Whether tucked away in a shoe box, lovingly placed into a photo album or nestled comfortably into the same frames for a century or more, the photos that link to us to the stories of our heritage are fragile artifacts that require careful attention, even as we steward them into the digital age.
My interest about my family history began as a young child during our annual visits to my grandfather Jose Tiburcio Argüello and Antonia (Tonita) Cordova Argüello’s farm in Llano de San Juan Nepomuceno, now known as Llano, New Mexico. During our visits to my grand-parents farm my grandfather always reminded me of how our ancestors were the ones who settled all the villages in the surrounding area many years ago. In 1946 after my father Clarence Argüello completed his military…
This is the first in a series of posts highlighting regional archives, the role they play in conserving our heritage and tips on how to navigate them.
In the middle of summer 2018, when the land was bone dry and we dreamed of summer storms, the “Gathering Memory: Object, Photos, and Story Community Workshop” was held at the Questa VFW Hall. via Gathering Thoughts after Gathering Memories — Questa Stories
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…
Food writing and foodie culture, at its best, enthusiastically celebrates traditional food cultures, like ours here in Northern New Mexico. However, the quest for recipes often results in a concentration on a few iconic dishes that are repeated and often modified to suit popular tastes, as they travel far from their origins. While this aspect of foodie culture is an admirable thing in its own right, after all, who doesn’t like finding a delicious new variation on an old favorite? What can often be lost, is the thread of intimate heritage knowledge that ties us all to our culture.