Reies Lopez Tijerina – even today opinions are divided. Was he a communist agitator or a selfless proponent of the poor and underprivileged? Let’s start at the beginning and explore.

​Tierra Amarilla, just a few miles north of Abiquiú on Hwy 84, is a sleepy little town. It almost looks like a ghost town with a number of closed business buildings and abandoned houses. It is somewhat surprising that it has been the Rio Arriba county seat since 1880 when the town got its current name (“Yellow Earth”; before that, it was called “Las Nutrias”). When the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad constructed lines that connected Chama to their vast network, the area around T.A. must have experienced a cultural and economic expansion that just as quickly ended when the railroads stopped running.
 
The current courthouse was built in 1917. I have visited it a few times; once because I was called for jury duty, another time to attend a meeting of the County Commissioners; always totally uneventful trips. I was therefore utterly perplexed when I learned that there had been a raid on the courthouse in 1967, the National Guard was called in, and one person got shot!

About 20 members of a group which was founded in 1963 by Reies Tijerina and which called itself La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants) assembled at the courthouse on June 5, 1967, in order to place the district attorney Alfonso G. Sanchez under citizen’s arrest. They also wanted to free a few members of the group who had been arrested a day or two earlier. The Alianza had planned a meeting in Coyote, and Sanchez used police force to break up the gathering, and several members were taken into custody. However, the county judge had already freed the imprisoned people, and Sanchez wasn’t in T.A. at all but in Santa Fe mobilizing police forces. When they couldn’t find Sanchez, the Alianza group took a sheriff and a reporter hostage; they also shot and wounded a prison guard and a police officer. The event caused national attention; Governor David Cargo called in the National Guard which descended with tanks and helicopters, state police, and local sheriffs for what probably was the biggest manhunt in New Mexico history. The Alianza members and their leader, Reies Tijerina, fled to the near-by mountains where sympathetic ranchers protected them. Only after Tijerina’s wife (who was pregnant) had been arrested, did they surrender to authorities in Albuquerque. 

​By now, you’re probably curious what this was all about: WHAT did the Alianza want to accomplish? WHY was the district attorney so set to arrest its members?
 
The name of the group gives a clue: it was all about land grants. An issue that even today can cause heated debates. It goes back to the time when the land here was a colony of Spain. The governors who were accountable to the King of Spain granted the land to people here. A person would petition with the governor or his representative; when the petition was granted, the person would receive a document which would guarantee that the person could occupy and use the land. Actually, that was a condition: the person HAD to occupy and use the land. Something like developers was not allowed. Communities could apply for land grants as well, in order to establish settlements.
 
When Mexico gained independence from Spain, they continued with the customary land grant system. An essential part of this system was the fact that the people didn’t really OWN the land – it was theirs to use and to live on, but if somebody would find gold or some other valuable substance, this would belong to the King. (I learned this from a video produced by New Mexico State Historian Rob Martínez; if you want to learn more, here is the link). 

​Things changed when New Mexico became part of the United States at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848. Although the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo confirmed the legitimacy of land grants under Mexican law, in practice many people lost their rights. Americans had a different understanding of land ownership, and communally held ownership was a foreign concept – Ejidos (Community-owned land) were not recognized under U.S. law and fell into private hands. Much of it became National Forest or was assigned to the Bureau of Land Management. People didn’t have their original copies any more, and lost their land. They were not prepared to deal with a complicated legal system and especially with unscrupulous speculators. The Santa Fe Ring, a powerful group of corrupt lawyers, businessmen, and politicians, swindled land grant holders into selling their land. One of them, Thomas B. Catron who became a U.S. Senator, managed to acquire 3,000,000 acres of land. Compared to these individuals who often hired assassins to eliminate their opponents,  Reies Tijerina looks almost like a choir boy.
 
Well, not really. Reies Tijeria was no angel, he wasn’t perfect. Born in 1926 in Fall City, Texas, he experienced from a young age the discriminating treatment of poor, migrant families with Hispanic/Mexican origin. After he became an ordained pentecostal minister, he founded a little community of some 20 families in the southern Arizona desert, The Valley of Peace, in 1955. He moved with his family and a few of his followers to New Mexico in 1957. That’s where he learned about the land grants and the injustice he perceived when he learned about the many families who had been dispossessed of their lands. This became his new passion: to bring justice to people who had lost their land, and to highlight the unequal working conditions that so many Native Americans and Hispanios had to endure.
 
