The Milagro Beanfield War

by John Nichols

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in a small fictional village in northern New Mexico’s upper Rio Grande Valley c. 1970; first published in New York City in 1974.

SYNOPSIS

A clash between a wealthy white developer and a Hispanic farmer broadens into a larger conflict between New Mexico’s dominant Anglo culture and that of the Hispanos who inhabited the area before the Anglos’ arrival.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

The Novel in Focus

For More Information

Born in Berkeley, California, in 1940, John Nichols was raised on Long Island and educated at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. His first novel, The Sterile Cuckoo (1965), was generally well received, as was a second novel, The Wizard of Loneliness (1966). In 1969 Nichols moved from New York to New Mexico, and most of his subsequent writings, both fiction and nonfiction, deal with his adopted state. The Milagro Beanfield War, his third novel, is the first volume of Nichols’s New Mexico Trilogy, which is continued in The Magic Journey (1978) and The Nirvana Blues (1981). Nichols’s other novels include American Blood (1987), An Elegy for September (1992), and The Voice of the Butterfly (2001). A committed environmentalist, Nichols has also written several nonfiction volumes celebrating New Mexico’s natural beauty, as well as the autobiographical An American Child Supreme: The Education of a Liberation Ecologist (2001). In The Milagro Beanfield War Nichols reveals an equal commitment to social justice, portraying New Mexico’s traditional Hispanic subsistence farmers as under threat from encroaching white society.

Events in History at the Time of the Novel

Historical background: Hispanos in New Mexico

Like the rest of the lands that are now the American Southwest, the upper Rio Grande Valley at the beginning of the nineteenth century lay in the far northern reaches of New Spain, the vast Spanish empire in the Americas. The high desert and mountains around the valley were inhabited by American Indians such as the Pueblo, Ute, and Apache, some of whom had been pushed out of the lower, more fertile areas along the Rio Grande by Spanish-speaking settlers starting in the sixteenth century. Essentially Spanish in culture, the settlers included both creoles (descendants of Spanish colonists) and mestizos (those of mixed Spanish and Indian descent). Most lived in small villages along the river valleys, farming communally and grazing sheep or (to a lesser extent) cattle on surrounding grassland.

In the 1820s Mexico won independence from Spain, and the area thus came under Mexican control. Contacts with Anglo-Americans also increased in the 1820s, as traders from Kansas and Missouri established the Santa Fe trail, linking Santa Fe—the Rio Grande Valley’s major settlement—with Independence, Missouri to the northeast and Chihuahua, Mexico to the south. Mexico’s short-lived sovereignty over the region ended, however, with its defeat by the United States in the Mexican War (1846-48). Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), Mexico ceded to the United States present-day California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of Colorado, as well as recognizing U.S. claims over Texas. In return the United States paid Mexico $15 million, extended citizenship to Mexicans living in the ceded lands, and promised to recognize earlier land grants there. Such grants, originally given to individuals and villages by Spanish and then Mexican governors, comprised the framework on which legal rights to land had been based in both New Spain and, later, Mexico. The land grant system would come into conflict with the incoming Anglo-Americans’ approach to land ownership, despite the treaty’s promise to honor past grants. In real life, as in The Milagro Beanfield War, disputes over land would lie at the center of New Mexico’s ethnic divisions and would arise when implementing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In the words of a character in the novel, “The war never ended in 1848” (Nichols, Milagro Beanfield War, p. 68).

Census figures for 1850 record over 80,000 Mexican Americans living in the American Southwest at that time, with nearly 55,000, by far the largest regional grouping, living in the New Mexico Territory (which then included Arizona). Smaller numbers lived in California (the so-called Californios) and Texas (the Tejanos). Of those in New Mexico, the densest population occupied the Rio Grande Valley from a point south of Albuquerque north through Santa Fe and the Taos Valley. They and their descendants have commonly referred to themselves as Hispanos, which is usually translated as “Spanish” (also they have used Spanish Americans to describe themselves in English).

Land, water, and economic culture

In contrast with Texas and California, New Mexico (which became a state only in 1912) did not immediately attract large numbers of Anglo-American immigrants. Only in the 1940s did Anglos begin to outnumber Hispanos in the state. However, the Hispanos’ land began slipping out of their grasp long before the 1940s, and it became clear to them that numerical superiority did not guarantee political power or social equality under the Anglo-American system. For well over a century the complex issue of the land grants has been the major focus of controversy, but disputes about land have spilled over into other areas as well, which Nichols also dramatizes in the novel.

