Madera Forest Products: Sustainable
Community Development
Editor's Note: This article is the first of a series in
which La Jicarita will focus on community-based sustainable
businesses. The Rio Pueblo/Rio Embudo Watershed Protection
Coalition feels it is essential for the maintenance of
northern New Mexico's rural communities that economic
development be appropriate to the rural/agricultural make-up
of el norte. This means enterprises that allow people to
maintain their ties to the land and keep capital in the
community. We have already become too dependent on tourist
dollars, which provide primarily low-wage service jobs and
exploit our resources (both human and environmental). As one
congressional candidate recently put it, New Mexico must
provide its citizens "a living wage, not a minimum
wage."
Madera Forest Products Association was founded in
1988 by members of the communities that surround the
Vallecitos Sustained Yield Unit (VSYU). The VSYU was
created, along with several other sustained yield units in
other parts of the country, after World War II by an act of
Congress. This act recognized the need to create employment
opportunities in remote forest-dependent communities by
setting aside tracts of land within the national forest to
be managed specifically for community economic development.
Unfortunately, in the case of the VSYU, this was not done
until Madera founding members Manuel Gurulé, Ike
DeVargas, Joe Samora, Luis Torres, and Arón Martinez
forced the Forest Service to address community concerns. Up
until that time the Forest Service made timber sales within
the Unit so large only contractors such as Duke City had the
capital and equipment to obtain them.
These sales provided some seasonal employment for
community members, but the vast majority of the profits left
the community. Furthermore, cutting prescriptions were
formulated to exploit forest resources rather than manage
them sustainably. Through the efforts of Madera members, the
Allowable Sale Quantity within the Unit was reduced and
small, locally-based contractors were guaranteed a
percentage of the sales.
While Madera had initially hoped to focus on value-added
wood products, lack of equipment forced them to concentrate
their efforts on firewood. They therefore established a
woodyard and successfully marketed firewood in the Santa Fe
area. They also acquired a house in Vallecitos through
donation and received the contract to restore the old Forest
Service ranger cabin on Borracho Creek. In addition to
restoring the cabin they obtained a special use permit from
the Forest Service to use the cabin as an office and the
approximately three acres surrounding the cabin for a
woodyard.
Building on the success of the woodyard, in 1992, through
foundation funding, they acquired a state of the art,
large-volume wood splitter. Unfortunately, at the same time,
the Forest Service changed its management focus for the area
and only put up thinning sales, which included trees five to
nine inches in diameter. The new wood splitter, designed to
split logs twelve inches and larger, was rendered useless.
This set-back was followed by the spotted owl injunction,
which shut down northern New Mexico forests for a period of
18 months. The combination of these factors pulled the plug
on Madera's plans to expand into value-added wood products.
Luis Torres left the community in frustration, and Ike
DeVargas, who had by this time organized the cooperative
for-profit logging company La Companía Ocho,
concentrated his efforts on that enterprise. As a result,
Madera went into a period of dormancy.
Undaunted, Manuel Gurulé, who had joined DeVargas
in La Companía Ocho, began reorganizing Madera. In
1996, along with Sandra and Joe Samora and Cindy Seely, he
contacted Maria Varela, who has a long history of community
organizing in northern New Mexico, including Ganados del
Valle and La Clinica Medical Center in Tierra Amarilla.
Maria helped Madera members draft a new mission statement,
which included firewood and value-added wood products, but
also diversified their goals. She now acts as their grant
writer. Operating under the non-profit umbrella of Southwest
Research and Information Center until they are able to
acquire their own non-profit status, Madera has received
several grants to expand their programming. Most recently
they were awarded $41,000 by the State of New Mexico
Division of Energy, Mineral, and Natural Resources to
develop a program using small diameter, round lumber to
build pedestrian bridges, logging skidder bridges,
scaffolding, and greenhouses. They are now in the process of
buying the former Methodist Church and adjoining house in
Vallecitos. Madera has set up its office in the church's
former office space and is renting the house to help defray
expenses. Manuel serves as president of Madera, Cindy Seely
is the office manager, and Sandra Samora is grant program
manager, responsible for making quarterly reports which
account for all grant appropriations.