This led to conflicts with lawmakers and the police who branded him as a communist agitator, and eventually to the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse raid.
 
After being convicted of charges related to the raid in 1970, the federal government sent Tijerina to a prison for the mentally deranged where he was forced to take psychotropic drugs. When he was paroled two years later, he was something of a broken man. He died in 2015 in El Paso, Texas.

Here is a corrido about these events performed by Roberto Martínez and his group  Los Reyes de Albuquerque who was a friend of Tijerina. It was played on all the local radio stations and was featured in the Smithsonian touring exhibition Corridos sin Fronteras / Ballads Without Borders. 

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​A quick mention has to be made of Tijerina’s involvement in the larger Civil Rights Movement: in March 1968, he was elected to be the leader of the Chicano contingent of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and worked  with Dr. Martin Luther King to organize the Poor People’s March on Washington. After Dr. King’s assassination in April, Tijerina continued his work under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy.
 
When you decide whether Tijerina was a good guy or a bad guy, keep in mind that to stand up for minorities’ rights in the late Sixties meant to put one’s life in jeopardy. Justice seemed to be reserved for the privileged, and the punishment for acts of violence were hugely disproportionate, depending on who was the perpetrator. Maybe Tijerina was sort of in the middle, like most of us.

I wrote about the origin of cats last week, so how about dogs? Well, to me, dogs seem way more varied than cats, both in size and disposition. I’ve seen dogs that barely look like dogs anymore they’ve been bred so much. Again, there’s a discussion in there I’m not willing to touch, at least not today.
 
We have 3 dogs. I love having dogs and wouldn’t want to live without them. They are all mutts, and strays. They all 3 showed up and adopted us, on different occasions of course. They all 3 have very different personalities, and ways to be annoying. Generally, I think of dogs coming from wolves, originally. Healers were bred from the Australian Dingo, BTW. Just a fun fact.
 
The New York Times had an article describing domesticated dog fossils found in Europe from over 15,000 years ago. There is also speculation that dogs were getting domesticated at roughly the same time, in Asia, and in Europe and the Middle East. There may be DNA evidence supporting that theory.
 
For fairly obvious reasons, at least if you have a dog or are a dog fan, they can be quite useful. They can be trained quite readily, some say, I wouldn’t know, and they can then be helpful in hunting, fighting, and protection. That all makes sense for early mankind.
 
I think they make a fairly good friend and companion, if not a bit needy sometimes. It is speculated that all dogs descend from the Gray Wolf, though likely from two time periods. It is also suggested that it would take 130,000 years for the wolf to be bred into the modern dog, which implies that wolves were cohabitating or at least inter mingling with humans well before they were being directly selectively bred.
 
The genetics of dogs is far less mixed up than you might imagine though. Particularly with Pure Bred species. A great article to look at, if you are interested, is from the PBS, which you can find by clicking here.

By BD Bondy

A while ago I wrote something about a genetically modified something or other. I don’t remember what. But it had to do with how humans have been genetically modifying their food for a long time, basically, since humans have been farming.
 
These genetic modifications weren’t done in a lab, but through evolution, through breeding qualities that were desired. Cultivating the wheat that grew with bigger grain, or breeding cattle that made more desirable milk, or meat. Bigger, or more docile, or better color, or sweeter. Whatever it was, it was cultivated over the millennia to be more what humans wanted.
 
Not everything, of course, but chickens, pigs, cattle; those aren’t natural, they were bred to be what they are today. Same with corn, rice, wheat.  The discussion about scientifically messing around with genes in a lab is NOT in this article. Maybe some other time.
 
I’ve got all these feral cats showing up, passing through. They live under our porch for a time. Sometimes for a long time. They most often leave after they’ve been captured and brought in to be fixed. No doubt a traumatic experience for them, if not humiliating. I’m sorry, but it needs to be done.

​​I love the cats under our porch. They kill mice and rats. I know. I’ve seen them. We have a camera under there and I have proof. They’ve also killed birds. Also on camera. Oh yes, that’s what I wrote about before. They are the number one bird killer in the world. By far. Feral and domestic cats account for the top 2 slots of biggest bird killer world wide. Wind turbines are on the list, but not the top 10. Read about that HERE.  https://www.fws.gov/library/collections/threats-birds
 
So, as you can guess by the title, I was wondering where cats came from. They definitely aren’t ‘natural’. Don’t get mad, I’m not disparaging them. I think cats are interesting. They are sometimes adorable, and sometimes horrible, but they are amazing. Astonishing reflexes. Super fast.
 
