There is something deeply intimate about yearbooks. Filled with professions of eternal love and friendship, inside jokes and the youthful signatures of our classmates, each copy is an intense snapshot of a very particular time and and a very particular place. But, what each year’s edition has in common, beneath the personalized messages from ones friends and classmates, is a record of community.
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.
Every village has a remarkable story and Las Trampas, named for the River of Traps that flows through it, is no different. This village in northern New Mexico was settled in 1751 and holds the legacy of the remarkable families that gathered ground, tilled it and through the centuries made community. These families had come from Santa Fe, but at least one of their progenitors had himself carried an older origin story, one that reflected a journey of thousands of…
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
As a genetic genealogist, much of my work is done behind a computer screen or amidst a stack of books. In the Fall of 2018, I was invited by Isabel W. Trujillo, the Pueblo de Abiquiú Library and Cultural Center Director, to assist her in conducting work related to a group of Abiquiú community members with long standing genealogical and historical ties to the Pueblo of Abiquiú who also identify as genízaro or genízaro descendants.
Recently, I have been thinking about the importance of the human voice, particularly as an instrument for storytelling. It is often said that when an elder passes, an entire archive passes with them. In this piece, I reflect about how important it is to gather these voices, to dedicate ourselves to recording the stories all around us, particularly of our elders. It is also possible that our ancestors were interviewed and that those interviews are held in reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes…
On a hot summer day in 1962, my dad, Fermin Valdez, and I were hoeing our sweet corn field. With temperatures climbing over 90 degrees, my dad said, “Hijito vamos pal alamo a descansar y beber agua, esta muy caliente.” As we walked to the tall cottonwood, he said, “Let’s sit over here in the shade.” We sat on a bench, wiped the dripping sweat from our faces and necks, then he took a drink of water from his thermos…
Some places only exist as memories and stories and this is certainly true of the Sala that belonged to my grandparents in Questa, New Mexico. As the youngest of all of the grandchildren of Jose Albino and Andrellita, I was one of the few who never experienced the business and building that our grandparents established to sustain both their family and their community. I did, however, inherit the stories. The Sala was located at the center of the village and…
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…
Many of us have antique photos, visual links to our elders and ancestors, handed down to us – treasured and often mysterious. This is the first of a series of posts on caring for and sharing our visual heritage.