Land

Under the old system, land grants had been obtained by applying to the Spanish or Mexican governor; both individuals and villages could apply. Land was granted to successful Hispano applicants in three ways:

• Unconditional grants called sitios given to wealthy individuals for private ranches or haciendas. These were most common in the rolling grasslands of the Rio Abajo (lower river) area south of Sante Fe.
• Grants to powerful individuals called patrones who undertook to establish a village of at least 30 families.
• Communal grants to existing village of at least 10 families. The community then distributed some lots for private use such as home-building and subsistence farming, holding the rest for common use such as grazing sheep or cattle. Communal grants were most common in the sheltered valleys of the Rio Arriba (upper river) area north of Santa Fe, where the novel’s fictional village of Milagro is located; Milagro is portrayed as having received such a grant.

Problems arose for all three categories of land grant recipients and their heirs over the century following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Individuals were given deadlines to prove their grants under Anglo-American law, which often required time-consuming efforts to obtain documentation from Mexico City, where records were kept. Getting the records in time (or at all) frequently proved impossible for the commonly illiterate Hispanos. Even if the grant was accepted, U.S. authorities might reduce its scope by hundreds or even thousands of acres. Grants customarily did not spell out precise boundaries or areas, instead using landmarks like boulders or trees, for example, or the distance that a man can walk in a day. Such claims were easily challenged in court by the Anglo speculators who began arriving in New Mexico in the early twentieth century. As sociologist Carolyn Zeleny explains,

The conflicts over land were turned over to a supposedly impersonal third party, the Court, which technically fulfilled the Anglo-American conception of “justice” but at the same time proceeded to fix the Spanish-American[s] in a position of subordination… . Enmeshed in a culture they little understood, in procedures and standards mysterious and technical, they were powerless to resist Anglo-American encroachment, but their sense of justice was outraged, and their hostility took the form of growing resentment against the usurpers of their country.

(Zeleny, pp. 154-55)

The novel’s Ladd Devine the Third, heir to an Anglo land dynasty in New Mexico, is the grandson of one such usurper. Devine’s fictional fortune is based on the historical fact that, despite the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Anglo-American authorities did not recognize communal land grants. All such communal lands were transferred over to the federal government, which then sold them to homesteaders, developers, and others, or else retained them as National Forest lands. Beginning in the 1880s, such lands became highly desirable as the railroads opened the west, and the prices of beef, cattle, and mutton rose sharply. The original Ladd Devine is depicted as having used political influence during this period to obtain, from the federal government, the lands once granted to Milagro. Such lost communal land grants make up a large proportion of the more than four million acres of land that Hispanos are estimated to have lost in the period between 1848 and 1970.

Water

Because the region receives little rainfall, farming there has always relied on irrigation, which has been practiced since before the Hispanos’ arrival, when the Pueblo Indians farmed corn, beans, and squash in irrigated plots along the river. Traditional Hispano irrigation in the Rio Grande Valley relies on networks of river-fed main ditches called acequias, from which the farmer diverts water into smaller ditches in outlying fields using a shovel. Every year the farmers along each acequia elected a mayordomo, or mayor, to allocate the water and supervise the ditch’s maintenance. This system was threatened as incoming Anglo-Americans developed their own ways of dealing with irrigation and other water-management issues such as flood control. The historical clash between the Hispanos’ traditional use of acequias and the Anglos’ reliance on large, expensive concrete dams plays a central role in the Milagro Beanfield War.

GRAZING RIGHTS AND THE U.S. FOREST SERVICE

By the late 1960s the federal government, and specifically the U.S. Forest Service, had become the focus of much of the Hispanos’ growing resentment. The most contentious issue grew out of the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, which was intended to address Hispanos’ complaints about their decreasing pasture lands. The act provided for a permit system by which individuals would be able to purchase permits for grazing prescribed numbers of sheep, cattle, or horses on Forest Service lands. Already poor in cash, over the coming decades the Hispanos also faced rising permit fees, reductions in the number of permits available, a shortened grazing season, and a general lack of cultural understanding on the parts of Anglo federal employees. Many, like joe Mondragón in The Milagro Beandeld War, found themselves with herds of sheep they were unable to graze on the lands that had once belonged to their communities. Throughout the 1960s Forest Service facilities in northern New Mexico were subjected to acts of vandalism such as arson and fence cutting. In the novel, Smokey the Bear symbolizes the federal role in depriving the villagers of their communal lands. The Forest Service mascot is a despised figure to the villagers.

