The Yuppie

Listening to the yuppie’s rant about cows impelled me to write a blog in Unfucking Believable, which I haven’t visited since February of 2025, when my dog Paco died. I didn’t get into an argument with the yuppie, I just said, “I like cows,” which set him off even deeper into degradated cowdom. The answer that rose up but I repressed was, “So, you want to turn New Mexico into Colorado, do yah?

Maybe he does. He and his family moved to El Valle about five or six years ago, after spending a lot of money remodeling Jacobo and Lalo’s adobe. I will grant him a little leeway, as he missed the apex of El Valle life, when Tomás and Arsenio and Orlando were still alive and cow culture was well integrated into village life. Now, the only ones who have cows are Adam and Adrian, and neither belongs to a permittee association, so they keep their cows in the village, moving from pasture to pasture, and sometimes running wild.

But the yuppie’s main complaint is cows in the wilderness. He’s hiked most of the trails in the Pecos Wilderness, climbed its peaks, run long distance, biked hundreds of miles, and cross-country and downhill skied. He hates the cows in the watersheds, he hates them on the trails, and thinks they have more privileges than people: “It’s ridiculous that you have to fence the cow out of your field, instead of the owner fencing it in.” Part of my response to him would be, “Do you want to have to get a permit to hike in the Pecos Wilderness and then get a reservation to go to a certain area? Do you want to hike with hundreds of other hikers on the trails outside the wilderness? Do you want to drive in miles of traffic to ski Taos or Santa Fe and then pay hundreds of dollars for a ticket? Well, that’s what you do in Colorado and that’s what’s in store for New Mexico if you turn over everything to the recreationists.

Northern New Mexico has to preserve its rural funkiness or we’ll fall prey to what I just described. And cows are an important component of that funkiness. They’ve kept a land-based culture alive but, unfortunately, not so well, as demonstrated in El Valle with the loss of Tomás’s generation. We’re just on the cusp of being able to keep these lands in agricultural production, be they hay fields, orchards, organic gardens selling to the local restaurants, or grazing for horses and cows. There’s a paucity of young people to take over management of the acequias. The mayordomo in El Valle lives in Santa Fe! There’s only a couple of families in the village with young children—Tomás’s great-grandchildren—and the yuppie, with one young son who goes to day care in Santa Fe.

When the cows go so go our hay fields, our getting up at 6 am to irrigate them, our contentious acequia meetings where everyone in the village gets to vent at the commissioners or all their neighbors, our relationships with vecinos of land-based knowledge and contemporary contrariness, and our slower paced life than that of our urban based children. So I think the yuppie should move on down to Santa Fe to enjoy a cow-free life—I think there are fewer cows on that side of the Pecos Wilderness—and the fruits of that lovely, gentrified city. We may be slowly dying up here but we’d prefer to do it on our own terms.