Success in Santa Fe: score on for the revolution from below.

• Author: Nichols, John
• Position: Fight against land developers in New Mexico; includes related article on environmental movement

In the struggle between rich and poor, folks like Valentin Valdez usually end up holding the short end of the stick. But not in Santa Fe.

Valdez is a retired janitor who, since childhood, has climbed in the mountains that surround New Mexico's historic, picturesque, and increasingly trendy capital city. Several years ago, as he hiked on Atalaya Mountain, Valdez came across a parcel of land that had traditionally been known as a place of great spiritual significance to members of Santa Fe's large Hispanic community.

Now, however, what Valdez had always thought of as public space was being divided into lots where developers planned to build $500,000-and-up homes for wealthy emigres from California.

"I realized that greed was destroying our community," says Valdez, a soft-spoken man of seventy-one. "I realized that if we did not fight back, the rich people would just roll over the poor people - like they have for a thousand years."

The fight back that Valdez describes has evolved into a remarkable story of municipal transformation that, in less than two years, has seen Santa Fe's City Hall wrenched from the hands of a conservative, pro-development establishment and handed over to one of the most progressive local governments in America.

Where Santa Fe's mayor and city council once could be expected to rubber-stamp extravagant development proposals and then march off to drink cocktails with their rich contributors, local officials are now voting for development moratoriums and then heading out for union rallies or Green Party meetings.

In Santa Fe, where class issues were once ignored, local pols now speak candidly about economic disparity. "People know class differences exist, but politicians in most places never talk about it," Mayor Debbie Jaramillo declares. "Well, here in Santa Fe we do talk about it. How can we avoid the subject? It's so blatantly obvious what's going on - you have rich people forcing poor people out of their homes, their communities. This isn't something I'm making up. This is something we see every day. And this is what people elected us to do something about."

The new mayor and council have also appointed openly gay and lesbian officials for the first time, placed Greens on planning bodies, and so shaken up the status quo that discussions of local government are now spiced with phrases like "populist coup" and "revolution."

"Compared to the history of politics at this City Hall, our taking over could be viewed as a revolution," admits Jaramillo, who began her political journey as a militant neighborhood activist in 1986 and seven years later was sworn in as mayor. "I think that those who saw the election as a revolution did so because the shift that was made was from a good-old-boys club, real pro-development-type government to one that was led by a woman - and a Hispanic woman at that - who was talking about putting the interests of working people and poor people first."

So marked has the shift been that national observers are beginning to point to Santa Fe as a model for progressives nationally. It illustrates the possibility of building coalitions involving Greens, unions, the elderly, minorities, and the white working class, and it highlights the issues that can help sustain such coalitions.

"I think the left has to start thinking about putting development and affordable-housing issues to use as tools for coalition-building and for getting important things done. And Santa Fe shows how that can happen," says Steve Cobble, a former official in the Presidential campaigns of the Reverend Jesse Jackson. "If the left is serious about environmental issues and issues of wealth and poverty, this shows a way to build coalitions and to succeed."

Former New Mexico Governor Toney Anaya, a Santa Fe resident who was one of the most progressive governors in the nation during his tenure in the 1980s, shares Cobble's view. "The model from Santa Fe could go to other places. In fact, it should go to other places," says Anaya. "The model of building coalitions around issues such as development is something that progressives need to understand if we're going to really start winning at the local level and, eventually, at the national level."

While left coalitions have won control of a number of cities around the country over the years - from Burlington, Vermont, to Berkeley, California - the Santa Fe example is unique, not only in the makeup of the coalition, but in the distinct emphasis on class issues. Then again, everything about Santa Fe is unique.

With roots that stretch back more than seven centuries, to the time when the Pueblo Indians established a village on the site of the current city, Santa Fe is one of the oldest and most distinct communities in North America. So appealing was the site that the Spanish conquistadors fought the Indians for the turf - eventually establishing a thriving commercial center that boomed as the terminus of the Santa Fe Trail in the Nineteenth Century. Shortly after the beginning of the Twentieth, it was named as New Mexico's capital.

A town of gentle adobe architecture perched on a 7,000-foot-high plateau, with a pure blue mountain stream running through its center, Santa Fe has long been portrayed as a sort of Eden by artists...