New Mexico Mercury

Weekly Poem: déjà vu

The mayor comes over to my table and says I am invited
to join him and el jefe ICE agent for a drink. I walk over
and sit down as the mayor pulls out a small black book
and hands it to the agent. He begins to read aloud:

Richard Vargas, born in Compton, California. Members
of your family came here from Mexico, and you are one
generation removed from picking grapes and cotton.
You went to school, the university, and now call yourself a
“poet"...

Addiction is the Legacy of the Born Immigrant

To many in the Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico, the United State’s enactment of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was nothing more than a fancy smoke and mirrors tactic that allowed the U.S. to steal huge pieces of land from its rightful owners.

One of those land owners was my great-grandfather, Jose Inez Quintana.  He was born in Mexico.  His daughter and my great-grandmother, Geñoveva Quintana, was born in the United States.  Only, they were born in the same physical place: San Ildefonso, NM...

Farewell to Books?

A friend wrote the other day to tell me her novella had been published. Where can I get a copy? Here’s the link, she responded. And when I went to it I discovered her book was only available on Kindle. No hardcopy at all! This was my first experience with what I fear may become commonplace, a gradual replacement of physical books with their digital imposters, something like cloning gone wild.

Call me old-fashioned. I like to read real books, material objects with pages I can turn, a cover that draws me in, inked pages that in some cases even smell of the old bookmaking craft...

Provincial Matters, 3-10-2014

V.B. Price's weekly collection of appreciations and observations.

¡COLORES! March 7, 2014

Santa Fe's Peter Sarkisian sees video as a new medium for art making.

The Wind Rises: Miyazaki’s Most Personal Film

In The Wind Rises, anime master Hayao Miyazaki adds his own memories and obsessions to the real life of Jiro Horikoshi and the writings of Tatsuo Hori. The result is a complex film of great beauty, one that has angered the right wing in Japan for its attitude toward 1930s militarism, and disappointed others worldwide for its failure to show the consequences of the hero’s quest.

Jiro Horikoshi designed the innovative Zero, a long-range and highly maneuverable fighter used in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Once the United States had caught up in fighter design, the Zero became a manned missile...

Weekly Poem: Certainly, Water

When I think of water spilling from a green bottle onto a wooden floor and the danger

it poses to a carpet and the Moroccan women I met once, Berber women with kohl
lined eyes and mehndi on their hands, who made carpets from wool they sheared
themselves, and who ululated on request for pictures because outside of Morocco that’s
what they were, ululating Berber women— ...

Billy Graham at the Sun Bowl

Juarez adventure and dreaming in this short story from Baker Morrow.

El Machete: Take that El Chapo

Take that El Chapo

Feminism revisited on the Albuquerque stage

A full-throated debate over women’s equality might seem to be a pointless rhetorical replay of the arguments of our parents or even our grandparents. But that turns out to be hardly true.

As illustration recall the passage from Just Fly the Plane, Stupid, the new memoir by our own congressman, Republican Steve Pearce, in which he said he and his wife agreed to follow a biblical injection that a woman would follow her husband and be subordinate to him.

A similar theme is debated in Rapture, Blister, Burn, a thoughtful new play at the Aux Dog Theater in Albuquerque’s Nob Hill, which will have its last performances 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday after a three-week run...