by the magic of the universe after having entered into such a piece of paradise.
People ate well and generally lived long and fulfilling lives. They possessed a formidable work ethic and an immensely generous and cooperative spirit. Some grew to be very wise. Just as importantly, the young grew up to be responsible members of the community, mastered innumerable survival skills, and possessed enormous amounts of ingenuity, prowess, and most importantly, a working knowledge of the earth. After living in one of our age-old Spanishspeaking communities, renowned cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead pronounced our culture to be“ holistic” and in possession of profoundly humanist values. I am convinced that our pastoral way of life was the principal source for this kind of goodness that naturally flowed forth from human beings.
Once a people stop farming, however, agricultural traditions that developed over centuries and millennia and that require vast reservoirs of knowledge and experience to maintain are extremely difficult to recover. and in seasonal labor in the sheep camps of Wyoming, beet fields of Colorado, or in mining operations throughout the region, suddenly flocked to Los Alamos, the site of the national scientific laboratories that developed atomic energy. There they found work as construction and maintenance workers, which required reliance on their eldest children to carry out much of the farm work left behind, except in the evenings and on weekends when they resumed charge.
A second blow to regional, labor-intensive agriculture followed the wide-spread acquisition of television sets and the influx of entertainment-based mass media and advertising from Hollywood proclaiming a life of pushbutton ease and luxury. This was predicated on relentless consumerism and, of course, the 8:00-to-5:00 jobs people had to strap themselves to in order to afford that lifestyle, but which the cameras never dared to show.
When compared with the manicured lawns and plush houses of suburban, southern California, where much of the messaging originated, rugged northern New Mexico appeared shabby, Spartan, and requiring too much effort. And so it was that by the 1970s, much of the younger generation had already migrated to the West Coast, where the state’ s booming aeronautics industry provided almost certain employment and where Universal Studios and Disneyland provided endless forms of entertainment. Behind them, they left a somber and bewildered elderly population together with the occasional lonesome farmer and their family.
Even with these blows to regional agriculture, a few farmers such as myself remain who value our relationship to the land as much as the food we produce. We manage to carry on this tradition that not only connects us to our immediate ancestors but also to the oldest civilizations of the world. On our farms the strains of Middle Eastern, Iberian, Mexican and Native American foods and technologies mingle with those of our modern U. S. culture. Today, amid sky-high grocery prices, generations of homeless and addicted individuals on the streets,
The growing rupture between people and farming in my region began gradually over the last several decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It became pronounced in the early 1940s when far-flung New Mexico was chosen as the site for the development and testing of the first atomic bomb.
Men who up until then had been employed on their small farms plenty I autumn harvest 2025 19