Word has come down that the acclaimed Taos writer, John T. Nichols, has died. He was my friend, and I am fortunate that I had the privilege to know him and learn from him. I remember Nichols, in sorrow that he’s gone, but also in gratitude that he taught us so much about the people and world of the great Southwest.

Nichols was a giant of American literature and philosophy, and I only wish that he was better known because he has things to tell us that we need to hear. He lived most of his life in Taos, which is only a scant 220 miles from the bustling business and military city of Colorado Springs.

But what a different place Taos is, a profound difference that Nichols best exemplified. Nichols was a prolific writer, completing many works of fiction as well as nonfiction. In addition to his fiction, his books celebrating the beauties of nature in the Taos Valley are great examples of his philosophy of nature. Nichols wrote about nature in the same vein as the famous philosophers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

As we might recall, Thoreau and Emerson found solace in the sublimity of the natural world as opposed to the falseness of the human world. I would tell Nichols that he was a romantic and a transcendentalist, experiencing the ineffable as a spiritual reality found only in nature. When we read Nichols books like “The Last Beautiful Days of Autumn” or “The Sky’s the Limit: A Defense of the Earth” we are moved because we realize that Nichols literally transcends, goes beyond normal human experience, and knows unmistakingly the truth and sacredness of nature.

When I would wax poetic like this he would show his humility and scoff at me and tell me that he was just recounting the joys of his rambles in the prairies, forests and mountains, and that I was just a benighted academic.

Most of us know Nichols as the author of the 1972 novel, “The Milagro Beanfield War,” born out of real-life experience. Nichols wrote the novel based on his experiences advocating for the land and water rights of the original owners of the land, the Chicano/Indo-Hispanic and Native American people.

Milagro is the story of the grassroots rebellion by hardscrabble Chicano farmers against powerful exploitative corporate interests that threaten their traditional way of life in northern New Mexico. It generated enough interest for Robert Redford to make a movie out of it. The film was a valiant attempt to depict the often misunderstood Hispanic people and their struggle to retain their culture and lifestyle, but unfortunately it fell far short of doing justice to the story.

I got to know Nichols through his father, David G. Nichols, who used to teach psychology at UCCS and was a distinguished man in his own right. I interviewed John for my Ph.D. dissertation dealing with the triad of Southwest literature, Anglo writers, who along with Hispanic and Native American writers have created a rich category of American literature.

Nichols was an Anglo American writer, the scion of long-established East Coast elites, but that did not constrain him. He had the unique ability to again transcend, to go beyond the superficial trappings of social hierarchy. Once in Taos he re-created himself, and as I believe, became a Mexican American/Chicano writer while at the same time remaining faithful to his Anglo roots. This transformation is perfectly demonstrated in Milagro. It was a difficult balancing act and it required great sensitivity to pull it off, but he did it.

In a society that ignores Latino/Hispanic writers and our contributions to American letters, John Nichols opened a cross-cultural window into the Chicano world, the world in which bilingual, bicultural Mexican-origin people live.

Many of us inhabit simultaneously the realities of Mexico, the border with Mexico and the neglected rural territories of the Southwest, and at the same time the mainstream world of urban American life.

Joe Barrera, Ph.D., is the former director of the Ethnic Studies Program at UCCS. He teaches Mexico/U.S. Border Studies and U.S. Military History. He publishes The Almagre Review, a literary journal. He is a combat veteran of the Vietnam War.

Joe Barrera