New Mexico Mercury

160 Years Later: 12 Years a Slave

If you were to judge the movie by its trailer, you would expect 12 Years a Slave to be a Spielbergian epic—pretty in the wrong places and sentimental at its core. You would be mistaken. Director Steve McQueen’s film is an unsparing look at the dark heart of slavery and its devastating effects on all touched by the institution.

The physical suffering of slaves is graphically depicted, but this movie illustrates that the greater injury is psychological and emotional. It is not simply bodies that are being damaged; it is souls...

Friday Voyage: Copper Canyon

A glimpse of a disappearing world in one of the most rugged terrains on the planet.

La Santa Muerte and Jesús Malverde: Narco Saints?

“I may be big but I’m very scared,” Jorge answers as we work our way through narrow streets in the Tepito district of Mexico City, searching for either the church or the “santuario” of La Santa Muerte (the Saint of Death). We’ve heard that this increasingly popular saint is the protector of drug users and dealers and want to get the real story. Jorge is a highly successful Mexico City lawyer but, most important, he is big and powerful looking.

I first read about La Santa Muerte in a 2008 New Yorker article, “Days of the Dead, the New Narcocultura”, by Alma Guillermoprieto. She said that, “The cult is known for the drug traffickers’ devotion to it ...”

Weekly Poem: Garden Report

The last of the roses are on the bush,
one red bud caught in the brief dips into cold,
it's final form a tight embrace.
The other opening, opening, insistent and resolute,
bearing the last gleanings of warmer nights...

El Machete: Bad Dog

El Machete: Bad Dog

Community Treasures

Local breweries are winning awards, fostering local community and adding a new flavor to New Mexico's renowned palette.

Friday Voyage: The National Museum of the American Indian

Margaret Randall guides us through a unique Washington experience in the heart of the nation's capitol.

Weekly Poem: A History of Faith

Man. Woman. Huddled. Crouched in a dark corner.
He hears scuttling roaches. Phantasmagoria. Demons. Pixies.
He hears Stygian depths downward.
“Listen carefully,” she says,
so gently, to calm a child in a schoolhouse of terrors
long before she purportedly stole from the apple tree...

Land, Migrants and Poets: The Day of the Dead 2013

New Mexico and the borderland will come alive this weekend with activities related to the annual Day of the Dead celebration, which falls on Saturday, November 2, this year.  As befits a cultural boom that is drawing in thousands and thousands of people, this year promises bigger and broader events than ever before, encompassing art, music, literature, and culinary treats.

“Without a doubt,” the growth of immigrant and Mexican populations on this side of the border is “exponentially” related to the expansion of the Day of the Dead, said Albuquerque poet and longtime community activist Jaime Chavez...

Book Review - The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

When Michelle Alexander took a job working on racial issues in the criminal justice system, she expected to find the same problems with racial bias that afflict all institutions of our society.  Instead, she found a large scale, intentionally created, ostensibly race-neutral (“colorblind”) system of racialized social control reaching deep into the fabric of African-American life.  What Alexander found shocked her.  As I read her book, it shocked me.  The New Jim Crow (The New Press, $19.95, 261 pages) should shock any reader...