The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols

I've had this book on my TBR 'radar' for a bajillion years and I don't know why I waited so long to read it. Until one day Joe Mondragon decides to cut a break in the wall and divert water onto his late father’s field, so he can plant some beans.

So he’s been able to buy out the poor farmers securing more and more land and leaving less water for those that remain. Over the years Ladd Devine’s family has manipulated the indigenous peasant farmers, securing the majority of water rights for his proposed golf course / spa retreat while leaving the original residents with arid land, unsuitable for farming, or even grazing. In a New Mexico valley the power is held by one man and his company. The tale of Milagro's rising is wildly comic and lovingly tender, a vivid portrayal of a town that, half-stumbling and partly prodded, gropes its way toward its own stubborn salvation. And downstate in the capital, the Anglo water barons and power brokers huddle in urgent conference, intent on destroying that symbol before it destroys their multimillion-dollar land-development schemes. Gradually, the small farmers and sheepmen begin to rally to Joe's beanfield as the symbol of their lost rights and their lost lands. But like everything else in the dirt-poor town of Milagro, it would be a patchwork war, fought more by tactical retreats than by battlefield victories. And so began-though few knew it at the time-the Milagro beanfield war. Carefully (and also illegally), he tapped into the main irrigation channel. Joe Mondragon, a feisty hustler with a talent for trouble, slammed his battered pickup to a stop, tugged on his gumboots, and marched into the arid patch of ground. The Milagro Beanfield War is the first book in John Nichols's New Mexico Trilogy (“Gentle, funny, transcendent.” - The New York Times Book Review)

The Milagro Beanfield War by John Nichols