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In Cheap Land Colorado, Ted Conover immerses himself in the barren landscape of Colorado’s San Luis Valley with individuals living at the margin of society. Conover’s book came out in November, and the subject material all takes place in the last five years as he lives in the Valley for months at a time. Conover has written six books, and he is known for living with and among his subject matter while truly experiencing the challenges facing them.

Conover is originally from Denver, and he hears about the abandoned developments near Alamosa while researching a different story on South Park, Colorado. The San Luis Valley is the number one Google search ranking for “Cheap Land Colorado.” I appreciated learning the history of the area from explorers, to agriculture, to failed subdivisions while also seeing the region for what it is today. 

Conover gets to know people throughout the San Luis Valley by volunteering with La Puente. The organization provides safety net services for the entire area, and I knew the organization through my work at El Pomar Foundation. I enjoyed seeing a behind the scenes look at the organization, and I thought Conover thoughtfully detailed the challenges facing staff of the organization while also acknowledging his own perceptions of clients using the organization.The dynamic between county law and code enforcement and La Puente creates interesting questions for the reader.

Conover lives in a camper and a trailer and ultimately buys his own piece of land for his trailer. He gets to know many of his colorful neighbors, and the stories of their average day make the book worth reading. Consistent themes throughout the book include battles with poverty, drug usage, unreliable transportation, and tight spaces. The family stories are heartbreaking, and the book reminded me of Evicted in a rural setting. 

I admired Conover’s fearlessness (or craziness) in approaching some wild characters in his work for La Puente as well as his daily life with neighbors. I thought his interviews and stories were the strongest part of the book, and his commitment to living in his own trailer gave him 24 hour access for good and bad moments. The last quarter of the book takes a brief turn into the 2020 pandemic, and he uses Facebook posts as some of his source material. I thought it provided some good context but felt out of place. 

Quotes

“It’s the opposite of the entitlement culture,” he began. “Those with the frontier mentality are trying to make it on their own. In what they’re trying to accomplish, sometimes you see a reflection of yourself.” Plus, he added, “the fringes of society really define who we are. They are the extreme fringe, asking questions about how we all should live.”

“Prairie people overall just seemed poor and wanting a different life—one with more self-reliance, fewer bills from utility companies, and, in many cases, lots of distance from neighbors. Most seemed to be escaping more typical American lives that had become unsustainable, whether because of too many bills or too many disappointments.”

“She made the kids spend time on their studies every day. Though she was smart, Stacy wasn’t highly educated—neither she nor Frank had finished high school. And she was a truly terrible speller. So the odds of her kids getting a good education were low.”

“Into the great openness of the flats flowed not only those seeking freedom in a good way but those seeking the freedom from their bad deeds of the past—or even freedom to do more bad.”

“The problem with paradise,” she said, “is you bring yourself to it.”

“Costilla County would give families gas money to get back and forth to the school bus stop. Zane would use the gas on his generator to power the TV that was always on”—or when the generator wasn’t working, he’d just turn on the car and power the TV from that. And they’d quickly spend all of their welfare money at the start of every month on shopping trips to Alamosa, and inevitably be broke by month’s end.”

“Rather, they were the restless and the fugitive; the idle and the addicted; and the generally disaffected, the done-with-what-we-were-supposed-to-do crowd. People who, feeling chewed up and spit out, had turned away from and sometimes against institutions they’d been involved with all of their lives, whether companies or schools or the church. The prairie was their sanctuary and their place of exile.”