Historian E. B. Fincher explains irrigation’s legal background:

An immense body of law dealing with community irrigation ditches (acequias) had developed in New Mexico between 1540 and 1847. Where water was so precious, where human organization was so utterly dependent upon a complex irrigation system, it was natural that water rights should seem almost sacrosanct. Among Americans there was no appreciation of the attitude that land meant little without water, for until the acquisition of Texas and the Mexican Cession there had been no irrigated deserts in the United States.

(Fincher, p. 28)

While Anglo-American courts adopted many of the legal principles upon which the earlier laws were based, they did so within a framework that was alien for the Hispanos. As with the land itself, the Anglos’ unfamiliar requirements and practices put the Hispanos. at a disadvantage with respect to the water that they needed to irrigate the terrain. Their unfamiliarity with Anglo-American ways resulted in the erosion of their legal rights and access. The novel’s plot hinges on the Hispano attitudes to irrigation that Fincher describes. Because of changes in the water laws, the small beanfield of a Hispano named Joe Mondragón no longer has legal irrigation rights, but he takes up a shovel and illegally irrigates it anyway, escalating the tensions already present between Anglos and Hispanos in the community.

Economic culture

As the above discussion suggests, disputes over land and water in New Mexico have a cultural dimension that reveals stark differences between Anglo and Hispano approaches to such issues. In economic terms, these differences can be summarized by observing that whereas Anglo culture stresses cash profits and land ownership, traditional Hispano culture emphasizes subsistence farming and land use. Accustomed to raising enough food and livestock to meet their own demands, Hispanos have viewed land not as a possession to capitalize for profit but as a life-sustaining resource. This attitude is reflected not only in the widespread phenomenon of communal lands but also in two other crucial facts. First, under Spanish and Mexican law, products were taxed, not the land itself; second, taxes were customarily paid in kind, such as crops and goods, not in cash.

Hispanos have traditionally put a low cultural value on cash, which is the very thing that Anglo-American culture has valued above all. American governments taxed land, not products, and those taxes had to be paid in cash, a reality for which the Hispanos were unprepared because of their different way of operating. Materially, the Hispanos’ culture left them ill equipped to pay large amounts of land tax. In short, a leading reason for the Hispanos’ loss of their lands—unpaid taxes—can be traced to the different economic cultures of the settled Hispanos and incoming Anglo-Americans.

Clashes over “conservancy districts.”

These cultural differences came to a head during the twentieth century, as Hispanos and Anglos clashed over the establishment of so-called “conservancy districts.” The conservancy district essentially embodied the idea that in certain geographical areas, like river valleys, bonds should be sold and special taxes imposed in order to pay for expensive projects (such as dams, levees, and canals) that would, it was argued, benefit everyone. In 1925 the New Mexico Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the state’s first such proposal, for the area of the Rio Grande near Albuquerque, and the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District (M.R.G.C.D.) thereby passed into law.

Sixteen major floods had struck the Rio Grande between 1884 and 1925, causing numerous deaths and extensive property damage. Proponents of the M.R.G.C.D. argued that the project would control the floods and at the same time improve the region’s irrigation. In their ranks were Anglo-American landowners, local business owners, and city officials, most of whom could afford to buy the bonds and pay the conservancy taxes, and many of whom also stood to benefit from the project. From the start, however, they were opposed by a mostly Hispano group of small farmers and others who believed that the project was unnecessary and who also knew that they could not afford to pay the conservancy taxes. Before the first decade was over, more than half the taxes assessed by the conservancy had become delinquent, and in 1937 a moratorium was declared on further construction taxes. But for many the moratorium came too late. Numerous Hispanos had already lost their lands because they could not pay the taxes. Some 10,000 Hispano residents of the valley were involved in protesting the M.R.G.C.D. by the time the movement finally collapsed in the late 1940s.

