New Mexico Hippies Finally Getting Their Historical Due

In its most recent issue (Vol. 87, No. 1, Winter 2012), the New Mexico Historical Review has two - count them, two! - articles on hippies: "New Mexico's New Communal Settlers" by Timothy Miller, and "From Innocence To Experience: Irwin B. Klein And The 'New Settlers Of Northern New Mexico'".

The first article is helpful mostly because it lists the communes of Northern New Mexico, where they were, who founded them, and what happened to them over the years. The second article features lots of photos of hippies cutting firewood, picking fruit (in El Rito!), and the like.

It's about time! For their surprisingly-small numbers, hippies sure made a big cultural dent in the state. It was because they were so flamboyant in a place that rarely saw such behavior. I remember our first encounters with them: how fearful people were of them at first, and yet how nostalgic people were for them later, when they seemed to disappear.

Growing up as a kid in New Mexico, it seemed like hippies erupted out of nowhere in the late Sixties (specifically, from that obscure land called Northern California), yet I remember also running across a Life Magazine article from the 1940's featuring an interview with a person who was clearly a hippy way back then (and who lived in a coastal town in Northern California). So, hippies had already existed in obscurity in small numbers for a long time, but 'went viral' when conditions were right in the Sixties.

I remember when my dad picked up an 18-year-old woman hitchhiker: very pregnant and clearly countercultural, and how exotic that all seemed. And of course, when the latter-day Buddhist hippies moved in next door in 1972, and profited handsomely when the Indian jewelry market boomed. Skinnydipping and nam myoho renge kyo: those were the days!

But by the late Seventies, hippies had faded from view again. I overheard a rocking-chair conversation about hippies between my grandmother (G) and my dad (D), who both came from a strict, Hispanic Catholic Northern New Mexico upbringing, one blazing hot summer's afternoon in 1978, when we visited her mobile home in Bernalillo:

(silence)

D: Hippies cause lots of problems.
G: Hippies!
D: Hippies!

(silence)

G: I saw some hippies at the store last week.
D: Hippies!
G: Hippies!

(silence)

D: You don't see many hippies these days.
G: I see lots of hippies.
D: Hippies!
G: Hippies!

What I sensed was a yearning for the missing hippies. The earnest, all-purpose scapegoats for society's ills had slipped into obscurity, or had mutated into unrecognizable forms, and yet society seemed just as lost as ever. If you weren't careful with your censoriousness you might end up blaming yourself for society's problems.

But more importantly, the very-conservative Catholic Hispanics of Northern New Mexico had slowly, grudgingly, come to like hippies, and missed them.

Viva Los Hippies!