A proud son of New Mexico, LaFont welcomed the chance to sit and talk about Trump, the weather, climate change, and local history.
“I grew up during the 1940s, the son of an Indian trader,” he said. “I was raised on the Navajo reservation, the biggest reservation in the country. It goes over into Arizona and touches up in Utah. We operated the trading post in Prewitt, between Gallup and Grants, fourteen miles off the Continental Divide. We traded Indians [laughs]. No, we didn’t. Years ago, the Indians didn’t have a source of food or goods they needed. The trading post provided everything. There was around thirty traders. Your posts were in outlying areas, maybe five to ten miles from where the Indians lived. They’d come on wagons, trade, and then go home in a day’s time. There was no money involved. It was usually pledging sheep and buying wool. Then the trader would give the family credit so they could buy food. We’d go out, gather the sheep in the fall, take and sack the wool. It was a family deal. We all worked. The only day we closed was on Christmas Day. On that day, we varnished the sandstone floors. As the Indians began buying cars and trucks, and got jobs, they didn’t need us anymore. The posts faded away about 1952, ‘53, ‘54.
“The Indians never really accepted the traders. We were friendly, we all got along good, but they’ll never invite you to dinner. It’s their culture. It’s just one of those things. You get used to it. They don’t think the way we think. It’s just like Bush being in Iraq there. Best thing he could have done was said, ‘Adios, guys.’ Because those people do not think the way we think. You could have a democracy, you could have any goddamn thing you want over there, and they think the way they think and they’re not going to change. Indians are the same way.
“When I bought this place in 1996, it was a dump. I tore everything out, rebuilt it. Until 2001, we had good business. September 11 hurt businesses throughout the country. Then we started doing pretty good again, until Mr. Richardson let all of our water out in 2004. That changed everything. The other thing that kills us is the press we get out of Albuquerque. It’s negative, ‘Drought! The water’s down!’ Everybody thinks there’s no water here. We still have the biggest lake in the state of New Mexico. It’s really quite usable almost all year round. There are times it’s up, times it’s down. This year it’s up quite a ways and it’s doing well. But the press is not very nice to us down here. Lately, we’ve been drawing more people out of Texas than Albuquerque. We get a lot of military people. When it comes to West Texas, this is the closest lake.”
I ask LaFont if he thinks climate change has something to do with extended drought in recent years. “I don’t know if you know it, but this planet has been going through space for a long, long time,” he said. “Did you know this place had ice all over it at one time? And do you remember where the oceans came from? Well, hell, trees need carbon monoxide. If we had more carbon monoxide, we might have more trees. A lot of the climate change stuff comes from intelligent people that sit in universities and never been anywhere and don’t know a damn thing. Gosh, here in New Mexico we’ve had volcanoes. We’ve got the ice caves over there. The world has changed. It’s going to keep changing.
LaFont segued to Trump, and why he liked him, warts and all. “Trump’s a businessman. That’s what I like about him. And he’s not part of the establishment. The American people are sick and tired of the establishment. He’s probably got ten times more balls than Obama’s got. I do have a problem with anybody that talks about themselves. Being a businessman and relatively successful, I don’t think you need to let everybody know everything about you. That’s where I come from. I don’t think he’s exactly what I would call ‘smart’ in things that he just blurts out. It’s sort of like when a bunch of guys are sitting at the bar talking, it just comes out. I think he should be more methodical about it. There’s a lot of people like Rush Limbaugh that thinks he shouldn’t change. Well, that’s fine, but I think more people would be more open to him if he was a little bit more selective in what he says.”