In 1971 another, much smaller, conservancy district was proposed in the area of the upper Rio Grande surrounding Taos. Called the Rancho Del Rio Conservancy District, this project included the construction of the proposed Indian Camp Dam, which would create a lake more than a mile long. By offering recreational opportunities such as fishing and sailing, proponents argued, the dam would benefit local businesses, as well as provide an additional supply of water to local farmers. At first the area’s mostly Hispano farmers supported the proposal, but their support turned to opposition when they learned that landowners in the proposed district would be taxed to pay for part of the dam’s construction and half of its maintenance costs. They feared that, like Hispanos in the M.R.G.C.D. to the south, they would be unable to pay the taxes and would lose their land. The Hispano farmers allied with Anglo-American environmentalists and with Chicano activists (see below) to form a grass-roots organization called the Tres Rios Association. The association fought the proposed conservancy district in the courts for five years before winning victory in 1975, when the measure was defeated.

Editorial by the Tres Rios Association Taos News, April 26, 1972

We are … afraid of the wide powers of a conservancy district. Anyone familiar with recent articles in the Albuquerque Journal about the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District understands by now that a district is a complicated and ever-expanding enterprise… . Also their district down there has come to be managed by the Bureau of Reclamation instead of the people of the Middle Rio Grande Valley. Members of the board [the district’s governing body, with power to assess taxes] aren’t even elected.

(Taos News in Orona, forthcoming)

The public debate over the Del Rio Conservancy District in the early 1970s finds many parallels in the fictional saga that makes up the Milagro Beanfield War and its two sequels. For example, the Del Rio Conservancy District comprises a real-life model for The Milagro Beanfield War’s Milagro Valley Conservancy District, while the Indian Camp Dam is thinly fictionalized in the novel’s Indian Creek Dam. Similarly, the novel’s Milagro Land and Water Protection Association is loosely based on the Tres Ríos Association. In the novel, however, environmentalists and Chicano activists are largely absent from the struggle, although Nichols does allude to Chicano activism as part of his story’s background. In real life, democratic political activism actually played a major role in the struggle. A stereotype exists of Chicano or Hispano “’peasant’ whose only recourse against government injustice and capitalist oppression is to engage in spontaneous acts of banditry and revolution,” but in fact Hispano farmers resorted to peaceful, proper means of protest, quickly seeking “legal expertise from political leaders, lawyers, and business people,” understanding “the rule of law and their place in it” (Orona, forthcoming).

The Chicano movement

As civil rights movements attracted increasing attention in American public life during the 1960s, some Mexican Americans became more militant in protesting their subordinate position in American society. The term Chicano, originally a pejorative label (short for Mexicano) for any unskilled Mexican worker, was adopted by the militants as a sign of unity against Anglo culture. At least part of the movement’s origins can be traced to the Hispanos of New Mexico’s Rio Grande Valley. Led by the charismatic preacher Reies Lopéz Tijerina, Hispano activists sought to reclaim land grants that they argued had been lost through fraud and legal trickery. They began confronting authorities in northern New Mexico in 1966, spurring a movement for greater political awareness and cultural pride that spread to other areas with large Mexican American populations such as California and Colorado.

Though Chicano activism plays no overt role in the novel, Nichols does refer to the movement several times in passing. Moreover, the violent atmosphere that occasionally surrounded movements such as Tijerina’s (though Tijerina himself did not espouse violence) are reflected, perhaps

REIES TIJERINA AND THE TIERRA AMARILLA COURTHOUSE RAID

On June 5, 1967, three carloads of armed Chicano activists invaded the Rio Arriba County courthouse in the small, dusty village of Tierra Amarilla, the county seat. When the activists drove off into the mountains after two hours of gunfire and threats, two lawmen had been shot, and one of them lay close to death. A massive police manhunt ensued. The activists were members of Reies Tijerina’s Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants), which had been agitating for the return of lost Hispano land grants since 1963. The widely publicized courthouse raid was part of an increasingly angry campaign to reclaim the lost Tierra Amarilla land grant of nearly 600,000 acres, given by the Mexican government to one jose Manuel Martinez in 1832. Tijerina himself was arrested 5 days later, and eventually he was convicted on two charges stemming from the raid (accounts had varied as to whether he was actually present). Newsweek magazine estimated the Alianza’s membership at about 14, 000 people. One observer suggested that “While about 90 percent of those northern people think the land was really stolen from them, only about 20 percent think Reies can get it back.” (Nabokov, p. 18)

in exaggerated form, by the rambunctious, colorful, and often trigger-happy characters who populate Nichols’s fictional story.

