR Racial Degradation and Environmental Anxieties………………………..142FIVE “Smokey Bear Is a White Racist Pig”………………………………….183SIX Nuclear Natures: In the Shadows of the City on the Hill…………………228Conclusion: On Pion and Politics………………………………………..276Notes…………………………………………………………………289Works Cited……………………………………………………………345Index…………………………………………………………………371

Chapter One

THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF MEMORY AND LONGING

Tenemos sangre de Indios. Tenemos raices en la tierra. Somos Indgenas. [We have Indian blood. We have roots in the land. We are indigenous people.] –Erwin Rivera, Chicano artist and activist

“Even the land forgets,” Evila Garcia laments while walking slowly down the main street of Truchas toward the post office. As she tells me about her past, she frequently stops and points to an empty lot next to a trailer park here, a boarded-up building there. In them, she sees a panorama of mills, schools, houses, stores, corrals, and the sites of marriages, mishaps, and tragic deaths. Many of these sites and events are no longer entirely visible on the landscape, but they form part of her vision-a vision composed of memories that bind her to others who share them, even if what they share is uneven and passionately disputed.

Some of these memories are her own, like those of the intersection where she witnessed her cousin’s death in a car accident in the 1970s. Or those of the forest being carved into sharply delineated squares for logging, which are still visible on the lower pine slopes of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains thirty years later. Others memories have been inherited, but they belong to her nonetheless, and she guards them closely. One is of her family bloodline, which she traces back to a Spanish soldier who rode with the famous conquistador Don Juan Oate. Indeed, she claims that her grandson Antonio “gets his energy and curiosity from the blood of the Spanish explorer in him.” Another is of her ancestors, who, in the eighteenth century, were granted rights to the land where she now lives-and to the forest and watershed on what is now Forest Service land.

After our walk, I sit in her living room and she tells me of her role in bringing the healthcare clinic to town, of her fears about the movement of drugs from the nearby villages of Espaola and Chimay into Truchas, and, most passionately, of the loss of land-grant land to lawyers, land barons, and the U.S. government. Unlike many active land-grant leaders, she is not an overtly political person; in fact, she is wary of many of the land-grant activists, of their strategies and personalities. The passion with which she talks about the land is not expressed in grand statements of nationalism or declarations of global injustices but through her memories, from which she forms a sense of herself and her commitment to the northern New Mexican Hispano community. She says, “If we lose the land, we lose our history…. We cannot let go.” When I ask her about the land that was lost, she reluctantly concedes, “We did lose most of it, but we have not let go of it. Not totally; not all of us. Not yet, anyway.”

Evila’s small adobe house is near the middle of town. Her front yard is an empty lot where she and her husband used to garden. Behind the house rise the distant Truchas Peaks. To the west is the acequia, or irrigation ditch, and beyond it stretch open alfalfa fields spotted with neighbors’ old houses and double-wide trailers. All but one of her sons have left the region, enabled and emboldened by their involvement in military service: Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm. Their photos-along with those of her brothers who died in World War II-rest, carefully placed among small ceramic animals and religious candles, on a small wooden mantel covered with a hand-woven lace cloth. A wooden cross hangs above them. Unlike many others in northern New Mexico, Evila believes that “God and country will do what is right” and give back the land that was guaranteed to them after the Mexican-American War by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. For this reason, she is hopeful about the current investigation by the federal General Accounting Office and about bills in the state legislature that promise to address what has become known as “the land-grant question.” Many congressional hearings, state bills, federal investigations, regional studies, committees, court cases, legislative actions, and hearings have been mounted to research or resolve the “land-grant question.” Some of them were undertaken with genuine concern; most amount to cynical political posturing to woo the powerful Hispano voting bloc.

Still, Evila maintains that she must remain hopeful and not forget the past. She believes that “our [Hispanos’] future is based on the past. If we forget the past, we have no future.” Moreover, “Without the grant, we are just another group of poor people. With the grant, we are different…. We have a history that’s older than this country and older than the Anglos’ [history] here.” She insists on continuing to support the land grant even if its management often leads to bitter conflicts and divisions within the community, for “even if we do not have all the land, at least we have part of it … [and] that’s what holds us together.”