Madera's new goals now include: a fuelwood marketing
program, which features sustainably harvested fuelwood; a
contractual association to provide office space and
financial record keeping for La Companía; a woodwork
shop and crafts center; a forest-related job training
program for men, women, and youth; a learning place where
people can get their GEDs; an employment center where people
can find out about jobs in the forest with La
Companía, other local contractors, and the New Mexico
Department of Labor; an artisan development program to
assist artists with design, production, and marketing; a
community services support program which will include
partnerships with non-profit private and public health-care
services to provide health screening clinics and preventive
health care; a child development program; and summer arts
and sports program for youth.
Tech-Net, Inc. of Albuquerque recently gave Madera four
computers, which has allowed Cindy to initiate a computer
skills class on Monday and Wednesday evenings. Community
participation in this program has been very good. The office
is also able to provide Xerox, fax, and notary services for
community residents. Madera directors hope to initiate their
crafts program in traditional tin work, furniture making,
and retablo painting when the basement of the church has
been refurbished.
In conjunction with Shirl Harrington and Ryan Temple of
Forest Trust, Madera was able to hire two teenagers from the
Vallecitos area to collect information for a mapping overlay
study of the proposed Agua Caballos timber sale in the VSYU.
Information in that mapping project included existing old
growth, existing roads, timber types, perennial and
intermittent streams, Mexican spotted owl habitat,
semi-primitive designations, and previous timber sales. This
information will help the Forest Service and La
Companía, which has the right to 80% of the timber,
make this sale environmentally and economically viable.
Another project Madera would like to pursue is building a
green house to provide seedlings for reforestation or native
plants for commercial nurseries. While their program goals
may seem ambitious, their long history demonstrates an
ability to persevere. Madera directors realize that they
will not be able to accomplish all of these goals overnight,
but are committed to expanding their funding base as well as
community involvement. "We're here as community advocates,"
Sandra Samora says, and "we'll build on our successes and
learn from our failures."
ANNOUNCEMENTS
• Picuris Pueblo will be hosting a Native American
Permaculture Design Course at the Pueblo from June 7-18.
Courses of study include: land restoration; home garden and
backyard biodiversity; global community building; site
analysis and landscape language; water harvesting and
quality; and solar energy. Presenters include: Indigenous
Permaculture Center; Native Seeds Search; Taos Pueblo Range
and Agriculture; Seeds of Change; Tesuque Natural Farms;
Zuni Conservation Project; Flowering Tree Institute; and Rio
Grande Foundation. For more information call Picuris Pueblo
Environment Department at 505 587-0110 or Traditional Native
American Farmers Association at 505 983-2172.
• The Camino Real Ranger Station will be issuing
permits for dead and down firewood beginning May 3. Most of
the district is open to dead and down firewood collection,
but check with the district personnel about restricted
areas. The green firewood permits should be available
sometime between the middle and the end of May. District
personnel have already marked sales in West Entrañas,
Alamo Dinner, Bear Mountain, Fuentes area of U.S. Hill, and
La Junta Canyon (this area is aspen only). Henry Lopez of
the Camino Real suggests that community residents get their
firewood early, because it is very likely the district will
be affected by fire restrictions sometime during the summer.
He urged woodcutters to be especially cautious about fire
danger and be sure they have spark arresters on their
chainsaws.
Water Banking Workshop Explores
Ways to Maintain and Protect Acequia Communities
By Kay Matthews
The New Mexico Acequia Association (NMAA), in the first
of a series of 1999 workshops, sponsored a discussion on the
issue of water banking on April 17 in Las Vegas. The
workshop was cosponsored by the Rio de las Gallinas Acequia
Association, which has been involved in litigation with the
city of Las Vegas over water management and acequia concerns
(see April issue of La Jicarita). Prior to the afternoon
workshop, the Gallinas Association held its annual meeting
and elected William Gonzales, area parciante and water
adjudication specialist with Northern New Mexico Legal
Services, as its president.
