In Taos County, New Mexico, the Taos town government is conducting a survey asking county residents about the tourist economy. Currently, Taos county’s economy revolves around tourism as evidenced by the largest, single employer, Taos Ski Valley Inc. This organization employs about 200 people full-time, but during the winter tourist rush, it seasonally employs up to 1000 of the town and surrounding region’s residents. Overall, food service and recreational service industries, like Taos Valley Inc. employ more than a quarter of all workers in the county. These industries, alongside the retail industry (the third largest industry in the county), cater almost entirely to tourists. What does that leave the residents of Taos County? Why is our economy structured to serve tourists, with the locals given the scraps? Let’s examine why the economy revolves around tourism, and how this focus comes at the expense of the town’s working class.
The capitalist economic system we live under prioritizes the production of profitable goods and services. However, just because something is profitable, does not mean it is beneficial to working people — in fact, our lived experience as the working class in Taos County proves that the opposite is the case! For example, it’s currently profitable for investment companies to buy housing units and convert them to vacation rental properties, which comprise at least 5% of all housing in Taos County. Even worse, a further 20% of the houses in Taos County are second homes! This means at least a quarter of all housing in the county has been hoarded by corporations or the rich, which limits the already slim amount of housing available and causes the price to skyrocket to unattainable levels for the working people of Taos. The tourist and corporate greed that makes the Taos housing market profitable forces locals to relocate further away from town or into homelessness. Clearly, the profitability of housing is not linked to prosperity for working people.
Those who own businesses such as Taos Valley Inc. also reap the benefits of affluent tourists vacationing in Taos. But it’s not the owners who create the goods and provide the services to tourists at those businesses. It’s the workers who build, clean, and repair the rental units and hotels that we can’t afford to stay in; who serve, prepare, and cook food at the restaurants, and stock the grocery stores’ shelves. The working class produces the profits which the owners collect. The insatiable greed of the owners, and endless quest for profitability ensures the goods and services we produce are increasingly unaffordable to ourselves, and can only be sold to the demographic that is pricing us out of town.
Worse still, the government of the town of Taos, whose ostensible responsibility should be the wellbeing of the town’s residents, encourages this grift through its partnership with two private agencies, The Center for Responsible Travel and George Washington International Institute for Tourism Studies. Together with these agencies, the local government created a tourism plan. Though the stated mission of the plan is to ensure the industry benefits the local community, as long as the economy is based on profit, tourism will have disastrous effects on the working people of Taos County. The plan claims to promote collaboration between “residents, local governments, tourism industry stakeholders, enterprise leaders, nonprofit and social services managers” in order to benefit the community. But as we have examined, the needs of working-class residents are directly opposed to the desires of these “stakeholders”who need to displace and exploit us in order to make profits. How can a fundamentally exploitative relationship lead to mutually beneficial “collaboration?”
If the town could simply admit that the working-class economic interests of its residents are opposed to the wealthy’s, it would be a start, but the town doesn’t even bother to maintain a caring façade! Recently, some neighbors at the Taos Men’s Shelter repeatedly sought a meeting with the town commissioners to talk about the state of the shelter and how the town could improve its programs. They were denied every time. When our neighbors from the Shelter were finally able to schedule meetings with local non-profit executives, their ideas and reflections were rudely dismissed. What then, is the point of the survey and the new tourism plan? The town is sloughing off the incalculable suffering the tourism industry is causing the working people who live here. With the help of fancy firms, the town pays lip service to the grievances expressed by the people of Taos, while actually protecting and encouraging the parasitic vultures who profit from the tourism industry, and who are expanding their barrage on poor and working people.
The struggle of working people in Taos, though it has specificities, bears a stark resemblance to processes occurring across the country. The root causes and the response to the fires that wreaked havoc in Maui, especially on native Hawaiians, are connected to tourism in Northern New Mexico. In Maui, intensive construction undertaken by the tourist industry stripped the environment of components critical to fire prevention, such as water, creating the conditions for the deadly fire to take place. In the aftermath of the fire, investment firms, who operate identically to those in New Mexico, and in some cases may be the same companies who own about half of the short-term rental units in Taos, bombarded Hawaiians who had just lost their homes in the fire, seeking to buy their land. These marauding investors are seeking to further displace people in the midst of a crisis so their firms can profit. What’s happening in Maui is also happening in the midst of an economic crisis in Northern New Mexico, with bloodsucking investors coercing Hispanic and Indigenous Tiwa people to sell their land. This cruel pattern will repeat until the working and oppressed classes organize to stop it.
As working people in Taos, we must get organized to protect our communities against those profiting off of our demise. Join us at Kit Carson Park every Wednesday from 11:30–1:30 to learn about how we are organizing against this profiteering. Email us at newmexicosurvivalprograms@gmail.com or find us on Instagram at @newmexicosurvivalprograms.
