(ambient music) (lively music) - By allowing us to tell our own stories and have pride.

- That sense of longing for belonging is so strong in all of us.

- By memory, I could probably draw the outline of the mountains that surrounded me.

I know all the rivers and creeks.

I know the people who live here.

- They encouraged me to just be me and do me.

(lively music continues) - [Kate] Human relationship with the land here in the San Luis valley goes back over 10,000 years.

Indigenous peoples and native tribes traversed here for countless generations before Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo settlements changed all this for them.

Throughout this cultural crossroads remains a deep connection to the land and water.

Here in La Florida near the New Mexico border, traditional meets contemporary, such as these 3D printed structures.

They're made from adobe, a blend of water, straw, and the very dirt and clay on which they rest.

It's a project of architect Ronald Rael, whose family has lived here for generations.

He's created something new from an old technique, and meanwhile, is making what's old new again, including the restoration of a number of adobe buildings in his local community.

Like this one in Conejos, Colorado, where Ron and I met to share his story.

(indistinct chatter) - [Ronald] This was built in 1854.

There's the sawmill and gristmill that was just right there.

This part of the building.

(speech fades) (gentle music) Pre pandemic, I was living in Oakland.

I could walk to campus and teach at Berkeley and certainly, teaching at Berkeley is amazing and living in the bay area is amazing, but I know that every time I walked from my home to campus, I thought a lot about how I am not connected to that landscape, which is very different here, where by memory, I could probably draw the outline of the mountains that surrounded me.

I know all the rivers and creeks.

I know the people who live here.

I have agency in the landscape.

I can manage the way that the waters flow from the snow melt into the fields and that makes me connected to the birds that land in there and the fish that come into those places and the grass that grows and the animals that eat that grass and that's just a very different reality and I've had a hard time accepting a reality in which I'm not connected to it.

Even when I'm in Oakland, I can feel this landscape and it's pulling.

And so it's been great to come back.

(gentle music continues) In May, everything had become so closed down in the city.

And so the decision was made that we would come out here.

I brought some graduate students and we just spent the summer making things, making this 3D printed house and building things and being really free.

And honestly, I think of this year as one of the best years of my life.

(gentle music continues) My family has lived in Conejos County for at least six or seven generations and we still live in the same village.

I would say that I grew up fairly traditionally.

People built adobe houses.

People ate certain foods.

The majority of people spoke Spanish as a first language and many people didn't speak English.

My grandparents, my great-grandparents.

After the Mexican-American War, there was a lot of opposition for anything south of the Arkansas River to be part of the state because it was considered too Mexican.

And of course, New Mexico took a long time to become a state also because it was also considered too Mexican.

It was like the Puerto Rico of the time, like it's something else.

(calm music) We are not only people who identify as Mexicanos, but in that word, it's so charged with lots of different meaning, of our Mestizaje or mixed indigenous heritage, our Spanish colonial heritage, and the conflicts that I think exist within all of us related to those two lineages coming together.

People like us are not Native American or Native American enough, and we're not American enough and we're not Mexican enough.

And so we walk this strange line of trying to decipher our identities and we express them in different ways.

A lot of what I do is think about how we are part of an expanded borderlands.

The border isn't here, but it was here and it's not here anymore, but that memory still exists.

That project, Teeter-totter Wall, is really a project about making these connections across this landscape.

It also is about the generosity that two people have between each other in a shared act of joy and that a wall can't prevent those connections from happening.

People have come together to celebrate their binational heritage in spite of that wall.

And I also think about the contemporary border and the fact that there's a wall there and it was militarized.

But if we look back at 1846, there was a militarization of this border as well.

If we think about child separation at the border today, where children are being separated from their families.

If we look back at this landscape then, children were being taken from their families as well, all in the context of territorial expansion and definition, and so I think there are lessons to be learned about what happened and how we might not repeat them today.

Maybe I'm not confident about any assertion about who I am, but I'm pretty comfortable about knowing where I came from.

There's a gradient of culture that exists.

A lot of people who think about this question think about it all their lives.

They try to figure out who are we or who am I in a place where I've been forever.

(sonorous sound) - [Kate] Conejos is one of the first at the areas settlements that were established along natural and hand-dug waterways in the 1850s.

Descendants of these original settlers still live here today.

This collection of villages and their place names carry unique histories and memories, like here in Los Rincones, where those who grew up in this remote and beautiful area gather to share their stories.

(mellow music) - [Joe] Who remembers the movie Dances With Wolves?

Anybody?

A lot of people?

In one scene, Kevin Costner was asked, "Why do you want to save the frontier?"

