Featured
The Manitos Digital Resolana is a virtual gathering space for manitos, as people from rural northern New Mexico and southern Colorado call themselves. In many villages throughout this region, the resolana is the sunny side of a building, where people congregate to converse and share knowledge and wisdom. This Digital Resolana will serve as a space for people from these rural communities and their urban diasporas, where people connected to these villages now live, to reconnect, recollect, record, and reflect…
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Hosted by La Merced de Santa Gertrudis de lo de Mora (known less formally as the Mora Land Grant), to preserve the History, Culture and Diverse Heritage of the Past, Present and Future of Mora County. This year, the events theme of Rancimiento or Rebirth, takes on a special resonance in the context of ‘recovery’. The organizers are keen to stress that this event is not focused on the destruction wrought by the fires, but is a celebration of the many ways that the community came together in “querencia” and “mutualidad”, during and after the fires.
Jordan is a musician and cultural activist whose work centers on the unique role that music and language can play as a pathway into intergenerational identity and creativity. As a teenager he became interested in his family’s Ashkenazi Jewish and rural Missouri music traditions, and began his studies with master fiddlers in two distinct cultural regions in Missouri and with Yiddish language and klezmer music mentors. His interest in the relationship between traditional, pre-capitalist cultural autonomy and subsistence agriculture led…
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In every meeting with our Community Archivists, we talk about what we’re scanning and documenting. Last week, we held one of the most beautiful meetings I’ve attended. Each community archivist brought samples of what they had been working on and shared them with the group. Each photo came with a story and each story was revelatory as the last. It confirmed my commitment to this work and to this project. It also reminded me of some of the things I…
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Click the title above to read about one of our community archivists Kathleen Jimenez
Click the title above to read about one of our community archivists Dana Maestas!
As I write this, the bulldozer/burn line that the firefighters have made from Highway 65 to State Highway 283 appears to be holding steady on the ARCGIS satellite map that I try not to obsessively check and re-check for hotspots and changes to a fire perimeter, that can move with alarming speed. This breathing space allows time for reflection that has not been possible for the last week, as the Hermits Peak Fire and Calf Fire merged and expanded in…
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Last Friday, I went for a walk by Santa Fe Community College (SFCC) and saw the beginning of the Calf Canyon Fire. The smoke rising from the mountains provided a stark contrast to the bright blue skies. I stopped to take a picture. Today, I had planned to go for another walk but as I drove south on Saint Francis, the sky began to change from blue to brown and by the time I got to SFCC, the mountains were…
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Good afternoon everyone! Saturday, April 16 at the Bernalillo Community Museum from 2:00 – 4:00 pm, graphic designer Lily Padilla and illustrator/animator Natasha Vasquez will be presenting and leading a discussion about the Cuaderno Series. The series is a reflection and comparison of the Spanish Flu of 1918 and the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020. Hope to see you there!
I stepped away from my weekly update last Friday because one of our community archivists Andrew and I were traveling to Las Cruces to visit my uncle and collect stories and photographs from him. I had not been to Las Cruces since before the pandemic. And that visit had been for my dad’s funeral. It felt strange to visit Las Cruces (well, technically Vado) without seeing my dad. His trailer sat empty and unused; the inside coated with dust. I…
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My last meeting with “Tone” – as we knew him – was about 6 weeks ago. I delivered him a box of apples which I had just picked from my orchard. The apple visit had become an annual ritual: I would drop by his house, deliver the apples, and we would sit on his porch or around the kitchen table and visit. Tone wore his feelings “on his sleeve” as the saying goes. He was warm and friendly, but more to his nature he was genuine, unpretentious and sincere. I always felt welcomed in his home; that he was glad to see me.
