Properties of Violence: Law and Land-Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico

Epilogue: Rare Earth

167 EPILOGUE Rare Earth IT’S AUGUST 2011, and I’m in the backseat of a four-wheel-drive Ranger, a gaspowered , off-road “golf” cart with huge tires and plenty of cup holders. We’re tearing along a rutted gravel road that leads to the land at the heart of the Martínez v. Mundy dispute. Mike Plant is driving, drinking a Tecate and smoking a Cuban cigar. Nagging knee injuries have turned the former Olympic speed skater into a pudgy fifty-two-year-old land developer. Actually, land development in Tierra Amarilla is just his hobby. He spends most of his time in Atlanta, where he serves as the executive vice president of Major League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves. His route into sports management dates to just after the 1980 Olympics, when he was a teammate of six-time gold-medal speed skater Eric Heiden. After the Olympics Plant took up competitive cycling, as did Heiden. Unlike Heiden, however, Plant found his greatest success in organizing athletic events rather than competing in them. With a partner he started a sports promotion company in the late 1980s and convinced Donald Trump to pitch in millions of dollars. The Tour de Trump was the result, an East Coast U.S. version of the Tour de France. The tour folded after a few years, but not before the Atlanta Braves’ billionaire owner Ted Turner bought Plant’s company. Plant holds out a Cuban cigar to me. “Have you ever smoked a Cuban?” he asks. When I say no, he pulls it back. “It’ll make you sick then. Better not.” He takes another sip from his can of Tecate and returns to the conversation he’s having with his front-seat passenger, former Atlanta Braves slugger Ryan Klesko. Klesko hit nearly three hundred home runs in a sixteen-year career spent mostly with the Braves and now, in retirement, hosts his own hunting show on cable. He’s in Tierra Amarilla to film an episode about elk hunting on the former land grant. I can barely hear the two of them over the roar of the engine, but I make out that they’re discussing elk habitat and the best place to locate a hunting blind. I turn to watch the scenery fly by. “For sale” signs in front of small ranchettes populate the roadside alongside “no trespassing” signs and, occasionally, massive western-style ranch entrances with huge metal gates and names like The Landings at Chama and Mundy Ranch. Fences are everywhere we look, and 168 • epilogue they define new boundaries of property that today divide the former land grant into thousands of smaller private holdings. Wealthy out-of-state vacationers own many of the ranchettes, a real estate euphemism for upscale second homes. We drive past Jim Mundy’s ranch, and Plant hollers back that Jim, the son of Bill Mundy, is building an exclusive residential development complete with an artificial-turf golf course and a firing range that can accommodate .50-caliber machine guns, a gun so large that the rounds are as big as small bananas. We’re on our way to Plant’s 5,800-acre ranch/development, which he named Canyon Ridge, a Rare Earth Community. The glossy real estate brochures that promote Canyon Ridge describe an idyllic setting for million-dollar homes set in a mountaintop, conservation-friendly, master-planned community. Promotional materials narrate a history of untrammeled wilderness and peaceful seclusion that elide the long history of conflict and property struggle in Tierra Amarilla. Plant’s website doesn’t even include the villages that made up the Tierra Amarilla land grant. Like the sheepherders that the story of Canyon Ridge ignores, they’re off the map. Canyon Ridge comprises part of the land that Bill Mundy first bought in 1951. Since acquiring the property in 2007, Plant has reduced whole ridgelines to rubble in order to build roads through thick forests. Soon, if all goes as planned, the roads will be choked with construction equipment building scores One of the many entry gates to Canyon Ridge: A Rare Earth Community, August 2011. (Photo by author.) Rare Earth • 169 of multimillion-dollar homes with breathtaking views of the Tierra Amarilla valley—a valley that Plant’s maps have renamed the Chama Valley. We finally reach the ranch entrance, and Plant idles the four-wheeler in front of a huge gate. Klesko hops...