His response was, "I need to see it before it's gone."

Same thing about our Los Rincones.

We need to share it.

We need to learn about it.

We need to live it.

We want to share it before it's gone.

- [LeRoy] We come together today to celebrate our history in this sacred place of Los Rincones.

We thank you for those that came before us and for the culture and family traditions that they passed on to their children.

- [Loretta] People have been tromping through here for at least 13,000 years.

If you look at these hills behind us, there are rock shelters and game blinds all through these hills.

All this flood plain of the San Antonio River was full of bison, but the pressure of hunting coming from the United States from the east and the decimation of the bison herds eventually affected this area.

So all the bison disappeared from these meadows by 1870.

By that time, the Utes had been removed from this area.

- [Dennis] Mexico had gained its independence from Spain in 1820, and so all of this became Mexican territory.

And so there were families that applied for a land grant and they applied it under the name of the Conejos Land Grant.

2.5 million acres.

And that's where the name of this area came from.

Los Rincones, meaning the corners.

One of the corners of the land grant.

- [Loretta] It is, if not, one of the oldest, perhaps the oldest Hispano settlement in the state of Colorado.

And we're happy for anybody to share anything that they think is important to the history of this region because everybody's story matters.

(mellow music continues) - [Joe] This home was actually a home to three couples.

My grandparents Rosita, Adolfo Mestas.

They lived here from 1921 to 1924.

My grandfather was a World War I veteran.

Very little money, even being a soldier.

When he came back the spring of 1918, here's where they lived.

They waited a few years to be able to start building their own home out of adobes.

Adobes that they would make themselves.

So can you imagine the money?

What money?

Survival, that's what it was about.

One room at a time.

Two rooms, three rooms, four rooms, five, six.

1948, finally the house is complete.

Span of what?

30 years?

To build a home for your family says a lot.

That's what they could afford, but this is a tremendous start of somebody's life, and this is what's left of this site anyway.

I wish I could just freeze frame everything and enjoy it forever, but that's not the case.

- [Loretta] Back in the time this community was settled, there were a lot of Natives coming through trading, and you know, we're so far from any kind of industrialized area.

People needed kitchenware, they needed bowls and pots and pans and whatever.

And what I'm passing around is pieces of Native American pottery that came out of this house.

And you'll notice it's sparkly because it's got mica in it.

And that's typical of the pottery from Picuris Pueblo, which is in the mountains south east of Española.

In the trash pile was fine China from probably 1870, along with painted pottery, which is probably from the pueblos of Taos area in that area.

(mellow music) - [Christine] No electricity, no indoor plumbing, you know, but we survived, and now I'm proud to say that, you know, I was from Los Rincones, and like you say, you know, part of that is still in us.

It makes you grow up to be what you are.

- [Joe] Look at each other.

We have helped each other be who we are today.

I want to say this about Los Rincones.

I am Los Rincones forever.

(mellow music continues) (gentle music) - [Kate] The Rio Grande flows through the San Luis valley, south to New Mexico, and today marks the boundary between Conejos and Costilla Counties.

Here, traveling east along Highway 142, we reach the Rio Grande Natural Area.

This designation was established in 2006 under the leadership of then Senator Ken Salazar and state representative John Salazar, brothers from Los Rincones.

(gentle music) - [Ken] This is a very beautiful and wonderful area.

It used to be that these two counties here, Costilla and Conejos, were the forgotten counties of the state of Colorado.

In the '90s, these two counties were among the four poorest counties in the United States of America.

And yet, somehow the people of this valley recognize the richness of the spirit of the people.

As the former governor used to say, Roy Romer, it's a place that may be poor in material things but it's very rich in spirit.

- [Mitchell] There's a hymn that we sing in our church that says, "Firm as the mountains around us, Stalwart and brave we stand.

On the rocks our fathers planted for us in this goodly land."

And I think that sums up the people that come from this area.

They're firm, they're steadfast, they're strong, they're immovable, and we've got plenty of rocks and plenty of mountains.

It's kind of the hidden secret of the State.

We don't want to keep it secret, but we do want to keep it sacred.

We want to keep it protected.

We want people to come and enjoy it and feel the strength that comes from this area.

(uplifting music) - [Kate] Further east in the Costilla County, we visit Viejo San Acacio, another of the oldest settlements in what is now Colorado.

Lifelong resident, Roque Madrid, tells the origin story of this, the oldest standing church in the state.

- [Roque] We're standing in front of the church that was built by the very first settlers here in San Acacio.

There were apparently some people that were writing up the Culebra there.

people that were out in the field were doing their agriculture work.

