Southern New Mexicans Gather to Discuss Local "Kitchen Table" Values

Activist Maury Castro at his Sunday house meeting

Contributing writer Stephen Jones checks in with more on-the-ground coverage from Southern New Mexico.

Dozens of local neighborhood meetings were held across southern New Mexico this past weekend to discuss the nation's “kitchen table" values and to rebuild the American dream. Nearly 1600 "American Dream" house meetings were held in every Congressional District in the U.S., including the well-attended house meetings in New Mexico's 2nd Congressional District. The meetings focused on how the current economic downturn has affected average Americans lives and how local neighborhoods can begin to push back against the radical right-wing agenda of the Republicans and Tea Party extremists.

The meetings were sponsored by the American Dream Movement (Rebuild the Dream), a growing coalition of seventy-two progressive community, environmental, political and labor organizations including Moveon.org and ColorofChange.org. Community and environmental leader Van Jones launched the national grassroots agenda that led to this weekend's neighborhood meetings last month, urging local grassroots neighbors to find ways to rebuild what Jones termed the "American Dream" and make it more accessible to all Americans.

Long-time local neighborhood activist Maury Castro of Doña Ana, New Mexico led one of the local meetings on Sunday night at his home in the rural southern New Mexico community, which is just north of Las Cruces. Twenty two area neighbors came together at Castro's home on Sunday to introduce themselves to each other, and to help hammer out a community-driven issue agenda that common Americans, like themselves, can rally around.

At Castro's grassroots house meeting in Doña Ana, local neighbors heard a brief welcome via the Internet from Van Jones and from other national coalition organizers, then broke down into smaller groups to discuss the issues that they felt were most important to their neighborhoods, and to rank those they felt should be prioritized over the coming months, nationally. The group then sent their recommendations back to the national coalition.

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