The boots on Buck Jackson Road
Searchlight New Mexico by Molly Montgomery, May 22, 2025
New Mexico is the second-largest oil producer in the U.S., behind Texas. Drawing immense wealth from the Permian Basin, the state relies on a workforce — often Latino men — who are subjected to harrowing conditions that lead to death, injury, disease and terrible tolls on mental health and family life.
At first, in the haze, they look like birds, perched on fence posts along the road. But they don’t shift or take flight, and there’s one on every post for as far as I can see. They are upside-down boots.
The road, Buck Jackson, cuts south through southeastern New Mexico, across the fields where companies are drilling for oil. I drive for almost three miles before I stop seeing boots above the sparse grasses and the thorned mesquite and the trash. A Chevron sign marks a plot of land beside them, and the heavy silhouettes of pump jacks and processing plants hover behind them. Boot heels point up to the sky.
The oil workers wore them. Then they retired and hung them up, or traveled to oil fields elsewhere and hung them up, or died, and their relatives and friends placed them there. On a black rubber boot, in white marker, someone wrote “6/13/20, R.I.P.” and a name that has worn away.
“They leave their memories there,” a former oil worker, who asks to go by the pseudonym Diego García, tells me. García, 36, is undergoing chemotherapy treatments for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), which he developed while cleaning sites contaminated with drilling waste. He’s worried that employers won’t hire him again if they learn he spoke to a journalist. “Some people leave pants, too.” He laughs.
I think about what the workers stood on when they wore the boots — rigs, spilled oil, tanks, truckbeds, caliche — and how many hours they wore them, during shifts that could span five straight days and nights, no sleep. These were hours of absence, when the workers were away from home, and the people who loved them couldn’t see them. And the fence becomes a fence between the fields and home.