This Year At Bioneers: Arturo Sandoval
Shortly after my first wife and I landed in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1974, we moved to a small farm 25 miles north of town. Chimayo is home to the Santuario de Chimayo, called the Lourdes of North America for its reputedly miraculous healing dirt. It’s one of the famous traditional Spanish Northern Villages that remained after the Conquistadores retreated south around 1600. The villages remained largely isolated for centuries in this beautiful though harsh high mountain desert. The communities are close-knit, deeply familial, and profoundly religious.
Nora and I wanted to get back to the land to heal ourselves and to farm. We wanted to learn basic real-world life-ways, from growing food to solar building, canning vegetables and cutting firewood.
In this high desert mountain ecology, water is life. Our farm’s water rights were administered by a community-based system of acequias, ditches diverted from the Santa Cruz River originating in the Rocky Mountains above us.
The acequia system was originally hand-dug centuries ago by the first Spanish settlers from the rocky hard earth. They brought the practice from Spain, but it was originally developed by Islamic desert cultures in North Africa. Governing water was the basis of Sharia - Islamic law - the word Sharia means water.
The village treated water as a commons requiring strict governance. The mayor domo of the acequia was our first visitor. Juan Trujillo, a saturnine figure carrying a battered shovel over his shoulder, made sure we understood our obligations to use only as much as he permitted, when he permitted. He told us guns had been drawn over such matters. And, I learned, I was expected to show up on Saturday for the annual community ditch cleaning day.
I never worked so hard in my life, but about 60 men and boys armed with shovels and an occasional bottle of Jack Daniels left me in the dust, or more accurately the mud. Only sheer will power kept me lifting spoon after spoon of impossibly heavy mud while willows whipped my sunburned face. But I had to prove myself. A newcomer and a city boy, I was also an Anglo, one of only six Anglo families in a valley of about 5,000 Hispanics with centuries-old roots in this place.
We really did farm and the community came to accept us. Because most young people were leaving the land, anyone who farmed seriously gained community respect. Our beloved Spanish next-door neighbors relished floating our baby daughter Ramona down the acequia in an inner tube to her squealing delight.
I was elected Treasurer of the ditch committee, which I took as a great honor. Until I discovered it also meant Juan would be calling me at 5am on Sunday mornings to fix the ditch. But truly it was an honor. I became a member of a community built around the commons of water and food. For us, the healing dirt of Chimayo was tierra sagrada.
Arturo Sandoval is an elder and esteemed leader in the Indo-Hispano lineage of Northern New Mexico. Arturo’s life work is as a bridge-builder, organizer and teacher. He works among the often conflicted indigenous, Latino and Anglo cultures of the Southwest, helping revitalize local and regional cultures, protecting ecosystems, and boosting economic development in one the country’s poorest regions. He deeply understands the profoundly important and critically endangered traditional knowledge these diverse cultures have to teach the dominant culture - from a living commons to a profound love of community and the land – tierra sagrada.
Arturo is founder and president of the highly respected non-profit Center of Southwest Culture, which helps develop healthy indigenous and Latino communities through economic development initiatives and educational and cultural work in the Southwestern U.S. and México. He has advised community-based organizations, large companies and government bodies at the local, national and international levels.
With 40 years’ experience in media and public relations, he has worked as an award-winning print journalist, TV news anchor and news photographer. He is also founder and president of VOCES, Inc., a communications and organizational-development consulting firm based in Albuquerque and Chihuahua, Mexico. Bioneers is honored to work with Arturo on our Dreaming New Mexico Localized Foodshed project.
Please join us and Arturo Sandoval, one of our great visionary leaders from Nuevo Mexico, at Bioneers 2009.