Paula Garcia, director of the NMAA, opened the workshop
by asking the parciantes present to help the association
identify acequia issues that can be addressed in subsequent
workshops. These issues were then categorized into major
areas of concern. Water conservation practices, such as
better ditch maintenance and equitable water distribution,
were encouraged. To help effect better water management,
parciantes suggested making sure everyone - especially
newcomers to the area - is aware of the historical role and
cultural and economic import of the acequias. Parciantes
pointed out that there needs to be better individual
participation at acequia meetings, better representation at
the state level, mechanisms to share water when necessary,
and better long range planning. They acknowledged that it is
sometimes hard to ensure better participation and management
because of a lack of time, equipment, and money. All of the
parciantes present agreed that the city of Las Vegas must
engage in good faith negotiation with acequia
representatives on water issues.
Three panelists then addressed the concept of water
banking, or water pooling, a practice that is being
implemented by individual acequias and has been proposed as
a state-wide program. David Benavides, staff attorney with
Northern New Mexico Legal Services, opened the discussion by
posing the problems and concerns water banking can address:
1) to prevent loss of water rights due to nonuse; 2) to
protect acequias from outside threats such as municipalities
and developers; and 3) to reestablish community control of
its water resources.
Essentially, water banking is a mechanism to assign,
lease, or convey individual water rights to an entity,
preferably an acequia, that will put the rights to
beneficial use or otherwise protect them from being lost to
the community. State statute currently dictates that if an
acequia owns a water right, rather than an individual
parciante, that right cannot be lost because of nonuse or
condemnation.
There are many things to be gained in setting up a water
bank. For instance, an individual who is not irrigating, for
whatever reason, or who wishes to make a donation, can give
a water right to the acequia and not have to worry about
forfeiting that right. Once the right is donated to the
acequia, the parciante would not have to worry about
tracking whether the water right is being beneficially used.
A parciante can lease a right to an acequia, through the SEO
permitting process, and set up the lease in a specific way
so that he or she would not have to go through the
permitting process again to terminate the lease and regain
the right. And if the right is leased or assigned to the
acequia, the parciante would not surrender ownership of the
right.
Once the acequia is in effect "banking" these rights, it
can use the water within the acequia as needed (unless the
acequia is using 100% of its water entitlement, which is
very unusual). The acequia can further protect and
beneficially use these rights by drafting covenants to
prevent the transfer of the right out of the acequia. In
fact, a Manzano area land grant is considering making a
declaration that its water rights are community rights, not
individual rights, and the rights will always be kept within
the acequia system, in their area of origin.
Because so much of the water banking discussion is still
theory and not practice, the Taos Valley Acequia Association
(TVAA) has been trying to set up a water conservation
program that would allow member acequias to bank water
rights. Geoff Bryce, TVAA Program Director, told the
workshop that the TVAA set up a pilot water conservation
program (see November 1998 issue of La Jicarita) in 1996,
which would protect all water rights assigned to the program
from forfeiture. This program was submitted to the SEO for
approval (to basically test exactly what constitutes
approval and/or permitting), and 60 parciantes assigned
rights to acequias. Then in 1998, the SEO informed the TVAA
that its submitted guidelines were not adequate, and the
association is currently working to revise the guidelines.
Several additional issues TVAA will be addressing in this
revised program include protection of water rights from
abandonment based on hydrographic survey information, and
assurances that acequias will be able to lease banked water
only within the service area of the acequia. Even though the
process has been long and arduous, TVAA wants to continue to
push for this program because of a bill on this year's
legislative agenda which would have set up a state-wide
banking program. Both the TVAA and the NMAA continue to
promote acequia-basedwater banking programs.