I asked Google, and this is the short answer: Domesticated cats all come from wildcats called Felis silvestris lybica that originated in the Fertile Crescent in the Near East Neolithic period and in ancient Egypt in the Classical period.
 
Interesting, but not really an explanation. The Library of Congress has quite a bit more to say on the matter HERE. 
 
Cat domestication appeared early in civilized humans, and apparently in two major periods, the latter being in Egypt. Also, it seems that a major selective breeding change happened during the medieval period pertaining to the coats of cats, apparently trying to breed them according to their coloring.
Cats are supposed to have been taken all over the world via shipping vessels, likely to help with the rodent problems on board. Cats clearly became useful and desired by humans and a symbiotic relationship has kept them going strong. I loved fostering our kitten which was made under our porch. And his father, whom we also caught, was a pleasant fellow. His elusive mother, still fertile, the cleverest of the bunch, remains under the porch.
 
Get your pet cats neutered, please, and try and keep them inside. They will live longer.

Zach Hively
Fools Gold

As a man with an advanced degree in English, I must say that few literary delights compare to building something tangible with my own two hands. Barring that, because in fairness I use English far more often than I use corded drills, very little compares to getting my dad to build things for me.

With me! I mean WITH me. Father and son, drawing up plans, watching instructional YouTube videos, buying carloads of hardware from every home improvement store in the county then returning everything because the hardware they bought was the wrong size hardware—this is as American a pairing as playing catch in the yard. It’s even more American if one of them is playing catch by himself because the other one has a job and responsibilities and doesn’t have TIME to do this right now, Dad.

But—I wanted a pergola. It would make me feel more retired, even though I’m not and (being an English major) probably never will be. So unless I can build a pergola out of a comparative analysis of magical realism in the collected works of Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez, for which I would have to read a LOT more of both authors, I needed to suck it up and dedicate some of those endless working hours to helping my actually retired dad get excited about starting a new temp job, only for free. Because I sure can’t research all this lumber by myself.
And boy, is there a lot to consider with lumber. Such as: why is a two-by-four actually a one-point-five-by-three-point-five, yet when they say it’s ten feet long it’s actually ten feet long? Did the definition of an inch shift since the invention of lumber, while feet stayed the same? Or is this, as I suspect, a dark conspiracy backed by Big Wood to nullify all my lumbering calculations?

Ah, but I’m getting ahead of myself. You see, before we even started with the lumber, we had to set the concrete.

The cardboard forms for concrete pillars, as you may know, are round; bags of concrete, on the other hand, are not. This set up Pops and me for doing some math. It being a word problem, I felt qualified to help:

“If a pillar is eight inches in diameter,” Pops began, “and we need to bury them thirty inches deep…”

“Are these real inches or lumber inches?” I asked helpfully. “And, how many inches equal a pound of concrete?”

Like a couple of smart fellas, we budgeted the entire first day of Project Pergola for buying concrete. This disappointed me somewhat; I had visions of pizza and margaritas under the pergola before sundown. But, Pops knows best that some things, like his son, take longer to reach fruition than you bargained for.

Day Two, Pops called in to his one-day-a-week volunteer gig, and I had to find a decent bookmark for the novel I was reading, so that we could dedicate ourselves to mixing concrete. You don’t want to half-ass mixing concrete—not if you ever want to use your wheelbarrow as a wheelbarrow again. But you might want to half-ass mixing concrete, if you have any desire to move your body without hurting ever again.

It turns out—despite suggestive adjectives to the contrary all over those bags of concrete—that concrete requires a great deal of force to mix. Strangely enough, this might have been the moment that Pops chose to disclose to me, in a moment of male bonding, that he had scheduled surgery for his hernia.

“I can handle the hose,” Pops said. “And I can poke the air bubbles out of the concrete after it’s poured. But you get to mix.”