They put out a call for everybody to come in because they thought they were going to be attacked.

The settlers said all they could do is pray, and they prayed to San Acacio and if he was deliberating from what they thought was an impending attack.

They would build a church in his honor, and there's the church.

This is where I was raised.

I was raised here in San Acacio Viejo, and I was an altar boy in this church.

On March 8th, 1973, I got a phone call in the middle hours of the night.

The American Indian Movement was invited by the settlers of Wounded Knee and the surrounding communities to come and help them overcome a problem that they had with a dictator there by the name of Dick Wilson.

So on February 27th, the American Indian Movement took over the village of Wounded Knee.

I got a phone call from a woman I had met in Chicago the previous semester.

She knew that I could fly in and that I had medical skills, and she said that they had this amount of supplies, 640 pounds worth of food and medicine.

And so if I could take them to an airport and get them to Wounded Knee, she would leave it up to me to figure out how to do it.

So I did.

That night, the Feds didn't want to let us cross through into the village.

They yelled at me and they said, "Hey, if you turn back, we can protect you.

But if you go past that demilitarized zone, we can't protect you."

And I said, "You're the people that I need the protection from, man."

And that same night I got shot.

And this is that story.

The people at Wounded Knee shot a cow to kill it for meat, and when they did that, the Feds used that as a pretext that they had been fired on to open up on us.

(suspenseful music) While that fire exchange was going on, one of the guys from security came up and he says, "I need to run one of the medics.

See if any of our people have been hit."

So I was the one to go for that.

I got up and we were running and I was meeting and I was in front of that guy.

You know, a good runner man.

I'm in front of him.

And I saw a foxhole about from here to that wall.

And I was just ready to, three or four more steps and I was going to dive into it 'cause I could hear the (imitates bullets firing) bullets hitting all around me on the ground.

(imitates bullets firing) And so I knew that they were, that I was in the hail of fire but I didn't think I was going to get shot.

And so I'm running through that foxhole.

And the next thing that I know, I'm doing the- The bullet didn't hurt.

It didn't hurt at all.

It felt like somebody just got like that with their finger on you.

But what hurt was the road rash.

I went tumbling on a dirt road.

When I got shot, I was laying on the ground and I thought, I didn't even call my grandma and tell her that I was going.

Which I always did, wherever I was going, "Grandma, I'm gonna call you later.

I'll talk to you later, write you a letter."

But I didn't.

You know, because I didn't want to worry her.

And then I thought, oh, she's going to hear about it from the obituary column or something.

But no, man.

Lo and behold, good medicine.

Good medicine.

Powerful medicine.

Powerful medicine.

(somber music) Neither Daniel nor I know who the third guy was.

There was another guy that helped Daniel carry me back to the clinic and so I'm laying on a mattress on the floor.

And I'm real calm with everything.

You know I could care less about what they were doing, you know, watching everything happen.

So here's the guy with a little bucket of sage.

Burning Sage with a eagle feather, singing and praying and his songs around the whole room.

Then over me and over Leonard Crow Dog and the MD and everybody that was in there.

And so when they were checking me out that they wanted to call a ceasefire, my blood pressure was dropping pretty fast.

So that's why they wanted a cease fire, to send me up, and Leonard Crow Dog said, "I'm going to take that bullet out.

I'm going to operate."

He goes to his cabinet, about half the size of this little table on the wall, about that deep, about three or four shelves on it.

And he goes through there and he gets something from it, canning jar that was dried and he chewed it and he stuck it in the bullet hole.

Sterile technique did not even cross my mind, you know, about gloves and face masks.

That didn't even cross my mind.

This guy's chewing something and sticking it in my bullet hole.

And I was watching him sharpening his pocket knife on a honing stone.

And he would check it on his finger and fingernails, he'd see how sharp it was.

There was no pain.

The only time that I felt it was when the knife actually hit the bullet and make contact with the bullet, that hurt like if I had just been kicked, that hurt.

But as soon as he withdrew the knife, the pain, it came like this (snaps) and it went like that.

Just didn't last at all.

No bleeding and no infection.

We escaped from Wounded Knee.

We had to crawl on our bellies because there were sentries posted all over the place.

About 56 hours after getting shot with a machine gun and I'm escaping from Wounded Knee and the only thing that happened is that I ruptured the stitches that the doctor put on.

But I put a compress on it and there was no bleeding.

It was just fine.

But I did rupture.

There's marks where I tore them.

- [Kate] Do you have a scar from the bullet?

- Yeah.

Right there.

Yeah.

(somber music) You know, then I thought it was kind of illegal to shoot an unarmed medic I thought that was against the Geneva Convention and the other laws besides that.