Arnold Lopez, representing the Acequias de Chamisal y
Ojito, was the last speaker. This association filed a
Declaration of Water Conservation Program in 1998 with the
SEO "to make available a supply of water and water rights
for management by the Acequias de Chamisal y Ojito for the
benefit of its members and itself, which would include but
not be limited to storage of water." So far, the SEO has not
responded to the declaration, so the association has
proceeded independently with the program. Twelve parciantes
have contracted with the association (which includes nine
acequias in the two communities) to place their water rights
into the community water system, which shall have all rights
of management. The parciantes retain ownership of the
rights.
David Benavides then discussed what advise he would give
acequias that want to set up their own banking programs,
given the two examples of the TVAA water conservation
program with the SEO and the Acequias de Chamisal y Ojito
independent banking program. While we wait to see if the SEO
grants approval to the TVAA conservation program, or if the
Chamisal association is challenged, acequias can do two
things. In the public arena, acequias can submit
applications to the SEO to allow alternate places of use of
water rights (for example, moving the water rights not being
used on one field of the acequia to a different field).
Privately, acequias can turn over the authority of water use
to the acequia comisión. As a community effort,
parciantes would assign management of their water to the
acequia, a gesture that could reinforce the idea that water
rights are a community resource and are not for sale to the
highest bidder.
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Oral Histories:
By Bud Córdova, Mary Bissell, Derick Arellano,
and Max Schiller
Editor's Note: La Jicarita was invited to visit Sue
Gottschau's 4th grade class at Peñasco Elementary to
talk about journalism in their career opportunities program.
We asked the students to conduct interviews with friends or
family to contribute to our Oral History feature. It's
particularly interesting that many of them interviewed their
parents, for they are the most important role models and
bearers of history for 10-year old kids.
On May 5, 1946 a boy was born in a small house in Buena
Vista, New Mexico. He was born in the house with a midwife
name Doña Gabrielita to assist his mother. He was
born on a sunny Sunday afternoon.
When he was young he played marbles and swam a lot. While
he was growing up he rode horses and bucked hay. He started
school when he was six, but didn't like it much, for he had
problems with his classmates. When his dad came back a year
later he went back to school.
When he was 17 he joined the military and became a
helicopter mechanic. But the first time he left home was
when he was 13 and went to Cheyenne, Wyoming. When he was
there he stayed with his sister-in-law for 3 months.
He was married at 19 and had one son whose name was
Marty. After some time he divorced and later married a woman
named Sue Bissell. She has three children whose names are
Elena, Amanda, and Mary.
He now works with kids as a social worker. He now knows
that he doesn't know as much as he would have liked to know,
and thought he knew more.
- Mary Bissell
• • • • • • •
•
Tomás Montoya was born December 31, 1930 in El
Valle, New Mexico. He was born in a house next door to ours,
with no doctor, just a midwife.
He went to school in the old El Valle schoolhouse until
he was sixteen. He went to be a sheepherder in Wyoming
during the summer, and then he went to Gillman, Colorado to
work in the mines. He worked there for eight years. Then he
went to Hollister, California to work in a tomato packing
plant.
When he was a child in El Valle, he thought life was
better than it is now because he didn't have to worry and
all the people in the village helped each other. Nobody had
cars, just horses and wagons. His family never went further
than Peñasco and Truchas, and they grew most of their
own food. When they went to the store they only went for
clothes, sugar, and coffee. They grew their own wheat to
make bread and took it to the mill in Vadito to be ground.
His father was also a miner, sheepherder, and logger. When
he worked as a sheepherder he only returned home once a
year. When he worked in the mines he came home once a month.
When his father was away, his mother had to take care of the
children and the land and animals.
When Tomás returned to El Valle he was about
thirty years old, and he started working as a bus contractor
for the school. He built the house he lives in now. He also
built and operated a gas station, grocery store, and pool
room from 1969 to 1990. Today, he has two grown children and
two grandchildren who live in El Valle. He raises cattle,
drives the school activity bus and a fire bus, and is the
mayordomo for one of the village acequias. He is a very good
neighbor to us.
