Hippies hoped to find peace and love in New Mexico
Longtime residents unready to embrace counterculture lifestyle
As the 1960s rolled around, Taos was enjoying a period of growth and gradual prosperity, a windfall brought somewhat by service men and women returning home from war the previous decade and the increased visibility of the community through tourism and the arts. But, in some ways, all that masked an anxiety gripping the rest of the nation.
The dark specter of Vietnam was in full flower by 1968, a foreign policy disaster-in-themaking that spawned a growing anti-war movement that dogged the newly-elected president Richard M. Nixon and his administration right from the start, having inherited it from Lyndon Johnson’s failed presidency. Combined with the spread of a radical youth movement that straight people assumed was rife with mindexpanding substances, free love, psychedelic rock and a philosophy that encouraged young people to “tune in, turn on and drop out” (Dr. Timothy Leary, 1967), the nation was in the grips of major sociological change.
Soon, many young people began leaving big cities in the east and headed west to places like Taos, where they believed they could start over, get back to the land and reshape the ways people could live together — in peace and with harmony.
The reality was a mixed bag. “The waiting began this week for nine young people, all in their 20s, charged with possession of marijuana. The excitement was over, if not the suspense,” wrote Keith Green in the Sept. 26, 1968 edition of the Taos News.
Green’s story chronicled a Sept. 19, 5:15 p.m., raid by nearly a dozen New Mexico State Police officers, led by Sgt. George Ulibarri, along with a “plainclothesman with the State Police narcotics section.” The target of their raid was “an old adobe house on the fringe of Arroyo Seco.”
Of course, there is irony in the fact that, as of April 1, 2022, recreational cannabis is now legal and can be purchased as of this writing at three businesses in Taos. Whereas people surreptitiously dealt weed and smoked away from prying eyes in the 1960s, today, one can flash their ID and casually walk in to one of these outlets and buy joints, gummies, oils and other products to legally get high.
Back in 1968, the young people caught up in that raid found their names plastered on the front page. After a reading of a search warrant issued by District Judge C.R.
McIntosh, “the nine — young men handcuffed, women not — sat around a scarred wooden table. They talked casually, while the detectives and uniformed patrolmen began going through drawers, opening suitcases, peering into paper bags and under floor boards,” Green wrote.
Ulibarri said his officers “collected marijuana plants, seeds and other material which would have to be analyzed before it could be certainly identified.”
During the raid, a man and woman in an “old car” drove up and “police nabbed him.” For what, the report doesn’t say explicitly, but during a search of his car, they found a loaded .22-caliber revolver in the glove box. The 26-year-old Florida native was booked for disorderly conduct and later released after making a $100 bond, “the lowest of any arrested in the raid.”
Of those arrested, most were from California, one from Washington
state and three from New Mexico. They were transported to the Taos County Courthouse, with one young woman left behind “to take care of the animals.” By the end of the next day, all had bonded out to the tune of $1,0002,000 each. One young woman remained in jail because she couldn’t pay the bond.
In 1968, possession of cannabis was a felony. Green’s report states “the law requires proof of possession (constructively or actually) and proof of ‘knowledge’ of the narcotic for conviction.” Though generally legal throughout the state of New Mexico, cannabis possession, sales and growth is still illegal in some circumstances, including in national forest areas and amid Native American tribal lands. Exceptions are so far in the works for two tribes: Picuris and Pojoaque pueblos, whose leaders signed agreements with state cannabis regulators late last month to participate in the state’s recreational marijuana market.
Drugs notwithstanding, the effect of hippies in our midst, along with numerous communes, created a number of clashes. Local youths, whose brothers and fathers were in the military, took issue with hippies and their antiwar politics, sometimes resulting in violence. Older Taoseños simply didn’t like them, characterizing them as “dirty hippies” and pointing out the worst of them as representing them all.
The most difficult challenges, however, were yet to come.
At the Woodstock Music and Art Festival the following year, Wavy Gravy of the Hog Farm collective, spoke about their place near Llano and soon throngs of young people began flooding into the area (New Mexico Magazine, March 8, 2013). Suddenly, systems to feed, house and take care of all these kids were taxed to their limit. And, 1969 was also the year Dennis Hopper’s “Easy Rider” was released. (More on that in a future La Historia installment.)
Strange days, indeed.