HOW TO BARTER FOR EVERYTHING
A New Mexican family shares how to forego money and trade for everything.
BARTER
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A determined New Mexican family frees itself from
today's market economy.
By kay Matthews
Over the past 20 years, my husband Mark and I have bartered
everything from a two-week vacation in a mountain cabin to
a hernia operation for Mark. Trading our time, labor, and
skills seems so much more intimate and humane then selling
ourselves on the free market for money (worth much less, I
must admit). So that's why we moved here, to northern New
Mexico, where people still maintain a diverse enough
lifestyle to keep bartering alive.
Back in the early '70s, when we started out in Placitas,
New Mexico, a small Hispanic village at the north end of
the Sandia Mountains, we didn't have many skills to offer
in trade. What we did have was a desire to live a simpler
life in a community more in touch with its
environment—the antidote to our lives as suburban
children of the '50s. Placitas provided a community with
200-year ties to the land, where people tended their
gardens and orchards, raised chickens and goats, and took
care of their own needs as best they could. Surviving on
part-time jobs in Albuquerque, the state's largest city 25
miles away, we rented a 100-yearold house in the village,
turned over a garden plot, and began our apprenticeship in
subsistence living.
When our roof started leaking like a sieve, our landlord
traded us a month's rent to fix it. To figure out how to
fix it in the future, we took care of our friend Tom's kids
in exchange for his expertise. When the leech lines blocked
up, we bartered another month's rent. I'll never forget
those days in the middle of January, digging through the
frozen ground to replace old tar-paper pipe with PVC. We
even had Mark's 20-year-old cousin, Marian (who was
visiting from New York), out there with us, picking and
shoveling away.
While learning the joys of house repair, Mark and I were
initiated into the rites of the acequia, or irrigation
system. A mayordomo controlled the water rights,
determining how much and on which days you could irrigate
your garden and orchard. On the day you needed to irrigate,
you had to track him down in order to request the water.
Then you had to make sure that your neighbor, after seeing
the water come down the ditch, didn't decide to irrigate
his own garden as well. Finally, you had to direct the
water once it got to the garden so that it didn't run
straight through the lettuce and drown it, missing the corn
altogether.
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