- Max Schiller
• • • • • • •
•
My dad was born on September 1, 1965. He is 5 feet 5
inches tall and weighs 145 pounds. He likes to fish, play
basketball, football, watch wrestling and boxing. He works
for Gossett Bros. in Los Alamos. He used to have a small
farm when he was small. When my dad and his sisters were
small my grandma and grandpa went somewhere and they had to
watch the goats. But they were playing instead of watching
the goats. The goats went inside the house. They ate all of
the food and were standing on the table. The goats used to
climb trees. My dad is now 33 years old. Everyone says I
look like my dad when he was small.
- Derick Arellano
• • • • • • •
•
I'm interviewing my father, José Córdova.
He thinks things were better when he was a child. The
community helped each other a lot. He also says it is harder
to get help now than when he was a child. He was the only
one born in a hospital out of 12 children. He worked on a
farm and the Rio Grande railroad. He is now retired and is
back to work on the farm. He is a married man and is a
father of three and loves his family very much.
- Bud Córdova
Book Review
By Kay Matthews
Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics: Subversive
Kin
Edited by Devon G. Peña, University of Arizona
Press
Chicano Culture, Ecology, Politics: Subversive Kin,
edited by Colorado College professor of sociology Devon
Peña, should be required reading for every New
Mexican (or Upper Rio Grande Rio Arriban, actually) who
calls him -or herself an environmentalist. Just as European
society requires that we read the books that promote and
maintain the values of that society, so must we open
ourselves to the values of Rio Arriban land-based
communities which connect cultural and political systems
into a world that embraces diversity. This book, a
collection of essays by Devon Peña, Rubén O.
Martínez, Reyes Garcia, Laura Pulido, Gwyn Kirk,
Malia Davis, and Joseph C. Gallegos, is a great place to
start.
Peña has brought these particular writers together
to present a mixed bag of academic analyzes and stories -
acequia tales, activist tales, and homeland tales. The first
part of the book deals with issues of bioregionalism and
Indo-Hispano land ethics. The second part of the book brings
these issues closer to home by discussing the histories and
current environmental politics in the Upper Rio Grande
watershed, including chapters on Ganados del Valle's
struggles to find grazing land, and La Sierra's attempts to
regain land grant rights in the mountains above Costilla.
This is where Peña himself put on the activist mantel
as he joined the local community first in its fight against
a gold mine and then a massive logging operation on the
Taylor Ranch, the former land grant commons.
In his introduction, Peña explains the meaning of
the book's subtitle "subversive kin", or Chicano
environmentalism: an antidote to Western "reductionist"
thinking - a separation of facts and values that holds to
universal truths - which instead allows a sense of place and
identity to integrate ecology with politics and economics.
It embraces the diversity of life, in both human and natural
landscapes, and defines new ways of thinking about what
constitutes bioregionalism.
Several chapters deal with the concept of bioregionalism.
In the chapter "Los Animalitos" Peña credits
sociologist Bill Devall with the clearest statement of what
defines a bioregion: a perspective that links the study of
cultural and natural areas based on biotic shift (the change
in plant and animal life from one region to another),
watershed, sense of place or spirit of place, and cultural
distinctiveness. He emphasizes that this applies to
existing, endangered cultures rather than just the people
who lived and defined a bioregion before industrialization.
The next chapter, written by Rubén O.
Martínez, associate provost at the University of
Southern Colorado, builds on the premise that it is critical
for Chicano communities to organize at the bioregional
level, just as ethnic minority groups throughout the world
organize to secure autonomy. Strategies to counteract
western development and the forces of the free market
economy must be based on synthesizing political economy,
cultural ecology, and environmental history on a bioregional
basis. In Chapter 3, Réyes Garcia, who lives on his
family's Conejos County ranch and teaches philosophy at Ft.