The Novel in Focus

The plot

The Milagro Beanfield War opens with a paragraph-long summary of the motives that various Milagro townspeople attribute to Joe Mondragón in illegally irrigating his tiny, dried-up beanfield. The brief passage introduces a few of the novel’s major characters, as well as indirectly revealing much about the town’s built-up tensions and the potentially incendiary nature of Joe’s seemingly trivial action. Milagro’s sheriff, Bernabé Montoya, thinks Joe simply has “a king-size chip on his shoulder.” The owner of the Frontier Bar, Tranquilino Jeantete, thinks Joe wants to make a defiant gesture towards the Devine Company, which runs the small, half-deserted town. The town’s storekeeper, Nick Rael, thinks Joe hopes to make trouble and “drive up ammo sales at the same time he put Nick out of business,” thereby wriggling out of the $90 debt he owes to the store for items bought on credit. The Devine Company’s owner, Ladd Devine the Third, thinks Joe intends “a personal assault on his empire”; and the old-timer Amarante Córdova thinks “Joe did it because God had ordered him to start the Revolution without any further delay.” (All citations are from Milgaro Beanfield War, p. 3).

Joe Mondragón, 36 years old, and his wife Nancy have three children and live in Milagro, in a small hand-made adobe house “surrounded by junk” (Milagro Beanfield War, p. 25). A generally unemployed jack-of-all-trades who can fix anything, Joe has a tool shop full of “begged, borrowed, or stolen” tools (Milagro Beanfield War, p. 25). He drives a beat-up old pick-up truck, and usually has several small-time (and often shady) projects underway at a time. Joe shows little respect for the law. He is regularly in and out of the local jail for fighting, drunkenness, and stealing sheep owned by the Devine Company. And like many in Milagro, he feels resentful:

He was tired, like most of his neighbors were tired, from trying to earn a living off the land in a country where the government systematically gathered up the souls of little ranchers and used them to light its cigars… . And he was damn fed up with having to buy a license to hunt deer on land that had belonged to Grandfather Mondragón and his cronies, but which now resided either in the pockets of Smokey the Bear, the state, or the local malevolent despot, Ladd Devine the Third.

(Milagro Beanfield War, p. 26)

For over a century the company, founded by the first Ladd Devine in the nineteenth century, has controlled the town. Joe’s family, like many Hispano families in Milagro, used to own a fine house and fields on the west side of town. But in a series of “complicated legal and political maneuverings” in 1935, much of the water from nearby Indian Creek was “reallocated to big-time farmers down in the southeast portion of the state or in Texas, leaving folks like Joe Mondragón high and much too dry” (Milagro Beanfield War, p. 28). Now the west side is barren and deserted. Though Joe and his family live elsewhere in town, he still owns his parents’ old house and a small beanfield on the west side. Most of the others (except for the stubborn ninety-three-year old, Amarante Córdova) have sold their west side land to the Devine Company. Unbeknownst to the villagers, the company now stands to make a killing on the abandoned west side land, which will skyrocket in value when the planned Indian Creek Dam returns water to it. The townspeople are to pay for the dam, through legislation taxing them as part of a so-called conservancy district. Yet the company—which orchestrated the scheme, and which also plans an exclusive vacation resort along the shores of the resulting lake—will be the main beneficiary.

Joe’s decision to irrigate his small west side beanfield threatens the company’s plans, because it amounts to a direct challenge against the forces that have dominated the town’s history:

irrigating his field was an act as irrevocable as Hitler’s invasion of Poland [which started World War II] … because it was certain to catalyze tensions which had been building for years, certain to precipitate a war.