I asked if he thought Trump could win New Mexico, a border swing state, in November. “Up here, the border situation doesn’t seem to bother us,” he replied. “We really can’t tell the difference. Most of the people, they just go right on by to Albuquerque. The only thing we have here is the people that run out of money and sit down outside Walmart and ask for food. This is a funny state. It’s primarily Democrat, and major Hispanic, no matter what anybody says. The state is pretty much controlled by the Hispanic people up around Espanola and that northern part of the state. Whether anybody likes it or not. Of course they’ve been here five and six generations, too. So they’re kind of inbred to that way of thinking. You and I aren’t going to change it. As far as my predictions are concerned, I don’t know. Looks like Hillary’s got her tit in a wringer. I wonder how that happened? [laughs]”
I ask if he’d seen the reports about what happened in Albuquerque the night before. “That was a bunch of bullshit. The policemen and the state of New Mexico should have been ready and not let it happen. I graduated from Albuquerque High School in 1958. We didn’t have the strife between the Hispanics and the whites that we have now. If anybody got out of hand, they got the shit beat out of them. You didn’t burn the American flag. You didn’t even think about it. Where I grew up, everybody had a gun. I had a gun when I was ten years old. But you just lived differently in those days. A lot of the problems today have to do with attitude. A lot of them act the way they do because they know they can get by with it.”
LaFont veered into a long disquisition on the Indian fighter Kit Carson and how he brought the local Navajo clans to heel. Taking my leave, I thanked LaFont for the history lesson and wished him luck in weathering what may be many years of deepening drought.
“I’ve been doing this for over fifty years,” he said. “When you’re dumb, you got to be tough.”
* * *
I drove south on a stretch of the old Route 66 that cuts through the Acoma and Laguna Indian reservations. Amid an ocean of desert scrub, I slowed while passing a ramshackle trailer compound, where a man was standing at an outdoor worktable. He looked out of place in a baseball cap, purple T-shirt tucked into jeans, and Nike running shoes. I approached the wire fence separating his property from the road and asked him what he was doing. He said, “Making a windmill.” He introduced himself as Mike, declining to give his last name. He was voting Trump, he said, and had recently adopted a life in the desert to pursue his life’s mission: a breakthrough in micro-scale alternative energy.
“I was living in Albuquerque when I moved down here to work on my little windmill,” he said. “I needed a place to build the prototype and test it. This was the perfect place: lots of wind, nobody to gripe about what I’m doing. So I’m out here roughing it until I get it going. I’ve got a little solar shower. I haul my water. As you can tell, I’m about five miles past the last power line. You know, the mother of invention is necessity. Out here, if I want power, I have to make it.
“I’ve been thinking about green energy a long time. Solar was over my head, so I decided to go with wind. I’m tinkering with a model. The only thing that I’m purchasing from an outside vendor is the actual generator. Why reinvent the wheel? One of the markets I’m going to invest in is the reservations. The Indians got folk further out than me from power. And let’s face it, we keep sending our military into places it shouldn’t be for oil. We need other kinds of power for people. I hope I can find niche markets like around here, with strong winds. Make a buck or two.
“These winds in high desert, it’s a problem for little turbines, for micro-wind. The generators burn out because of the occasional eighty- or ninety- mile-an-hour gust. What I tried to do, and I think I accomplished with this new one, once I assemble it, is limit the RPMs so it won’t burn out the generator. I got my fingers crossed. I got to go back into Albuquerque next week and pick up some parts I’m having manufactured there. Then I’ll stick it up and hope it survives the wind gusts. That’s what I’m doing out here
. Just trying to work a windmill.”
I tell him I understand how the desert plains winds could be a problem. More than once, they’d blown my compact rental car clear across the blacktop like a cotton willow. I ask him how long he’s been interested in the engineering challenges of green energy.
“It’s been in my head for a long, long time,” he said. “When I was in the Navy, I worked on aircrafts and that kind of thing. This was during Vietnam. When I got out, I worked in machine shops, weld shops. I’d see something an engineer had designed, I’d look at it, and think, ‘I can do better than that.’ But I just kind of kicked around. Life happens. Finally, I stopped drinking and went back to school. Finished a two-year business degree. Got my priorities straight. Once I did that, I couldn’t get the turbine out of my head. I finally decided, okay, I need to either make it work, or stop tinkering with it and walk away. So I bought this place and put one together. The first one didn’t work. Went back and studied some more. Now I’m trying again. I’m out here until I decide it’s a dream or a nightmare come true. I’ve been putting a lot of energy and money into it. I’m hoping at some point I can get a grant to help me proceed, or maybe take it to market.”