Indeed, the Truchas Land Grant lost some of its acreage in the late nineteenth century when the Court of Private Land Claims did not fully recognize the boundaries of the grant. Still, the Truchas Grant was more fortunate than most; only 6 percent of the Spanish land grants were recognized by U.S. courts in New Mexico, leading to the loss of millions of acres of land owned by Mexicans living in what is now the United States. Of the 6 percent that were recognized, much was lost-sometimes illegally, but more often through legal yet unjust methods of deceit and fraud. Though the memories are usually unspecific, people’s passions concerning the loss of land are anything but fleeting. In fact, when I ask about the specifics of the grant, Evila and most others know few of the details. She knows generally where the boundaries are and that the land now under Forest Service management once belonged to la gente del norte-the people of the north. But the exact process by which it was lost seems unimportant: it has become enshrined as a common story-a general history of loss rather than a specific history of a particular piece of land. Moreover, as a people, norteos (northern New Mexicans) have become a community united not so much by their ties to the land and shared practices of production but by their shared memories of loss and longing for the land.

Through these memories, the tragedies of earlier generations are linked to the lives of the present, thereby serving as a basis for claims through right of inheritance. This is a material legacy, and one that links poverty and the dispossession of land to the history of colonization in symbolically powerful ways. This history of dispossession, although it has taken many different forms over the last thirty years, is constantly invoked in public meetings with state representatives, members of Congress, federal agencies, and environmentalists. Conflict that was once framed as “a violation of Mexican nationalism” and “a thorn in the side of American democracy” has become “an abuse of international human rights agreements.” When I ask Evila about the different ways the land-grant struggles have been understood, she says they are all part of a “struggle against forgetting.” But she does not see the remembering as a gesture to address historical injustices, or even as a means to substantiate contemporary claims to the land. Referring to a newspaper article about Hispano workers at Los Alamos, she says she remembers “because the same stuff [injustices] continues to happen today.”

Memories of dispossession and sentiments of longing for land help constitute Hispano identity and make the Hispano community cohere. For this reason, the land itself and, by extension, the forest on it operate simultaneously as a symbolic ground for the reproduction of identity and community, and as a material source of livelihood. In this chapter, I explore the work that is done to stem the tide of forgetting that would obscure these memories. I also explore how the brutal legacy that travels within these memories creates deep divisions and contradictions in Hispanos’ identities and land claims; these memories also provide for powerful political possibilities. Ultimately, the land and forest are inextricably intertwined with powerful sentiments of longing in ways that are key to understanding the deeply passionate responses to contemporary forest politics in New Mexico.

I start by laying out the material history of land in and around Truchas as I learned it through interviews and archives. I would not pose this as the “real history of events,” set in contrast with the “imagined memories of subjective individuals.” Instead, I see it as a material imaginary that has had deeply tangible and powerful political ramifications for the lives of people in northern New Mexico. Next, I explore the politics of a specific incident-one directly linking land struggles to forest lands-around which memories of the past and sentiments of longing have gathered, making it a powerful tool for uniting the Hispano community. Third, I look at some of the contradictions inherent in these claims of community identity through the lens of a contemporary act of “vandalism.” I conclude by returning to the theme of the cultural politics of memory and longing and relating them back to contemporary forest politics in New Mexico.

ORIGIN STORIES

These histories, “real” and “imagined,” point to the materiality and injustice etched in the loss of land. But I want to examine them without portending a fixity, a single coherence, or a teleology: the past is a vibrant but volatile site for contemporary land and forest politics, and to imply that it can be so easily contained would be to miscast it entirely. I tell these origin stories not because they are the only way to understand the past, but because they are the way in which many people involved in contemporary land politics today understand and talk of the past. I find them particularly illuminating because of the audaciousness of the connections that are asserted between identity and the meaning of land, past and present. The leaps between the character of a Spanish explorer and that of Evila’s grandson, between past claims and present assertions, seem to be long ones, yet their coherence across centuries remains remarkably clear and untroubled by the contradictions and nuances of New Mexico’s histories.

