Butchie

In George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss (Eliot is a reference for many of my blog posts) the main protagonist Maggie Tulliver dies tragically, hounded by Rousseau’s “society”, which he believed makes man (or woman) a “tyrant both over himself and over nature.” Is the “evil-speaking” and “self-exaltation” of the society matrons who hound Maggie the only way we know to feel better about ourselves?

The bullies I encounter here in the hood, northern New Mexico, carry the weight of post colonialism, but with their “political shenanigans, bullying, abuse of power” (Orlando Romero, The Santa Fe New Mexican) they speak evilly about those who could actually be their partners in arms and exalt themselves by embracing patronage. This was recently played out at the county level, when a group of politicos came to trash the land use plan the county staff had worked hard for several years to write (starting with neighborhood associations and working up) with their usual complaints: “Nobody is going to tell me what to do with my land”; “How come I didn’t know about this?”; and “Are we going to let these newcomers tell us what to do?”

The meeting was the last straw for Butchie Denver, the Taoseña activist (she actually lived in Lama). As she reported to me on the phone when she got home (this is probably a mix of Butchie’s and my own sentiments, but seeing as how often they were the same, I’m not going to worry about it): “Well, to begin with, without a land use plan the developers are certainly going to have a say so in what happens as agricultural land gets bought up and water resources are transferred to urban use. Like hell they didn’t know about the plan, they just want an excuse to trash it because it wasn’t their idea and they don’t care about contributing to the common good. And these ‘newcomers’ they’re referring to are the staff that their all-Hispanic county commission hired to implement their vision of planning in the county. But trash it they did—the commissioners rolled right over, and now the county has no land use plan in place and a disconnected staff and commission.”

Butchie, aka one of Las Brujas (the other two being Trudy Valerio Healy and Fabi Romero), so dubbed by her longtime partner Tony Trujillo, was instrumental in wresting power out of the hands of the Democratic machine in Taos County through hard work, some intimidation, and knowing everything there was to know about everyone. Butchie also served for years on committees to revise the county land use plan, which is why she was so pissed off about the meeting that trashed it.

Yesterday Butchie died of cancer. She’d only been ill for a short time, and it was a shock to all of us. Tony took her out to the Bay Area two weeks ago for better medical care and to be with her daughter and granddaughter. While she was in hospice care Tony and I often talked on the phone and I heard a great many stories: her adventures at Woodstock; her husbands (there were more than one: Tony told me, “I never married her so she couldn’t divorce me”), her daughters, step-children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren; her move to Questa with a chimpanzee, a tiger, and a mountain lion (an explanation of this would take another blog post); and her career as an artist of retablos.

As an activist Butchie brooked no nonsense. She’d show up in anyone’s office—county commissioner, planner, attorney, town mayor—track them down at home, or confront them in public to express her displeasure when they failed to contribute to the common good. If she thought you were basically trying to do the right thing but got off track her approach was usually, “You know I love you but you’re really being an asshole.” She knew everything there was to know about water and how it was being used and abused, and was an invaluable resource for me in my position as chair of the Taos County Advisory Board on Public Welfare, which reviews all proposed water transfers within and from Taos County to ascertain if they’re in the best interest of the citizens of Taos County. She fought like hell alongside me to get the county to approve the advisory board after the regional water planning committee was hijacked by the powers that be. I don’t know what I’ll do without her.

But Tony told me not to worry, that Butchie will still be there watching my back, and the backs of all the others to whom she was a loyal and trusted compañera. Rest in peace, Butchie. You deserve some.