Culture Clash

Environmental Politics in New Mexico Forest Communities

The Culture Clash story begins in the 1970s in the village of Placitas, New Mexico at the north end of the Sandia Mountains, where author Kay Matthews built a house and began a family while involved in disputes with the Forest Service over forest management and with real estate developers bent on gentrification. It then moves to El Valle, a land grant village of 20 families at the base of the Pecos Wilderness, where she and her family moved in the early 1990s seeking a more rural life. Here, during the rest of that decade and into the 2000s, the small villages of el norte were engaged in battles on numerous fronts: protecting the integrity of traditional acequias; guaranteeing the rights of community-based foresters and ranchers to access public lands; addressing the long standing grievances of the loss of land grants; and maintaining the rural nature of communities through appropriate economic development. As a journalist documenting these struggles, and as a norteño living la lucha, Matthews weaves together a personal narrative and political analysis of a complex and dynamic rural New Mexico.