Hope, New Mexico: A small town where unlikely events ruined big ambitions

HOPE, N.M. – This town's story is one of big ambitions ruined by improbable events.

There was the railroad investor who went down with the Titanic. The banker who fled to Mexico with the town’s money. The overnight freeze that nearly killed the orchards that once sustained the place – apple, pear, apricot – and woke up residents with a shattering of branches.

"That come through here about the time that the sap was going down in the trees," said Bill Fletcher, Hope's 85-year-old mayor, sitting in a recliner in his one-room cabin. "One old-timer … said it just blowed those trees to pieces.”

The worst of Hope's calamities, though, came when the river running through town disappeared underground, leaving the town to parch on the high desert plain.

"When I come out here," said Fletcher, who arrived in 1981, "the wind was blowing something terrible when we come out, dust and everything, I said, ‘Ain’t no way I’m going to stay out here.'"

And yet, he did. And Hope, despite everything, has held on.

The hide of a mountain lion stretches across one of Fletcher's cabin walls, a trophy of his days as a predator hunter in a government program serving mostly Anglo farmers and ranchers. A caged parrot named Monkey Bird chatters on the porch.

"It grows on you," said Fletcher, who moved from the Texas hill country. "I didn't think it would. But the people out here are the nicest bunch of people I have ever … you know, they have nice people in Texas. But all these ranchers, they just took us in. And they’re just the nicest bunch of people I ever had to work for."

The 2020 U.S. Census said 113 people lived in Hope . But no one – not even Fletcher – is sure it’s quite that many.

The town has 84 active municipal water connections and collects $5,600 in property taxes annually. The last school closed in the 1970s. The gas station and lone cafe shuttered six years ago. There isn’t a business left in town and homes from Artesia, the next city over, seem to get closer and closer as the years go by.

But no one here is willing to bet against Hope’s future.

This community just outside one of the most profitable oil basins in the world is one of 19 small towns across America of the same name. USA TODAY visited six of them this summer at a time when divisions in the nation appear to threaten hopes for America's future.

Everyone we talked to here in Hope, New Mexico, seemed to have a story of the town's history. Their stories all had one thing in common – resilience.

Steering population growth

The Eddy County Fair was up in July, and Hope's Catarino Varelas, 63, was spraying down a Black Angus steer named Juanchi. His niece Mabel Valenzuela had entered the fair's 4H competition and still needed to groom her steer for the showing.

Varelas came to Hope from Durango, Mexico, five years before Fletcher, in 1976. He walked some 200 miles with his father across the U.S.-Mexico border to work a cattle ranch north of town. He was 15 years old and worked for $1 a day. The rancher, a pillar of the Anglo community named George Teel, paid his father $7 a day when the legal minimum wage should have earned him $18.

"The Peñasco River used to run (by here)," Varelas said. "The river sunk down, not through a hole, just little by little."

A barn next to the wash station bustled with young competitors and their families preening their steers: painting hooves, blow-drying their coats, hair-spraying their tails. Varelas' relatives – a cousin, nieces and nephews, his mother – gathered to support Mabel.

They were Hope's newest residents and one of the few families still raising children in town. They were also one of the only families speaking Spanish as they prepared for the competition.

Across America, two-thirds of rural counties suffered population loss in the decade through 2020. But the economic and social upheaval of the pandemic led to some growth in rural counties as more Americans turned to remote work and moved to sparsely populated communities. But in Hope, the trends have been more local.

The expansion of the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center 20 miles east in Artesia brought Border Patrol and other federal agents to town, Fletcher said. So does the oil industry. Though Hope lies just outside the Permian Basin's rim, Eddy County and Lea County next door accounted for nearly a third of crude oil and natural gas production in the basin last year.

But arguably the biggest driver of recent population growth has been Varelas' own family.

His mother and brother joined him 20 years ago. In the past five years, his cousin married a local man and brought her four children to Hope from Mexico. Now 6% of the 2020 Census population are his relations.

'Scratch one of us, we all bleed'

Fletcher brought the monthly city council meeting to order at 6 p.m. on a Wednesday in late July.

Outside, the sun roasted and a hot breeze blew. Desert harvester ants scurried over gravel while a rooster crowed among hens pock-pocking on someone's front porch.

Inside, fans worked overtime to cool the metal-sided municipal building that held council chambers and three offices: one for police chief Shane Baker; one for municipal judge Jeremiah Fletcher, the mayor's son; and one for city clerk Sonia Carbajal.

“We’re more or less a family here," Fletcher explained, as he greeted each of the councilors. "None of us is kin, but we’re a family anyway. You scratch one of us, we all bleed.”

Lupe Varelas, the first Latina city councilwoman in town history, took her seat on Fletcher's left. She was born and raised in Artesia in a Mexican American family. She met Catarino Varelas at a dance in 1983. Although she dreamed of moving to the mountains, she didn't make it further than Hope.

