SANTA FE, N.M. — As the Legislature wrapped up its regular session, debating tax cuts, the minimum wage and clean energy, one issue stood out for the amount of controversy it generated: cockfighting.
This state was one of only two in the nation to allow the sport, albeit only in counties far from the galleries and restaurants of this capital city. Then Gov. Bill Richardson last week signed a bill to outlaw cockfighting, which has become a symbol of New Mexico's growing cultural divide.
"We're country folks out here, mainly; we don't bother anyone," said Ronnie Barron, who heads the state's game fowl breeders' association and lives in the small southeastern town of Artesia. "Then [animal rights people] come in with their big New York ideas -- we don't want to be like New Yorkers."
Richard Lopez, who holds fights on his farm near Socorro, blamed the ban on the influx of coastal refugees who have snapped up real estate over the last decade. "We have outsiders, who would have you believe that they love New Mexico," he wrote in a letter to his local paper, the Chieftain. "They love what New Mexico has to offer, the sunsets, deserts, skies and open ranges -- but, in turn, they dislike the people and their customs and traditions. They want to change everything to their liking."
The push for change, however, was homegrown.
When Mary Jane Garcia, a legislator from the remote southern town of Dona Ana, took office in 1989, a male colleague suggested she try to ban cockfighting. An animal lover, Garcia introduced a bill to outlaw the sport, which involves attaching razors or other blades to the legs of roosters and making them fight to the death.
The bill was easily defeated, and Garcia soon learned that the ban suggestion was a sort of hazing to which veteran legislators subjected young female colleagues. Garcia had never been to a live cockfight. The only one she had seen was in a Mexican movie she watched as child, but, she said, that was enough to scar her. And she bristles at suggestions by cockfighters that the practice is a keystone of the state's Latino heritage.
"How dare they insult me this way, that it is my culture?" Garcia said. "Never, never, never."
Over the years, she repeatedly reintroduced her proposal, arguing that the sport was inhumane and that it facilitated drug use and underage drinking. A few months ago, Garcia began to think her ban might finally pass, having won the support of Richardson, who was preparing for a presidential run, and the New Mexico Conference of Catholic Bishops.
