San Juan Pueblo - Rio Grande Farmers Version

Considering the development pressures, it is at first glance surprising that some Native New Mexicans remain on the land. In fact, efforts are underway to actually expand the rule economic base. An annual event such as the Rio Grande Apple Festival re-asserts regional values of land, family, and community, I'm Kent Patterson reporting. At the Pueblo of San Juan in New Mexico, a modern dehydrator is used to dry chili and vegetables. In the old way, chili was dried in the sun and then tied into the long strings known as re-stress. Now, this machine dries produce for the San Juan Agricultural Cooperatives dried green chili stew. Limwood Brown is manager of the new co-op.

Currently, we can dry about 200 pounds a day of wet material and our new facility will be building this year. We'll be able to do probably about five times that much every day. The larger container here that it's an old walking cooler, this is a research project we're doing on doing a commercial scale solar dryer. Agriculture was once the economic backbone of San Juan Pueblo. Living near the junction of the Rio Grande and Chama rivers, tribal members cultivated generous fields of corn, chili wheat, and other crops. Supported by irrigation ditches called Assequias, yearly farm tasks such as ditch cleaning were collective endeavors. San Juan native, Hernánimo Montoya. Let's just use their whole own shovel and that sort of thing was a hard way to do it but they didn't have tractors or anything like that. Did you get out in the field and work yourself?

I worked a lot. Can you tell us what it was like getting out there with horses and shovels? Pretty rough. We had to get up early and get out to the farms and it's either planting or holding or cutting wheat or hauling hay and picking corn, hauling corn and all that kind of stuff. As early as the late 19th century, San Juan's agricultural economy began undergoing long range changes. Neil Acreley is the former director of the Center for Anthropological Research at New Mexico State University and a consultant in Southwest Water and Irrigation Systems. The actual maximum amount of land under irrigation may have peaked in the 1880s but the availability of wage labor in railroad construction and in particular the construction of the Denver and Rio Grande, Siphon off labor in effect and introduce the whole idea of wage labor into communities in this area and as a consequence many people gave up farming for some time and the amount of irrigated acreage declined apparently according to the numbers that we've seen

declined in the 1880s into the early 1900s. It has since fluctuated dramatically from year to year. The boom on the San Juan farming economy was lowered during World War II. Nearby on the hill of Los Alamos, the stirrings of the atomic age rumbled to the village of San Juan and neighboring communities. Even the Spanish people working up there so let's stop farming. Everybody make a mistake not doing any more farming like they used to. Like many others, San Juan resident Jose Ramoso Yange obtained full time employment at the Los Alamos National Laboratories. Outside jobs gave people less time to farm and fields were left follow or converted into grazing pasture. Today Ramoso Yange networks with farmers from other Native American coblos along the Rio Grande to preserve old seeds which are handed down generation after generation. If you can hardly find any old seeds like a used to, even the old melons, I have a hard

time to find some old melons. If I go down to see the Indian dense down in different coblos like I would say down in Hamis or down in San Ana or down in Zia Pueblo there, a lot of those people from a lot of those farmers from Islada, they always bring some old big melons. You know those old me. So I always go down there a lot of time when they have them down and I buy them melons and save the seeds. A group of Pueblo residents in 1992 resolved to reverse the farming decline. Their goal in founding the San Juan Agricultural Cooperative was not to just simply increase tribal income. At the same time, they set out to preserve values of collective labor and community cooperation.

We looked back at the old ways and said, what was it that we used to do that built a lot of the harmony and the value system and what our tribe was based on? So we looked back and said, you know, farming was one of them and that's the down to earth thing. We're working our hands, we're forming communal groups because all of the individuals within the community used to be down in the fields at harvest time, everyone was down there. Garcia is the governor of San Juan Pueblo. Garcia remembers working in the fields with his father and uncles. As a right of youth, it was a time of learning from the elders. The tribal governor envisions the co-op as providing a similar socialization for young participants. They be afforded the opportunity to work out in the fields. The planning season, the tendering of the fields and since we used the irrigation system to do the irrigation and then the harvesting part.

And beyond that as well, then you go into the processing part. San Juan co-op members now prepare for the third season. As they approach the 21st century, they seek to integrate tribal values with modern technology and business and paratives. I'm Kent Patterson reporting.