New Mexico Mercury

Governor Ignores Looming Disaster at KAFB

A major environmental disaster more than half a century in the making is lurking right below our very feet, and yet the Susana Martinez administration is irresponsibly and unlawfully choosing to look the other way. Officials with Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque have accepted responsibility for a major contamination of groundwater that has already spread beyond its boundaries.

The Governor has systematically dismantled the New Mexico Environment Department and is choosing to officially ignore a crisis situation that should already have warranted critical status in our state’s largest city. The fact that the Governor has halted the state from officially holding the Air Force accountable for the groundwater contamination is a clear act of political malfeasance and is a willful violation of the public trust...

Weekly Poem: Pasqual

His teeth are like a row of stumpy razors, and his black hair has a sheen like the sun on black
coral. He drinks Diet Coke instead of the filtered rainwater preferred by the Progressives, who
incidentally make him very nervous.

"What bills are you going to steal from me today, young man?" he teases me on the House
Floor.

Walking slowly, with the deliberation of a champion mule, his decades of office passing like so
many forgotten arguments. That quizzical look that he always gives me, impossible to read...

Friday Voyage: Cuba, Part 4

In the chasm between American and Cuban health care systems, the standout distinction is a mission to serve the poor and underrepresented populations.

Women Without Choices: Two plays in ABQ

Americans tend to think of the pursuit of happiness as one of our inalienable rights, but the phrase means not that society gives us happiness but that it offers choices that allow us to seek it. But what if we don’t have choices?

Two new plays in Albuquerque focus on young women whose choices are foreclosed, whose destiny is tragedy. That these stories occur nearly a century apart merely shows that the prison bars of ethnicity, gender and social milieu are endemic in America...

Letter from México: Part 1

A journey to the beautiful western coast of México turns into a second life for a New Mexican couple.

Friday Voyage: Cuba, Part 3

The neighborhood of Jaimanitas, Cuba is a fantasyland within the revolution and represents the creativity and playfulness that has helped this social experiment endure for over half a century. 

El Machete: Welfare Queen

Welfare Queen

Weekly Poem: Georgia at ‘The Black Place’

I sit
between black lava and ash

dust-brushed and shaken
amid suggestion of bone

in the curve of the place without sky

rose-lipped clouds beneath...

Gloria Graham: A Certain Slant of Light

Art historian William Peterson explores the timescapes of light, shadow, intention and memory in the latest series by the renowned Gloria Graham.

¡COLORES! May 9, 2014

Santa Fe artist Erin Currier transforms trash into works of beauty.