Both sides now

Patriarch Alfonzo Abeyta during February shearing. It's a communal affair with neighbors from Mogote and Antonito pitching in. The shearers are mostly Amish from nearby Manassa and Bob Barr, who runs the crew, is Mormon. When the job is finished  his son Andrew Abeyta and his wife host a late lunch for forty of their closest friends. Alfonzo says that "We're clannish. We can talk about each other but you can't."

Alfonzo Abeyta says that he didn’t speak English until he began school in 1943. He went to high school in Manassa and was raised as Mormon but that ended when he made a date with a Mormon girl from school. “She liked me and I liked her. I offered to pick her up at her house but she said that wouldn’t work so she snuck out her bedroom window and met me. When her dad and brother found out they came after me and beat me so bad that I couldn’t eat anything but soup for weeks. After that I never went back to the Mormon church and converted to Catholic.”

Sheep Chute.

All hands on deck.

An experienced shearer can shear a sheep in two minutes.

Shorn.

And released.

His father Amos Abeyta could only afford to send one of his children to college. That college was even an option and that his daughter, the oldest, was chosen speaks volumes about the kind of man Amos was. Because Alfonzo couldn’t afford to go he joined the Marine Corps.

When he was discharged in 1961 he tried to buy more land to add to Amos’s 70 acres. But when he went to the bank in La Jara to apply for a loan he was told, “Your people are meant to work the land not own the land.” He says, "I was so angry that I couldn’t speak.”  He and his wife Martha left the valley and moved to Denver. There he went to work for Martin Marietta where he became the first Hispano who wasn’t a janitor. Throughout his stint there and later with the telephone company in Pueblo, a total of more than forty years, he bought small parcels of land which he and his three sons worked every weekend. It’s a pattern common to rural Hispanos who must work full time to support the ranches and farms that are the cornerstone of the life they cherish. Today they own 700 acres.

Discriminatory lending practices were not limited to Conejos County or the San Luis Valley. In the landmark 2000 “Garcia vs. Vilsack” case brought by Hispano farmers throughout the country it was proven beyond doubt that those practices denied the Hispanos equal opportunity. And while they plaintiffs were denied class action status in 2006 because “commonality” in the discrimination wasn’t proven, two levels of compensation were mandated, $50,000 and $250,000. The Abeytas, who were party to the suit, received the $250,000 when it was demonstrated to the court’s satisfaction that the value of their lost opportunity was more than $2,000,000.

Racial and class discrimination is even reflected on the playing field where Anglo superiority is expected and unsportsmanlike conduct is unevenly penalized. Alfonzo's son Aaron Abeyta, a writer, poet and educator, tells the story of a particularly spirited football game between Mexican Antonito and Anglo Sanford where a Sanford player knocked down an Antonito player from behind and called him “a stinking Mexican.” The Antonito player was ejected from the game.

The Anglos go the better Conejos Schools in La Jara. The Mexicans, that's the operative term in the Valley, go to Antonito. Aaron resents it with every fiber of his being and was so disappointed at the education Antonito children were getting that he founded an alternative K-12 school with his wife Michele Trujillo, PhD.