(Milagro Beanfield War, p. 28)

News of Joe’s action quickly spreads, and two sides emerge in a struggle to determine what it will mean for the community. The two sides are not cleanly divided on ethnic lines, since the official establishment has enlisted Hispanos (such as Sheriff Montoya) in its structure just as its opponents enlist Anglos (such as the liberal lawyer Charley Bloom). Backed by wealth and political influence, Ladd Devine mobilizes the state engineer’s office, the state police, and the U.S. Forest Service in his support. Hesitant to act for fear of arousing unfavorable publicity, Devine’s allies make informal attempts to dissuade Joe from continuing to divert water into his field. Joe pugnaciously runs several of them off his land, including Eusebio Lavadie, “Milagro’s only wealthy Chicano rancher,” and Carl Abeyta, a Hispano Forest Service employee (Milagro Beanfield War, p. 36). An undercover state police operative named Kyril Montana cruises through the town to assess the situation—unaware that his every move is tracked by locals, who gossip over the phone. Outraged by this covert police reconnaissance and other incidents, a citizens’ group opposed to Devine organizes under the leadership of the fiery and beautiful local business-woman Ruby Archuleta, owner of Milagro’s Body Shop and Pipe Queen (specializing in car repair and plumbing).

Claiming that he simply wants to grow some beans, Joe resists Ruby’s attempt to politicize the issue, but she insists on its larger significance.

MAJOR CHARACTERS ON BOTH SIDES IN THE MILAGRO BEANFIELD WAR

“It’s your beanfield,” Ruby tells him, “but it represents all our beanfields. That dam is gonna hurt all of us, and we’re all gonna pay the conservancy taxes, and there isn’t anybody here who hasn’t been screwed by Ladd Devine” (Milagro Beanfield War, p. 154). A period of “Waiting for the War to Start” ensues, as tensions escalate in series of incidents (Milagro Beanfield War, p. 153). Supporters from both sides are beaten or threatened, and a brawl erupts at a softball game pitting locals against company players. Events come to a head, however, when word gets out that Joe has shot a local man named Seferino Pacheco in a brawl over Pacheco’s pig, which is famous in the town for causing trouble and which has gotten into Joe’s beanfield. While Pacheco lies close to death in the hospital, a manhunt begins for Joe, who is thought to have escaped into the nearby mountains. Led by Kyril Montana, the posse fails to find the fugitive, and Montana himself is mysteriously attacked in the mountains by three gunmen (who turn out to be Ruby Archuleta, her son Eliu, and her lover, a man named Claudio Garcia). Joe’s supposed flight is revealed as a ploy to distract the police, and at the right moment Joe—who never left Milagro—turns himself in. Pacheco recovers, and after it is established that Joe shot him in self-defense Joe is released.

In a meeting with the governor, who is alarmed at the prospect of bad publicity, Devine is forced to abandon his plan for the dam and the conservancy district. As the representative from the state engineer’s office tells him, “We underestimated the people’s ability to comprehend the complexities and to react against what none of them actually understands, other than instinctively, to this day” (Milagro Beanfield War, p. 613). As the novel ends, Joe Mondragón reflects uncomfortably that “his field, his bunch of crummy beans” may have made him into something he never wanted to be: a leader (Milagro Beanfield War, p. 616).

The collective, the individual, and the 1960s counterculture

Many critics have observed that the real protagonists in The Milagro Beanfield War are not any of the characters portrayed, but the two clashing cultures they represent, along with two sets of opposing cultural values. In Anglo-American culture a leading value is individualism, whose economic side is free enterprise capitalism, as represented in the novel by the aptly named Devine Company. In Hispano culture, by contrast, a chief value is collectivism, represented in the novel by Joe Mondragón’s determination to reassert a traditionally shared communal right—and by the communal support with which he succeeds in doing so. Joe’s old uncle, Juan Mondragón, reflects this collective spirit when he argues in favor of opposing the company: “In the old days people were more together,” he says (Milagro Beanfield War, p. 153).

Individualism has always been at the heart of Anglo-American culture, but in the 1960s and 1970s many young Americans began increasingly to question it. This reaction against individualism played a central role in the rise of the connected movements known as the New Left and the so-called hippie counterculture. Hippie communes, for example, attempted to “get back to nature” by achieving (with varying degrees of success) a communal lifestyle based on collective work and shared participation. Indeed, one such fictional commune, located near Milagro, plays a peripheral role in the novel. And in real life, the northern New Mexico town of Taos—a bastion of the Hispano homeland—became a mecca for counterculture artists, writers, and others who sought an alternative lifestyle in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

One early Anglo-American immigrant was John Nichols, who moved to Taos in 1969, and who was very much a part of the counterculture. In addition Nichols is a self-professed socialist, and as such he exemplifies the counterculture’s exaltation of communal or collective values as against individualism, and especially as against capitalism. In his portrayal of New Mexico’s threatened Hispano culture, with its traditional emphasis on a communal life based on subsistence not profit, Nichols thus dramatizes some of the important social issues that preoccupied his own generation.

