From Desert to Dam

Imaginations from Nuevo Mexico

“But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient...”

Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence.

12 June 2025 - 5:30 PM

When my parents closed the deal on the nine acres of prairie that they bought in the town of Carrizozo, New Mexico, I remember my dad telling me about his frustration about lost Spanish land grants. He talked about how after the Mexican-American War, the railroads and ranchers and prospectors all scrambled west, bringing with them new laws and new guns to force Mexicans off land that their families had held for decades. The indignation still simmers in his blood, as it did in his father’s, as it does now in mine.

What part of this country could have been ours, once? I know Montoya is a very old name; some of the earliest Spaniards to have arrived in New Mexico in the 1600s brought it from the Basque region in the north of Spain. It is a name that means from the mountains. My ancestors carried it with them, from the Pyrenees on the French border and onto ships across the ocean, dragging it like a tired horse through the desert until it came to rest in the dust of the Jornada del Muerto. It is a very old story, one that I have been told since I was a child, sitting up late at night fighting sleep at my grandmother’s kitchen table.

My family has not moved much, since then. The cinderblock house where my father grew up is not far from the mission that the Spanish established on the Rio Grande, 345 years ago. And somewhere in a clerk’s office, on a paper in the records of Lincoln County, the name Montoya is again tied to a parcel of sagebrush on the plains of Nuevo Mexico. To the west lies a missile range where the US military tests weapons for use in some future war of conquest. To the east lies the Mescalero Apache reservation, a pitiful resolution to a past war of conquest. But now, Carrizo Mountain casts a shadow over the invisible lines demarcating our little plot on the valley floor, and the wind whistles in my ears as I stand in the town nestled between lava field and volcanic mountain range.

“It felt like I was buying some of our land back,” my father once told me. It is a strange thing, really. Not knowing what you have lost, only that you have lost it.

In Carrizozo, I look up at the dusty cerulean sky, the brightness bringing tears to my eyes. Do you remember me? I ask the empty country, quietly.

The sun keeps shining, brilliantly, and is silent.

12 June 2025 - 8:12 PM

The air was fresh this evening, when I sat at the edge of the cliff overlooking Elephant Butte Dam. The path down the mountain to the river bottom stretched before me, the distance warping in my mind so that the Rio Grande looked both miles away and within fingertip’s length if I just reached out to touch it. The dam spanned the chasm down to the river easily, the heavy cement fused with the mountainside as if the two gargantuan structures grew together, side by side, from the desert floor.

I cannot imagine this canyon without this dam, in the same way I cannot imagine the mountain without its angular peaks, and I cannot imagine the valley without creosote covering it like a blanket. How long, I wonder, until something built becomes something infinite? It is the trick of architects and engineers, I think, who, like magicians with a sleight of hand, make us equate their creations to those of God.

But someday, this dam will fail, and the reservoir will empty, and the water of the Rio Grande will flow again unencumbered down its channel to the gulf. It will flood the pecan orchards in Mesilla, and the alfalfa fields in La Union. It will overflow its banks at the Chamizal and break through the fences that cage it in Socorro, and the old river bed at Rio Bosque Wetlands Park will again feel water baptize its parched soil.

Today is not that day, but this evening I sat at the edge of Elephant Butte Dam, and imagined what a flood might look like to an eagle, flying south into the desert sky.