The fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Summer of Love launched a wave of retrospection in former epicenters of counterculture activity. Dozens of exhibitions and public events reexamined hippie cultural history in the San Francisco Bay Area, including On the Road to the Summer of Love at the California Historical Society, Lavender-Tinted Glasses at the LGBT History Museum, the Psychedelic Soul encounter series at the Museum of the African Diaspora, and Flower Power at the Asian Art Museum, just to mention a few. Scholars mined the Day-Glo past at “Revisiting the Summer of Love,” a conference sponsored by Northwestern University's San Francisco–based Center for Civic Engagement. These enterprises reassessed critiques of the counterculture from left, right, and center—whether portrayed, respectively, as a craven trailblazer of niche consumption; the defiler of red-white-and-blue values; or a dopey purveyor of tie-dyed buffoonery. Recent scholarship and public memory increasingly regard the Summer of Love as a pivot linking rebellious Beat-era cultural innovation with contemporary Bay Area ventures in social, technological, and economic disruption.

Easily overlooked in the celebration of California hippiedom is New Mexico's role as a proving ground for counterculture ideologies and practices. The “Great Hippie Invasion” crested between 1967 and 1971, bringing novel philosophies and habitats to the Taos altiplano. Census figures put New Mexico's hippie population at 3,314 in 1970; a third of those identified as hippies lived in communes such as Hog Farm, Lama Foundation, Morningstar East, Manera Nueva, and Reality Construction Company. While the number of newcomers may have been small, their presence challenged a taut social equilibrium established among Anglo, Hispano, and Native American residents. From afar, Taos may have seemed “a leading candidate for [the] hippie capital of America,” as declared by Parade magazine, but in reality it was riven by resentment and violence.¹ With most communards …