"He asked my parents for my hand in marriage in three months," she said. "My mom said yes. My dad said yes. Then my mom changed her mind. So we eloped."

Back then, Mexican laborers weren't welcome in town or in government. The memories are still fresh. "My husband wanted to be in the fire department," she said, "but they wouldn't let him because he was Mexican."

But he pushed the all-Anglo volunteer board for nearly 10 years until they let him on in 1991. He later led the department.

"Catarino has been fire chief," Fletcher said. "He’s been everything you can think of. He is a good man all the way through."

Ladder truck in a one-story town

The councilors sat at a semicircle dais, an attempt at municipal formality. But chambers were otherwise as informal as a church hall, and every surface was stacked with the detritus of years gone by – lima bean and radish seeds on an antique metal desk, a well head, reading glasses, garage door openers.

Baker, the 67-year-old police chief, was the only town resident attending the annual budget meeting. He came in uniform and set his white cowboy hat on a table.

Carbajal explained the finer points of the town's roughly $1 million budget, with most of the funding coming from state and federal grants. Councilors questioned an expense associated with the purchase of a secondhand fire truck from Florida for $39,000 that cost another $71,000 to refurbish.

"They had to put everything on it," Carbajal said. "We just got it back from Houston."

"Is a ladder truck really needed in our community, honestly?" asked Matt Bowerman, who joined the council after the truck purchase. "Those are generally used in a two-story or higher building, which we really don't have."

"We're going to use it to paint the flagpole," Fletcher said to chuckles. "All in favor of approving the budget?"

Life in Hope

Hope made a national name for itself, briefly, in May 1950, when Life magazine came to town. Voters had elected a female “mayoress” and all female council members to a municipal government the magazine dubbed the “Petticoat Council.”

A clip from the magazine hangs in the municipal building.

“As soon as the women (aged 56, 54, 45, 32 and 28) took over, they acted up,” Life reported. “The town had no taxes and thus no money, so on May 13 the women threw a big barn dance and raised 800 whole dollars. This money will lie around, worrying people’s minds, until it is squandered on some civic improvement. Previous male governments never did any such thing.”

The stories of Hope that residents love to retell aren't easily fact-checked. The one about the railroad investor who went down with the Titanic, with his gold? No one can remember his name. Same with the banker who absconded to Mexico. But to residents, the stories aren't tall tales – they are oral histories carefully handed down.

The story of how Hope became Hope, when the village incorporated in 1910, has also taken on a life of its own.

Robert Julyan, author of "The Place Names of New Mexico," published by the University of New Mexico Press, offers this account:

"The most popular and widely accepted explanation of the present name is that two early settlers, Elder Miller and Joe Richards, discussing who should give the name, tossed a dime in the air and shot at it with pistols to settle the issue," Julyan writes. "'I hope you lose,' exclaimed Richards.

"Miller did, and Richards chose the name Hope," Julyan writes.

A river ran through

Alyson Young, 67, spent summers in Hope as a teenager and remembers watching Catarino Varelas and the other Mexican cowboys at work. She remembers the orchards behind her grandmother's house, how the river ran through a deep canal and how it seemed to rain every afternoon at 2 p.m. sharp.

"Big, old trucks would come to load the apples," she said. "They were so plentiful. Now, there is not even a trunk out there. It’s been years and years."

She knows the stories of the railroad money that went down on the Titanic, about the night of the big freeze and how the river disappeared underground.

Everyone does, as if the tales of the town’s resilience in the face of its calamitous history could tether the place and keep Hope alive.

Her grandfather's family came to Hope in the 1800s, when it was still called Badgerville, before Richards renamed the town to match his outlook.

"It used to rain," she said. "Water came down from the mountain in a huge canal. Mother Young would let us all go play. Right behind my grandmother’s house was a huge reservoir. It would fill up, and we’d play in it while it was full, and then Daddy Young would water the crops, and we’d wait until the next time."

No one here calls it climate change, but clouds blow past Hope now without leaving a drop. A hot wind rustled Young's gray curls as she chatted with Varelas outside the shuttered gas station and cafe he and his wife still own.

Hope is enough

Varelas sat under the wide canopy of a tree on the ranchland he has worked and managed for nearly four decades. He knows the land so well he can point out what's missing now: where the water used to flow, where wells were sunk to supply houses that no longer stand.

Despite all that has been lost to time, Hope has given him everything he could have ever imagined as a young man, he said.

"I worked hard for everything I have," he said. "I’m always watching for a good opportunity. They only come once."

Though he worked another man's land for most of his life, Varelas now owns two houses, one in town and one outside. He owns a farm and grazing land for his cattle and goats. He has two grown children who are well-off, he said, and two grandchildren who visit Hope twice a year.

"My dream was to have a little place big enough where I could ride my horse or go on my four-wheeler without asking anyone to give me permission," he said. "Now I have 2,500 acres and I think that’s big enough."

Lauren Villagran can be reached at lvillagran@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Hope, New Mexico: A small town where unlikely events ruined big ambitions