So you don't shoot people providing humanitarian aid.

You just don't.

But what was good is that they could break our bodies, but they couldn't break our spirit.

We were just as...

Right on, man.

You know.

I'll go pull duty with you, brother.

So it was a great experience, man.

It was a great experience.

Met some really unbelievable people.

Unbelievable people.

- [Kate] Crisp summer nights are ideal for growing snap peas, a San Luis Valley tradition.

Here, neighbors help each other plant the fields of San Pedro and Augustine Esquibel remembers his own first childhood garden out on the ranch.

- [Augustine] It goes hand in hand with growing up here.

Eventually just, it's part of you.

You start realizing how important it is.

(mellow music) Growing up and you plant your first garden and you're excited about these two rows are mine.

I put peas in there, I put havas in there, I put radishes in there, put a couple of little red potatoes at the end.

(mellow music continues) You irrigate and you watch those seeds come up and what they sprout, and you're real proud of it.

They commend you a little bit for it.

Really gives you a sense of how important the acequias are to this community, to, just to life.

Acequias bring life.

And when you're touching that water, that water shed up there is like the veins and the arteries to this community.

Those acequias feed this community, it's what nourishes it.

It keeps these people hoping.

And every year, they do the same things and sometimes not knowing if they'll have the water or they don't, but always with that faith.

Always with that faith.

(mellow music continues) (calm music) (water flowing) - [Kate] Keeping faith that water will come is a sentiment echoed by Junita Martinez in the village of San Francisco, just Southeast of here.

Traditional customs of land and water stewardship are critical to this lifestyle, including the Acequia tradition of irrigation.

- [Junita] I am a Chicana.

I am a child of the corn.

'A child of the corn.'

My parents were farmers.

(sighs) I get to experience this every day.

We're a land and water based people.

Mark Twain used to say that water was for fighting and whiskey was for drinking, and I believe that.

(gentle music) These are my chicken eggs.

14.

We've had some very serious arguments and hardships concerning our Acequia.

This is actually an irrigation ditch or an Acequia.

This ditch has been in operation for almost 200 years.

It gives us what we need to live.

It grows our crops.

Because of climate change and other factors, it's been so hard.

Every year gets more difficult because of the scarcity.

We're not getting enough snowfall in some years.

In 2012, there was a serious, serious drought.

We lost everything.

Nobody grew a bale of hay.

Hardly anybody in this canyon.

There have been times when it's been very, very dry where actually even the fish in it have died because there's just not enough water.

We're living on the hope that we're going to get the resource of snow every year and enough rainfall.

That's the hope that springs eternal, I guess, out of us.

This same water comes from our canyon, San Francisco.

And I would say it's a good four miles up.

It starts very small and it's little, little springs, and then when the snow melts, all the snow melt joins into one, comes into the San Francisco.

Currently in our community, 60 households in the village here irrigate 1,062 acres.

And we use this ditch or Acequia.

In this community, we have four or five of them and they have all been dug by hand by folks who just had an ax and a shovel and a plan.

Historically, we have a very long tradition that works.

We're communal in the fact that the water has to be shared.

And if there's not enough water, then the Majordomo and our commission have to figure out.

Instead of Jose getting three days worth of water, Jose, you're going to be cut down to two.

Instead of you getting five days, you're going to be cut down to three.

And so people cutting down their water levels allows everybody a chance to irrigate.

The owner who owns a hundred acres, you would think, "Oh, he could raise his collar and he can dictate how the vote's going to go."

But it doesn't happen that way.

It's one man or one woman and one vote, and it takes care of business.

So we get people from bigger cities and they buy a huge ranch.

And then they're a little bit miffed and upset because their vote is only one vote just like the gentleman with his little two acres, but it's effective and we've survived 200 years so I think it's worth saving.

(calm music) The tradition of being a land and water based people, of teaching your children that this water is what gives us in our villages sustenance.

It's invaluable.

It's a tradition.

It is something that you pass from one generation to another.

And then the next thing is you gotta fight like hell to keep it.

I want to hide it.

I want to keep it a secret, but I live in the 21st century now, and it's impossible to leave any areas undetected anymore.

It's gone.

So I figure if people entered with a better sense of where they're coming into the traditions and the culture, they'll be more apt to want to protect it and keep it the way it is.

(calm music continues) (mellow music) - [Kate] Thank you to those in Conejos and Costilla Counties who shared their stories with me and now with you.

You can learn more about your Colorado neighbors and experience impactful stories at rmpbs.org.

From Rocky Mountain PBS, I'm Kate Perdoni.

(mellow music continues)