Sources and literary context

The violent events surrounding Reies Tijerina’s 1967 courthouse raid provided the immediate inspiration for The Milagro Beanfield War’s confrontation between Hispano resentment and Anglo institutions, although Nichols had not yet moved to New Mexico in 1967. After moving to Taos, Nichols visited many of the smaller villages of the Taos Valley, near the western slopes of the beautiful Sangre de Christo Mountains. Along with their inhabitants, these villages—Arroyo Hondo, San Cristóbal, San Antonio, Arroyo Seco, as well as Taos itself—offered the basis for the novel’s descriptions of Milagro. The novel’s fictional Miracle Valley (in which Milagro is set; Milagro means “miracle” in Spanish) is a thinly disguised fictional version of the Taos Valley. The two subsequent novels in Nichols’s New Mexico Trilogy continue the story of encroaching real estate development in the Miracle Valley, which ends up (like the Taos Valley) with vacation resorts, condominiums, and middle-class housing projects.

The Milagro Beanfield War falls within a well established tradition of social protest writing in American literature. One clear literary model is John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which chronicles the Joad family’s displacement from their land in Oklahoma and their subsequent mistreatment as migrant workers in California. Another leading example from this tradition is Frank Norris’s novel The Octopus (1901), which condemns the rapacious land-grabbing methods by which the railroad industry expanded in the late nineteenth century. Like these classic American novels, The Milagro Beanfield War is based on historical events, and like them it celebrates common farmers while mourning their eviction by the forces of capitalist progress from land they have worked for generations.

Reception

The Milagro Beanfield War received generally positive reviews, with most critics finding its lively depiction of colliding cultures both humorous and powerful. Comparing Nichols with both Steinbeck and Norris, Motley Deakin writes in Western American Literature that its “basic seriousness” complements a colorful, “episodic” wit, recalling “the American humor of the frontier West” (Deakin, p. 250). Not all were charmed by Nichols’s hyperbolic, often profane writing style, however. The National Observer’s Larry L. King, for example, finds the novel to be “a big, gassy, convoluted book that adds up to a disappointment—one somehow failing to equal the sum of its parts” (King, p. 27). Frederick Busch in the New York Times Book Review also belittles Nichols’s informal prose, calling it “so slack as to be hastily composed, or so folksy as to be patronizing to the folk” (Busch, pp. 53-54). While praising parts of the novel as “gentle, funny, transcendent,” Busch also faults its characterization as shallow and stereotypical.

However, John E. Loftis, responding to such criticisms at length in the Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, defended the novel, suggesting that Busch “condemns it for … the wrong reasons” and arguing that Nichols’s approach fits a novel in which cultures, not characters, are the main protagonists (Loftis, p. 210). “Nichols’s concerns as a novelist are primarily social,” Loftis writes, “and he has created an unusual kind of protagonist… to give artistic form to these concerns,” one that has “reshaped the genre” of the social novel (Loftis, p. 213).

—Colin Wells

For More Information

Busch, Frederick. Review of The Milagro Beanfield War. New York Times Book Review, 27 October 1974, 53-54.

Deakin, Motley. Review of The Milagro Beanfield War. Western American Literature 10, no. 3 (November 1975): 249-50.

Fincher, E. B. Spanish-Americans as a Political Factor in New Mexico, 1912-1950. New York: Arno Press, 1974.

King, Larry L. “Few Shots in a ‘Beanfield War.’” The National Observer, 16 November 1974, 27.

Loftis, John E. “Community as Protagonist in John Nichols’ ’The Milagro Beanfield War.’” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 38, no. 4 (1984): 201-13.

Nabokov, Peter. Tijerina and the Courthouse Raid. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1970.

Nichols, John. The Milagro Beanfield War. New York: Ballantine, 1976.

Nostrand, Richard L. The Hispano Homeland. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992.

Orona, Kenneth M. Muddy Water: Power, Contest, and Identity in New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley, 1848-1947. Forthcoming.

Rosenbaum, Robert J. Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Zeleny, Carolyn. Relations Between the Spanish-Americans and Anglo-Americans in New Mexico. New York: Arno Press, 1974.