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.
During the years immediately following World War I, Lansing Bloom was hired at the Museum of New Mexico charged with directing the Museum’s War History Service. In this capacity, he was responsible for compiling the biographical records and information about New Mexico’s 16,000 World War I veterans. Toward this end, Bloom conducted a survey of surviving WWI veterans of NM. Approximately seventy-percent of the surveys were returned and are housed today at the New Mexico State Archives in Santa Fe,…
This blog post features 20 obituaries that were published by La Revista de Taos on November 22, 1918.
One of the core lessons I learned from my grandmother was that the best storytellers are those that have mastered the ability to lean in and to listen. In this, I think of the work of now renowned linguist and folklorist, Juan Bautista Rael. As a native son of the region, he had no doubt been raised on stories, however, in the summer of 1930, he returned home, freshly minted with a Master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley….
Today, on this highest of holy days to Catholics, I recall the deeply resonant sounds of the ancient spiritual hymns known as alabados. Recognizing the value and importance of recording these spiritual praises and other musical and religious traditions, folklorist and linguist Dr. Juan B. Rael returned home in the summer of 1940 and recorded the voices of fifteen men and four women from villages in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, including these deeply spiritual hymns. Listening to the alabados in moradas,…
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.