So I did. I flexed every muscle in my body mixing concrete. And when those gave out, I flexed the muscles that aren’t actually muscles, like spotting an its when an it’s is needed, just in case they might help. They didn’t. But I mixed the snot out of that concrete, until Pops said, “Let’s call that good enough; we don’t want it to set before we pour it.”
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He handled smoothing that concrete and setting some brackets with a master’s touch, and I made sure his dialogue included semicolons correctly. And that was the end of Day Two.
I’d like to say Day Three saw a pergola. Instead, it saw Pops drive home for some much-deserved R&R and a long session of researching bolt lengths. It saw me gazing proudly, for a great many hours, at the six concrete stumps sticking out of my back yard. Someday, I will have a pergola to enjoy. But even that cannot compare to the pride I feel today. It’s like I am standing taller. Which I am, if you measure in lumber inches.

~Jessica Rath

​​Got ya – you probably thought of chile. But that’s not what I mean, the topic of this article is: grapes. The grapes used for wine-making.

Did you know that the first wine-making grapes in the U.S. were grown in New Mexico, not in California? And did you know that the initial reason for producing wine was the Catholic Church? When the Spanish colonists settled in the Americas, including what is now New Mexico, several Catholic religious orders built churches and established missions so they could convert the indigenous populations. Franciscan monks followed the colonists to the upper Rio Grande valleys and to Santa Fe which in 1610 became the capital of Santa Fe de Nuevo México, a province of New Spain. The monks had to celebrate a daily mass, and for the sacrament of the Holy Communion they needed wine – which had spent many  months on galleys coming across from Spain, then overland to Mexico City, then from there via trade routes up to the Santa Fe province.  The wine was shipped in caskets with lead tops, which was probably poisonous; or it was shipped in goatskins, and by the time it arrived it was probably vinegar. So, the monks used choke cherries for making early wine. 
 
The Spanish King had forbidden the exportation of grape vines because he was  concerned that the New World would take over wine making. But some monks ignored this edict and smuggled some vines into what is now New Mexico, started to cultivate the stock, and soon produced their own wine – with a variety of grapes that is known as the Mission Grape and is still used today.

I learned all this and much more when I visited Stan Bader, owner of Las Parras de Abiquiú,  a five-and-a-half acres organic vineyard. “Las Parras” is Spanish for grapevines, the perfect name for this gorgeous property. I wanted to learn more about grape growing and wine making, and I couldn’t have come to a better person. Stan’s obvious love for and extensive experience with this topic make him a veritable treasure trove when it comes to anything related to grapes. 

Officially, he’s retired. In  1996/97 New Mexico’s department of Agriculture  was trying to encourage the growing of grapes, to boost the  industry, and Stan thought this might be an interesting thing to do  after retirement, as it would allow him to spend a lot of time outdoors.
 
“In 1996 we put our first grapes in and it has been a learning process ever since”, Stan told me. “I put in 200 Cabernet Franc grapes, and supposedly they’re the hardier grapes for cold weather. After one year they grew fantastic, 20-foot long vines. But when we came back next spring and started to prune, we found that they were literally dead. All the way back to the root. I went to an education conference in Albuquerque, and I was asking an old-timer what was the cause, why did this happen. He said, ‘This is the best thing that could have happened to you!’ WHAT? ‘Well’, he said, ‘you tear those out and put something in that will grow’. So that’s what we did. We took everything out, and kept six plants for 10 years, but they were never able to produce except for a couple of years. The roots never died, but the top does.”
 
I wanted to know WHY these grapes didn’t do well, and what other varieties would be more successful?
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 “The grapes used for Cabernet Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, and other French wines just don’t do well here”, Stan explained. “Partly because of the cold, but also because of desiccation. We have no way to block the cold spring wind that comes down the Chama River, and that wind has extremely low humidity. The vines get dried out. We learned over time that if you keep their feet wet, if you keep the root zone wet over the winter, then the bud that’s produced up on the vine can survive.” 

“You can take a razor blade and cut across a bud – that will expose the primary, secondary, third, and sometimes even the fourth bud. You’ll see that the primary bud has died, it is brown. But the secondary isn’t. It’s green. It will take the place of the primary. BUT – it’s only half as productive as the first one. And if you lose THAT one, you’re looking at the third one, and that one is there to keep the plant alive and survive that year, but  you have to wait for other years to get fruit. We’ve had situations in the 20-plus years that I’ve been growing grapes here that everything, particularly the white grapes, died. And we had to start all over again. The roots are fine, and the little vines from the ground up which are pencil-size or a little bigger, they survive. In the spring the sap is starting to come up. You’ve already done some pruning, and if you can see drops of sap at the tips where you pruned, it means it’s coming alive, the roots are sending the moisture up. But if there’s a cold snap, if it’s in the 20s for a whole night or anything  longer than five hours,  that’s their death. If it’s under five hours  you might get them through.  The old trunks are too brittle. The moisture inside is mostly water, that water crystallizes, freezes, and then it expands,  but the brittle wood can’t, and it cracks. They can be 1/4-inch wide and go all the way to the ground. That kills the trunk, kills the arms, and you’ll have to take those out. The thin ones, pencil-size or a little larger, are more limber and the freezing doesn’t split them.”