These stories of origins and the injustices associated with the land are both collective fictions and undeniable truths. That is, they have been scrupulously researched by scholars and fortified with footnotes and anecdotes. More important, they are the material histories that people have suffered, often brutal histories that, as Evila says, “we must continue the struggle to remember.” But these stories are also collective memories that are made and remade in the present. The history of conquest that I outline in the following section, for example, was told differently twenty years ago; it is not necessarily more accurate now, but it is nonetheless a very different story. A Hispana may describe her past as a member of the Spanish colony and not as a descendant of coma. Even more interestingly, because of the identity she lives, she may not be authorized to claim and recount a history of her native ancestry. For these histories are important not as artifacts of the past, as I hope the two stories in this chapter will illustrate, but for the possibilities they afford for the future.

The following history constitutes the material over which some of the most impassioned contemporary political battles occur. As such, it is profoundly selective and as indicative of contemporary politics and concerns as it is of the history of Spanish conquest and the creation and loss of land-grant lands.

Sentimental Reproductions: Land, Loss, and Community | In 1540, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado drove a Spanish flag into what is now the soil of New Mexico and proclaimed that the king, the pope, and God possessed dominion over this new land. Following these verbal proclamations came material ones, in the form of maps, titles, fences, settlements, and missions that helped make colonial aspirations brutally successful. Indeed, the success of the Spanish conquest brought immense changes to New Mexico for Native Americans, including dislocation from some of their most important agricultural and hunting grounds; enslavement; and the spread of diseases previously unknown in North America, resulting in a dramatic decrease in the native population. In addition, newly introduced livestock, growing in numbers from a few thousand in the seventeenth century to more than two million by 1820, radically transformed the region’s economy and landscape.

As the story commonly goes, the first permanent Spanish settlement in the area was the result of a compact between private enterprise-mainly mining interests-and the Spanish crown. The settlement was to aid, in the words of the conquistador Don Juan Oate, in the “discovery, pacification and conversion of the said provinces of New Mexico.” Oate, who spent a great deal of time in the northern frontier, was well acquainted with commercial ventures of mining and animal husbandry and coercing and enslaving Native Americans for their labor. The king granted his request for the exploration and the creation of the first permanent settlement near what is now Espaola in 1598.

In the process of “discovery, pacification and conversion,” Oate and his men occupied native pueblos, raided the natives’ stores of food and clothing, and engaged in acts of torture, rape, and murder. I will return to some of these acts as well as to the Native American reprisals later, but for now it is enough to note that tensions and violence grew so extreme that many of Oate’s men deserted. The colony would probably have disappeared if it had not been for the efforts of the Franciscan missionaries, who drastically exaggerated their successes, claiming to the king that they had baptized seven thousand “heathens.” They begged the king not to turn his back on the converts and to continue to fund the filling of these “vassals” with deference to God and loyalty to the crown. His Majesty Philip III of Spain granted their request and kept the colony alive at the crown’s expense.

The Spanish established property relations that played a central role in the colonization of the region. One of the first and most notorious was the encomienda system, which extracted labor-in the form of material goods or personal servitude-in exchange for ostensible “protection” and “spiritual welfare.” It was a system that attended to some of the basic concerns of conquest: rewarding the conquerors, defending the acquired land, and “protecting” the subjects. Granting a Native American pueblo as an encomienda to a Spanish conquistador ostensibly achieved all of these. It also gave soldiers loyal to the crown access to the most valuable commodity in the region at the time: labor. These acts did not go unchallenged.

In 1680, a unified alliance of pueblos launched a full-scale rebellion, provoked by the injustices of the encomienda system and the oppression of both the Spanish conquistadors and Franciscan missionaries. Pop, a religious leader in Taos who had been among forty-three religious leaders tortured for the crimes of sorcery and sedition, is widely acknowledged as the main coordinator of the rebellion. At the height of the rebellion, thousands of pueblo Indians surrounded Santa Fe, killing more than four hundred Spaniards, including twenty-one of the province’s thirty-three Franciscan missionaries. They destroyed and looted every Spanish building in the territory, dismantling and systematically demolishing every Christian icon, and succeeded in driving all the Spanish from the region.

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