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Filming Bernalillo
- Rutgers University Press
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187 Danny Lyon arrived in New Mexico around the same time John Nichols was making his way to Taos. Like Nichols, Lyon emigrated from New York after having spent ten years working as a staff photographer for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). His time at SNCC involved Lyon in a number of major actions in the civil rights movement in the South. As with other disaffected, college-educated Americans of this period, Lyon’s left-leaning cultural and political views kept him involved in emerging social movements. Recalling those years, Lyon writes: “The South rolled out in front of me—highways and cotton fields, shotgun houses with screened porches, and nineteenth-century towns built around small squares. I loved it almost as much as I loved the movement . And the truth is the two were inseparable. Putting aside my history books in the libraries of great universities, I had the rare privilege to see history firsthand” (, ). Lyon’s first trip to New Mexico had a very clear aim. He wanted to learn about some hippie-counterculture residents who had managed to establish a commune in Placitas, New Mexico, folks who were becoming known for their innovative geodesic dome community. Despite his contacts there, Lyon chose to live in Bernalillo, a town lying astride the Rio Grande some six miles down the mountain from Placitas. Lyon’s decision would have a deep impact on his creative outlook. His neighbors in Bernalillo were mainly farmers and working-class Hispanos, and he chose to make them the subjects of his films. Bernalillo, the county seat of Sandoval 7 Filming Bernalillo Post–Civil rights Chicano Film subjects 188 HiDDen CHiCAno CineMA County, was approximately percent Mexican American: it was largely a Spanish-speaking community that had earned the reputation of being a poor stepchild to Albuquerque, the state’s only real urban center at the time. Bernalillo’s neighbors were the Keresan-speaking Pueblo Indians from Santa Ana Pueblo on the north and Tiwa-speaking Sandía Pueblo tribal members on the south. New Mexico’s small towns effected a transformation in most counterculture exiles who wandered through in the late s, and Danny Lyon was no exception. “This place changed my life,” he said, and he went on to tell just how different everyday life in Bernalillo was from anything he had experienced elsewhere in the United States: “You know what I liked about this place, the people didn’t speak English in the Post Office. Mr. Ortiz was the postman and you’d go in there, routinely, and just like there are today—there’d be older gentlemen chatting away in Spanish. Wow, I thought, I’m not in America. This place gave me a community and it’s still there and it’s great” (Lyon interview). Like Herbie Platt, John Nichols’s alter ego in The Milagro Beanfield War, Lyon also went through a cultural apprenticeship in which he slowly learned the ways of his neighbors. Early on, Ezequiel Domínguez, a longtime resident of Bernalillo, befriended him. This initial contact was not entirely by chance but grew out of the informal network developed by the activist community that was converging on New Mexico in those years. At the time, Domínguez was active in Reies Lopez Tijerina’s Alianza Federal de Mercedes. Activists like John Nichols, Betita Martínez (a former editor at HarperCollins who had done civil rights work with Lyon), and others found common cause with the activities of the Alianza’s militant land grant members. Even before Lyon hit New Mexico, someone brought up Domínguez, telling Lyon, “If you’re out in Bernalillo, go see Ezequiel.” Domínguez initiated Lyon into New Mexico localisms in both cultural and political ways. Even before Lyon was fully settled into his new community , he was asked to get involved in an antidevelopment campaign that was attempting to block the construction of Sun Country Estates, which was intended to be the largest mobile home park in the nation and slated for the outskirts of Bernalillo. Lyon was cajoled into writing a position statement for the antigrowth people and was soon immersed in the collective action that required him to attend public meetings with the Sandoval [3.90.205.166] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 22:11 GMT) FilMinG BernAlillo 189 County Commission. With Lyon’s help the plan to develop the mobile park was defeated. At about this same time, he began to detach himself from his work...