Life at Hard Labor

Hennacy followed his wife to Denver and then to New Mexico, working at dairies to support them. Selma drew their daughters into the I AM movement, shunning him. Hennacy was arrested in Denver for passing out the Catholic Worker, but in Albuquerque he worked for Simms’s and Shirk’s dairies and wrote for the paper his “Life at Hard Labor” articles. He became an acequiero (irrigation expert) and interested himself in his Latinx neighbors and the Isleta pueblo. He visited the Doukhobors, a Russian anarchist sect, in Canada, and his daughters Carmen and Sharon in Los Angeles just before the atomic bomb was dropped. He cared for the Black poet Claude McKay and developed an idea of Native American anarchism based on the Hopis.