Lewis College, furthers this discussion by focusing on the
Indo-Hispano concept of homeland and sense of place, which
are articulated through personal history and analysis.
Subsequent chapters tell the story of Ganados del Valle,
critique the work of certain environmental historians that
fails to credit Hispanos with a conservation ethic, and
delve into ecofeminist issues as well. The last two chapters
tell the story of just what is at stake in Rio Arriba, as
Joseph Gallegos, a fifth-generation San Luis farmer,
attempts to govern acequia water, just as his forefathers
have done for generations, in the face of a gold mine and
massive logging operation that threaten el agua with
pollution and waste. This whole book is his story, really,
just as it is the story of Antonio and Molly Manzanares, Ike
DeVargas, Sandra Samora, Moises Morales, Lonnie Roybal, and
Alfred Trujillo. The are our subversive kin.
Contract Stewardship Workshop
On April 13 Camino Real District Forester Carol Holland
and timber sales manager Eppie Romero ran a follow-up
session to their February 17 Contracting with the Government
Workshop. This session focused exclusively on timber sales
and included "a mock timber sale" to acquaint community
residents with all the steps involved in acquiring and
processing a timber sale. About eight area residents
participated in the class.
Participants gathered in the Entrañas area off
Forest Road 155 to take a look at a small sale that had been
cut about four years ago. Eppie and Carol explained that the
first step to acquiring a sale is to get your name on the
mailing list of ranger districts in which you are interested
in working. The Forest Service will then mail you the
"prospectus" for all sales on that district. Once a sale has
been advertised, prospective buyers can contact the district
office to inspect the sale with Forest Service personnel and
determine if they are interested in bidding on it.
Eppie and Carol also spoke about estimating timber
volumes, orienting skid trails to maximize efficiency and
minimize environmental impacts, and hauling and milling the
logs.
The field portion of the workshop was followed by a
session at the district office to go over paper work
necessary to bid on a sale. Subjects covered included:
acceptable bid rate; understanding the terms of the
contract; payment for the sale; performance bonds; and
financial assistance. Participants then engaged in a mock
sale in order to get a feel for the auction process.
Carol and Eppie emphasized that they are available to
help contractors better understand the timber sale process
and encouraged interested parties to contact them at
587-2255.
Imus Water Transfer
In a dramatic move, State Engineer Tom Turney, without
recourse to a formal hearing, denied the application of
shock jock Don Imus to transfer 100 acre feet of water from
the lands of Francis Gusler in the village of San Miguel to
a nearby 3,000-acre parcel Imus owns east of the village of
Ribera. Turney personally showed up at a meeting of more
than 100 community residents concerned that the transfer
could impair already existing wells throughout the
community. Members of the El Valle Water Users Coalition
said they also invited representatives from the Imus ranch
to attend, but none did so.
Nicasio Romero, former president of the New Mexico
Acequia Association and member of the water users coalition,
told La Jicarita that coalition members felt all along that
Gusler's claim to 1160 acre feet of water per year was
bogus. That claim was based on the overall capacity of an
artesian well on the 2.5 acre Gusler parcel. However, Pete
Hurtado, whose family sold the property to the Guslers,
showed Turney his family's original declaration for that
well, which amounted to only 4 acre feet.
Turney explained that his office is "deluged" with
applications like the Guslers and must scrutinize them
closely because New Mexico has been unable to meet its
obligations to deliver water to Texas. He said that New
Mexico has already spent approximately $50 million to
acquire and retire water rights on the Pecos River in order
to meet that obligation.
While coalition members were delighted by the state
engineer's decision, they said that they intend to keep a
close eye on the Imus operation in the future. Many area
residents fear Imus may still attempt to purchase existing
water rights in the area which could imperil their wells or
acequia water rights.
La Jicarita will publish a combined June/July
issue, so look for the next installment at the end of June.
Thanks to all our subscribers and readers for their input
and support.
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