Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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"This theoretically and methodologically innovative study of how environmental politics shape and are shaped by race, class, and nationalism in the Southwest will make an important contribution to environmental anthropology and history as well as to border studies for years to come. An exciting book, it is also highly readable and can be used in advanced undergraduate as well as graduate-level courses."--Ana Maria Alonso, author of "Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico's Northern Frontier"

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UNDERSTORIES

Duke University Press

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

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...