There was really only one person in the vicinity who was breeding peacocks, but the point for the comadre was that he did not have to earn his living from raising the birds, much less use them for food. He was an outsider and there were a lot of outsiders moving in, buying up land that had belonged to original families, who were being forced to give it up because they just couldn’t live off of it no more, and the taxes were too high, and the children went off to Albuquerque or even farther away to work, or out of state to college, or out of the country with the Army, instead of staying home to work on the rancherías. The truth was that most people had not been able to live off their land for the better part of the last fifty years. Outsiders in the past had overused the land so that in some cases it was no good for raising crops or grazing livestock no more.

Sofi looked at her comadre, seeing that maybe there was a chance to win the conformist over, after all. (And if she had this one on her side, the rest would be easy, since this comadre was the biggest mitotera among all her neighbors, which was why Sofi had picked her to be her campaign manager.) But for the life of her, Sofi couldn’t figure out what she was talking about with these peacocks. She decided to ask her. If they were going to work together on her campaign, they may as well understand each other. “What peacocks, comadre?”

“Down the road, on the other side of the acequia, comadre! Haven’t you heard them? Haven’t you met ese Mr. Charles, with the reddish beard? I think he’s a sculpture or something. He’s got all kinds of junk all over his land, rusty parts of old cars, hasta los bones of all kinds of carcasses …! He’s breeding esos birds. Haven’t you heard them?”

There were so many new people moving in and abouts Tome in recent years, most of them gringos, that Sofi hadn’t noticed no “Mr. Charles.” Then she started to remember a very strange-sounding loud birdcall early in the mornings lately and she said, “Oh, yeah! I know what you mean! Yes, that’s just what I’m talking about! Here we have peacock breeders taking over our land, and we have to sell it to them because we need the money and they got the money to buy it, and we end up without no livelihood to depend on no more. You’re one of the lucky ones, comadre!”

“I know I am, Sofi! And still, look how hard it is for us! But what would you as mayor suggest for us to do?” la comadre asked.