I ask him what he thinks about Trump’s pro–coal energy politics, his climate-change denial, and his opposition to government investment to spur the growth of a green energy sector.
“Trump gets a bad rap about a lot of things. You know, if you can prove to them that it’s a money-making deal, that there’s going to be a need for this, then businesspeople like Trump will invest. It’s a free country. Nobody says, ‘Put him in jail because he’s got a windmill.’ I don’t foresee that ever happening. I don’t need a federal program. I’ll make them and sell them, or I won’t. But, if there’s a place that I can get a little grant money, I’d sure take that at this juncture. I don’t worry about the government programs, the tax credits and all that. If it’s a viable product, it will sell, and if not … The climate change stuff, well, I’ve concluded that when the cacti stop blooming and die, we might have a problem. But this is an arid area. It’s dry. I don’t believe them when they’re talking about drought in New Mexico. Before the white man got out here and started planting things that needed more water, there was enough water. There still is. The snakes don’t seem to mind it. The rattlers are okay.”
I ask him if he trusts Trump, who was already beginning to pivot away from or soften earlier statements as he headed toward the general election. “I’m hoping that he’s as conservative as he says he is. He used to be liberal on a lot of things. That’s life. Over the years I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things. If I held the same viewpoints I did when I was younger, I’d be living in Colorado right now, rolling one fat one after another. But like I said, I’m just out here trying to get this done. Just me and a couple of rabbits. And the rattlesnakes. This here is just fabulous rattlesnake habitat. I try to stay in the open area and wear gaiters when I get out in the weeds and chop sage. Hopefully we have a live-and-let-live understanding. They do seem a little more cranky than last year. I don’t know why. I ask them. They don’t tell me.”
I thanked him for the reminder to watch out for rattlers during roadside rest stops, and let him get back to work. Getting into my car, I asked him if he had a name picked out for his invention. “Oh, I’m already on name number ten,” he said. “It’s harder than you think, naming a windmill.”
* * *
When the city of Deming was founded in 1881, residents boasted of a “New Chicago” in the southwest. The site of an intercontinental railroad crossing, a port of entry for neighboring Mexico—how could it do anything but boom? New Chicago never happened. Deming instead achieved a modest twentieth-century prosperity built upon agriculture. But over the years, like so many places, Deming—with a Latino-majority population of fifteen thousand—has seen its prosperity slide into disrepair and depopulation. One hundred and thirty-five years after the celebratory driving of its silver spike, Deming can boast only of a nation-leading teen pregnancy rate and a brief cameo in Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing.
On a row of mostly empty buildings in a downtown that looks like a Western movie set, a crude window painting of Uncle Sam marks Deming’s GOP headquarters. I entered to find a retired realtor named Keith Harris exchanging goodbyes with a middle-aged Latina woman. The woman was part of what Harris said was a historic wave for Luna County’s outnumbered Republicans. “Because of Trump,” he said, “we’re growing for the first time in memory, registering more people than ever. This county is seventy percent Hispanic. A lot of them are changing over for Trump. We’re registering new voters, the kind of people that never vote, or haven’t voted since Reagan. We’re up ten percent, a huge amount for this county.”
What’s “huge” for Luna County doesn’t translate into many voters in absolute terms, and Harris conceded there is no national trend in Latinos defecting from the Democratic Party. But there are some, in New Mexico and elsewhere, willing to look past Trump’s incendiary comments if they think he’ll be good for the economy. “We have twenty percent unemployment. So do other towns,” he said.
Harris isn’t native to the area. He retired to Deming’s dry climate from California, where he earned a PhD in history at UC-Berkeley in the ‘50s—“Before the pinkos took over,” he joked—and made a small fortune in real estate. He framed Trump’s candidacy in a larger context of American decline and the failed liberalism of both parties. “This year is a do-or-die election for the country,” he said. “The border down in Hidalgo County is wide open. Drugs are pouring across. Human trafficking. Trump says it like most of us believe, about a lot of things.”
