Organizers spent two months planning a secretive gathering of musicians, aerialists and poets in the middle of the bosque. On Saturday night, the lights were strung, a baby and an older man danced together in front of the stage and a band started the first drumbeats of a song. And then the cops showed up.
The Bosque Lights crowd of about 200 people groaned and disappeared into the forest, and some of the organizers argued over whether they should have gotten a permit.
“We didn’t have an open-space permit, we didn’t have a noise permit, we probably needed a permit for the generator, a permit for something else; they just make you walk through red tape,” said co-organizer Cameron James. “That’s one of the things we were subverting, that stifling process.”
Bosque Lights was a gathering promoted on Facebook by somebody named “Nobody.” The location — under the I-40 bridge over the Rio Grande — was not disclosed until the day of the event, and more than 400 people were expected to show up.
Jerry Strong Heart, a Mohawk elder and traveler who had just come from North Carolina, said he spoke to the police on behalf of Bosque Lights.
“We went up and talked to them and said ‘These kids are innocent,’” Strong Heart said. “I told them ‘Don’t poop in your soup. Your whole life is soup. I’m concerned with the youth of the country, but these are good kids.’”
James said the point of putting on illegal parties in public spaces is to make a statement against what he thinks is overregulation and strict rules for public land.
“There was the side that was like ‘Well obviously we should have got a permit, that was stupid not to,’” James said. “Then there’s the other side of permitting as a way of preventing people from using their land like it’s their own. Public space is our own. A lot of us are fundamentally opposed to permits. So maybe it spanned an argument about that, but it’s something that needs to be talked about for sure.”
James said he used to throw parties, one of which was “hobo themed.” On the poster for one of these, he sits with a cardboard sign that reads “Will dance for booze.”
“I still will go to someone’s house who I just met, and they will have that picture of me on their refrigerator,” he said. “It stuck around for a long time. I had already done a lot of party organizing and stuff, it’s not like it came out of nowhere. But making them political, and making them free and more based on values is definitely different.”
James, who spent four months with the Occupy movement in Seattle, said the parties are not just a chance to have fun — there’s a political message behind them.
“The idea of public space had never really dawned on me until the Occupy movement, like how important it was, and how we’d been systematically separated from our public spaces, and how regulated and restricted and permitted the whole process of using your public spaces are,” he said. “The idea came just from wanting to reclaim public space.”
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James said he and other friends dreamed up the idea for Bosque Lights after their successful Arroyo Stomp event. Arroyo Stomp featured break-dancers, and was also broken up by the police — but not until much later on.
Arroyo Stomp received negative press from KRQE, and attendees of Bosque Lights were worried about fire. But James said the event is much safer than many licensed events.
“A lot of people were talking about how it’s ironic that our event is going to be more respectful, safer, less problems with violence and aggression, than something very licensed like the State Fair,” he said. “It’s very ironic. What really keeps the city from shutting that down is that it brings in a lot of revenue. That gets you thinking about who gets to do what and why.”
James hitchhiked from Albuquerque to Alaska and back, and will hop a train to California next month. But he said there are many other people involved, and he hopes the gatherings will continue once he’s gone. Co-organizer Kate Michalske said she hoped the idea would grow in popularity.
“What I hope is that this event inspires some kind of spark in people to go out and create in their communities,” she said.
“There should be more impromptu parties and random acts of beauty everywhere, and I think that our current society and economic situation and the way that we have everything structured doesn’t facilitate that. I think the possibilities are infinite.”
