Title: A dam's 'painful' history - New Mexico In Depth
Headings: A dam’s ‘painful’ history
Economy
A dam’s ‘painful’ history
Another transition
Republish our work
About Laura Paskus, New Mexico In Depth

Content: Every night we would see the lights equal to several football fields lit up and would hear the trucks make the funny beeping sounds. We went to sleep hearing the destruction of our heartlands. We would wake up to this for more days and weeks and months than I care to remember. In retrospect, I represent the generation who may have been the last to have grown up alongside of our grandfathers, grandmothers, and our parents working the land while learning about our way of life in that kind of traditional agricultural community. To see those places where we had played, the places that had nurtured us through all of our life experiences to that point, destroyed was traumatic. When the gates closed, we watched the remainder of the available agricultural lands become flooded by the seepage from Cochiti Lake.” In tandem with the dam’s construction, developers envisioned a privately owned, 400,000-person town smack inside the reservation, which was considered close enough to Santa Fe, Los Alamos and Albuquerque to draw visitors and second-home buyers. According to Pecos, that proposal tore apart the community and created a “new set of dynamics that would break from the past unified stronghold to resistance:” “It became a classic example of external interests using those internally to break down resistance. This form of exploitation came at great cost culturally, socially, politically, and economically to a small undeveloped and underdeveloped tribal community.