 “A lot of the popular grapes which come from the Mediterranean area, from France, or from Germany, we can’t grow. But we can grow hybrids. Almost all my grapes are hybrids, except for Riesling: that’s a grape we can grow here. There’s a sweet version of Riesling, and there’s a dry version. They both grow here in New Mexico. Riesling is a popular wine here. While we have problems growing Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot here in the northern parts, we can grow other grapes, and we learned to make really good wines utilizing these grapes.”  

I had no idea that grapes are so sensitive but,  not everything works here in the valley, Stan says. Other places like  Velarde for example, at the mouth of the canyon of the Rio Grande, are much better for growing; people there can grow all kinds of grapes whereas Las Parras can’t. They can grow Riesling, Gewürztraminer, grapes for German wines.

“I say that I can tell people more about what NOT to do, than what to do. I learned the hard way. “

“I got into this because of my interest, as a kind of hobby. I ended up doing way more than I should have, my first 200 vines were a mistake, sort of – but other varieties, the hybrids, did well. Like Léon Millot, for example;  the French used it to color lighter wines because it has a dark skin for color. They use it to color wines like Pinot Noir which  doesn’t have a good dark color, but has great fruiting flavor. The addition of Léon Millot grapes gives the wine a robust color”.

For Stan, growing grapes is  a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. He warns though that it is  very difficult to make a profit.  Crop production isn’t all that robust, the vines just can’t produce like they do in California. Also, up here in northern New Mexico the grape vines native to the mediterranean regions (they’re called “vitis vinifera”, different from vinifera hybrids) don’t grow.  Wineries pay a premium price for those grapes whereas for the hybrids they don’t. And Stan’s vineyard is too small to have mechanical pickers, so the grapes have to be picked by hand. Plus, they have to be pruned, fertilized, watered, weeded, and if there are any pests, one has to spray. Luckily, here in the north pest control is very minimal, except for  powdery mildew  which can be controlled pretty easily with a food-grade mineral oil spray.

Las Parras is a certified organic, whole farm, but  the wineries don’t pay anything extra  for organic grapes. Most wineries don’t produce organic wines because all the grapes are mixed together. 

“On my five and a half  acres I’m doing well if I can get close to 20 tons”, Stan is telling me. “Last year we only got about half of that. For one, we had terrific winds in the spring, the whole time when they were in bud-break state and started to flower. That strong wind inhibits pollination. Grapes don’t rely on honey bees, the blossoms are too small; they rely on other native bees, and they can only handle  a light wind or breeze. Plus, May AND June had periods when it was blistering hot, close to 100 degrees, that shifts the grape plant down in terms of growth. So they didn’t produce that much.”

I was curious to learn where the Las Parras grapes would end up:
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“ I sell my grapes to four different wineries. Prior to Covid, I was almost exclusively selling to Black Mesa Winery  in Velarde. Covid disrupted the wine business, people weren’t going to restaurants, and a lot of the wine is being sold to restaurants. Lots of wineries were left with wine that they couldn’t sell. Now, after Covid, Black Mesa is selling and making hard apple cider, because  some parts of the community don’t drink wine very much. They drink beer. Apple cider right now is a hot item, and it can be ordered in  bistros and similar establishments  that sell beer. So, they don’t need so many grapes, and I sell to other wineries as well: to Tony Black’s Smuggler Winery in Bosque,  to Jaramillo Vineyards in Belen, and to Sheehan Winery near Albuquerque.”

After the interview we walked across the vineyard a bit. It was a windy, blustery day so I said hello to the resident cat – “He thinks he’s a dog”, Stan said – and then I left. Maybe the next time you drink a glass of wine, if it was produced in New Mexico, you might ponder whether any of the grapes came from Las Parras. And good luck to Stan for this year’s crops!