Growing up in the Texas Panhandle, there were two field trips that happened every Spring. One was a visit to Palo Duro Canyon. Mom would pack a brown paper bag with a ham and cheese sandwich, Doritos, and a Coke wrapped in aluminum foil. As our bus descended what I now realize as an incredibly precarious road down to the canyon floor, my energy buzzed. I prepared myself for the sharp turns of the Sad Monkey Railroad train ride and…
It’s the third Friday of Lent today and while I was sitting at my desk finishing up the week’s emails, the sun moved lower into my living room window and filled the living room with its late winter light. Yesterday, it snowed and today I didn’t even need a jacket when I went out for my afternoon walk. In meetings this morning everyone brought up the wind. That is the story of spring and it is the story of cuaresma….
María Teresa Huerta Márquez passed away February 21, 2022. Without question, every manito researcher has been affected by the work of Teresa. Whether or not we had the privilege of working with her in person, any work done in the field of Mexican American literature, Nuevomexicano/a literature or Southwestern literature has benefited from her tireless energy. How many of us remember walking into the dark coolness of the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico and seeing…
More than 500 men from New Mexico ended up as casualties of World War I. In the War’s aftermath, the New Mexico Board of Historical Services launched an initiative to memorialize those fallen men, culminating in a memory gathering project and archive.
In the fall of 2020, Questa Creative Council board members invited Costilla native son and accomplished musician, Chris Arellano to create and lead a project exploring musical traditions in Northern NM and Southern CO. The project was spurred on by community members’ desire for more cultural sharing, honoring, celebrating, preserving and perpetuating of beloved local religious and secular music traditions. The project began with this question: How has musical expression in its many forms shaped the culture and people of…
Hello my name is Gabriel Meléndez and I am the author of the Book of Archives and Other Stories from the Mora Valley published in 2017 by the University of Oklahoma Press. It is my pleasure to read an excerpt from the book for the Manitos Community Memory Project and to post both the recording and these selections in English and Spanish that come from the last story in the book called “The Ante, Six Bets on the Infinte/El Alce,…
The Manitos Project is fortunate to have a found an academic collaborator in the person of Dr. Eric Romero, Manito scholar, Professor of Languages and Culture and Director of Native American Hispanic Studies at New Mexico Highlands University. Born, as he would tell you, out of the Manitos earth of southern Colorado, Dr. Romero has woven the threads of a rigorous formal academic training with those of the lived practical knowledge of a someone who knows how to work the land. Recently Dr. Romero and NMHU President, Dr. Sam Minner, began working together to bring the Matanza ( what might be called a pig roasting,…
This workshop will connect communities with acequia research to help mayordomos, commissioners, and parciantes understand scientific results and real-world implications. Co-author/researchers from NMSU, UNM, and Sandia Labs will discuss acequias in terms of hydrology, sociology, anthropology, range science, system dynamics, and more.
Including question and answer sessions and a community-oriented discussion about future acequia research potentials.
When a network of like-minded groups, institutions and individuals starts to gel, instances of sympathetic connection and causal commonality start to emerge with increasing frequency. Taking on lives and vitalities of their own.
The video document you find here, by Manitos media artist Mark Perez, is one such instance.
As a child of diaspora, my cultural linkages are often broken in ways that fly under the radar. A person can get quite used to cultural magpie behavior to fill voids in identity formation. A certain cosmopolitanism sets in and become a way of life, until challenged out of the blue on unlikely occasions. This New Year’s Morning as I conscientiously set about making black-eyed peas for luck in the coming New Year, I texted my prima to see if…