When I expressed interest in meeting Trump supporters on the border, he pulled out his phone. “You know who you need to talk to, is the Keelers,” he said. “Trump supporters. They know that border better than anyone. They can tell you stories.”
He wrote down a phone number and wished me luck. As I got up to leave, he told me to take some of the literature piled and racked around the office. I grabbed a pamphlet titled, “The Communist Party Is the Democratic Party,” and the Spring 2016 issue of AMAC Advantage, the membership magazine of a conservative “seniors advocacy group” that supports private retirement accounts and a higher retirement age. On the cover, Donald Trump leaned forward in a gilded Victorian chair surrounded by lush carpeting and vaunted ceilings supported by gold-trimmed marble pillars. Beside him, Melania struck a pose in a pink satin toga. The story promised to “unravel the mystery behind his successful campaign.”
* * *
Murray and Judith Keeler live in isolation at the end of a long, unpaved road that twists deep into the Peloncillo Mountains. Their ranch sits among hills as rough and dangerous as can be found in New Mexico’s remote southwestern boot. The area is well-known for crisscrossing smuggling routes out of Mexico. They’ve had friends killed and hijacked by smugglers; their home is frequently burglarized. Both grew up working on ranches and farms in southern New Mexico, and raised their six children the same. Murray Keeler, sixty-nine, is of slight build, with a coughing smoker’s laugh and a face of tough sun-beaten leather. Judith, sixty-four, is ginger-haired and quietly ebullient, her fairer skin splotchy from a lifetime in the desert sun.
Over glasses of water at the Keeler’s kitchen table, they spoke wistfully of the braceros they knew as children, laborers from Mexico named for the old program to replace farm workers lost during World War II. Terminated in 1964, the program is often invoked with nostalgia in border communities and held up as a model for an expanded guest worker program.* The Keelers also talked about their frontline perspective on Donald Trump’s Wall, their compassion for drug mules, and why the Border Patrol can be a bigger pain in the ass than the cartels. I started by asking about life in a major smuggling corridor. “We usually see them after they’ve dropped their drugs and are on their way back to Mexico,” said Judith. “They stop by here for food and water. We give it to them. I told Border Patrol, I
am going to feed them, because that’s the way I was raised. I’m not going to turn them in, because then you get in trouble with the cartels. Once, years ago, I turned a group in. Border Patrol was bringing them back up here so I could identify them when my neighbor met them on the road. She said, ‘Don’t you take them back up there, because then they’ll know who turned them in.’ After that, I don’t turn them in.”
“They’re pleasant enough when we’re home,” said Murray. “If we’re not here, they break in and take whatever they want. We’ve had three break-ins in the last year. They robbed a lot this last time, in February. They stole my binoculars, her pistol, a chainsaw, all of my battery-powered drills. They’re on foot on the way back from dropping the drugs. There’s at least seventeen trails where they come up the Peloncillos and drop off. Border Patrol has them mapped.
“The Border Patrol compound down the road there, it’s a farce. We tried to get them to build it down on the border. They could have had a perfect view of the fence. But twenty miles away? These are tough mountains. The US Army couldn’t get Geronimo out of these mountains. There are lots of ways they can go. There’s a trail they call Saint Mary’s. It goes all the way to Highway 9. Right now, Border Patrol counts Highway 9 as the border. That’s where they start working.”
“Put them on the border. Like, right now,” said Judith. “We have another ranch in Hachita, five miles north of the border. Our daughter, Amanda, is over there. One of the agents was telling her they can’t stop the illegals until they cross Highway 9. The government, the bosses, whoever it is, won’t let them stop them until after they get over there. Then they catch them, and can’t keep them. Sometimes ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] won’t let them keep a guy, even if he’s a known pedophile or a rapist. Or ICE wants to, but the judge won’t do it. The whole dang system is convoluted.”
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