POLITICAL ACQUIESCENCE REFLECTS NEW MEXICO’S HISTORICAL LEGACY

      The longer I live in Las Cruces (since 2007), the more dismayed I am by the conduct of its residents and their elected representatives.  These residents’ primary interests—family, friends, and football—are divorced from larger concerns about the community or city and thus give members of City Council the latitude to do as they please.  Knowing the historical context of this conduct, I should not be dismayed.  For this social solipsism goes back at least as far as the pueblo days, when each pueblo lived independently of others.  As a result, they did not band together to resist the Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century.  Decades later, they did unite in the successful Pueblo Revolt of 1680, but, by 1692, only twelve years later, they had dissolved their bands of unity.  Spanish armies returned and repressed Pueblo residents to a submissiveness ever after a part of their cultural heritage and of New Mexico’s.  It paralleled the submissiveness which characterized the underclasses of Spanish society at the time.  Such is the historical legacy of today’s Hispanics who constitute the majority of the Las Cruces populace and about half the population of New Mexico.  It is also a major cultural influence affecting non-Hispanics throughout the state, in which acquiescence to dominating officials is characteristic.

Thus, in Las Cruces, the police murders of Antonio Valenzuela (2020), Amelia Baca (2022), and Teresa Gomez (2023) failed to arouse this majority of residents.  After a few brief flurries of protest, the only citizens attempting to hold LCPD police accountable were Peter Goodman (white), Bobbie Green (black), and Earl Nissen (white).  Their approach was to seek reforms by meetings with the mayor, city councilors, and the police chief—to no avail.  Meanwhile, I had offered unwanted advice: seek the support of local organizations which presumably have an interest in the good of the city.  They ignored my advice perhaps because they knew better than I that those organizations would not be interested or able to rally their members to lobby City Council for a citizens’ police review board.

 

Of the three murders, Officer Jared Cosper’s particularly outrageous murder of Baca failed to prompt large and sustained protests against the efforts of law enforcement officials to do everything they could—and succeeded in doing—to clear Cosper of murder.  Instead, it elicited only a muted public reaction.  Yet protests other than transitory virtue-signaling demonstrations might have prevented these officials, who resist accountability, from rigging his exoneration.  LCPD Police Chief Miguel Dominguez delayed an account of the murder for about a week, during which time he devised a highly biased audio-visual defense of Cosper.  Presumably clearing Cosper, the Multi-Agency Task Force report to Dona Ana District Attorney General Gerald Byers caused him enough political discomfort that, though having promised a decision to prosecute or not in a few days, he turned the case over to New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez.  In turn, Torrez hired Steve Ijames, “a nationally recognized expert in the field of police officer use of force, who has reviewed approximately 3,000 use-of-force cases,” to investigate the murder and clear Cosper.  The NMDOJ report omitted Ijames’s record; about ninety percent of his work had been testifying as an expert for the defense of officers accused of excessive use of force.  His report resembles Swiss cheese but served well enough as a document passing the “thud test” to everyone who wanted the case to go away without further embarrassment.  Not a peep from the Hispanic or Progressive communities.

 

Not only are Progressives silent and restrained about such offenses, but also their representatives on City Council commit lesser offenses against citizens.  At the 27 February Progressive Voters Alliance (PVA) meeting, Councilor Cassie McClure termed those opposing Realize Las Cruces as “riff-raff.”  No one present objected to this slur on citizens petitioning government and exercising free speech, and the PVA minutes elide this unsavory language.  But the word got around.  One speaker at the 3 March City Council Meeting identified herself as one of McClure’s “riff-raff”; McClure looked uneasy, but, when she had the chance to deny using the term imputed to her, she said nothing .  As I have blogged, several Progressive councilors at the 19 May City Council meeting accused opponents of Realize Las Cruces of misrepresentations, lies, and fear-mongering; Councilor Johana Bencomo went farther to insinuate that opponents were racists.  Again, no one present, either in Council or in the audience, spoke up to protest these evidence-free accusations or slurs.  (Years earlier, under the Mafia-like practice of omerta, no councilor discussed or questioned my claim of antisemitism in the LCPD—a showing of their own antisemitism.)

 

Between the lethargy of citizens and the disdain of officials for them, it is no surprise that governance in New Mexico is incapable of effectively addressing the state’s problems.  The result: in many domains of public affairs—childcare, crime, education, economy, health care, homelessness, poverty—, New Mexico remains ranked at or near the bottom of the best or the top of the worst.  As long as New Mexicans choose to be apathetic, disaggregated, disgruntled, resentful, yet silent and compliant, so long their discontents will go unaddressed by officials except by performance posturing or pontificating.  The less things change, the less they will change.  Perhaps, it having been this way for centuries, they are content with their discontents.  As an outsider, perhaps also I should not give a damn and just pipe down.  Not likely.