New Mexico Mercury

A Story of Three Women

This is a story of three young women in Juárez, Mexico. These three stories are intertwined by virtue of the asylum and the leadership of its founder, Pastor josé Antonio Galván, who has created a family atmosphere where not only the patients but the members of the larger “family” provide an enormous amount of support for each other...

Tongues of Fire on the Border

With the defeat of Eric Cantor, immigration reform may be dead for the near future. Nonetheless, there are heroes out there who won’t be deterred by Congressional dysfunction. One of them is Reverend John Fife who was recently in Santa Fe.

Back in the early 1980s when wars were raging in Central America, refugees fled to the United States from death squads in their home countries, particularly Guatemala and El Salvador. The first church to respond to this crisis was Fife’s church, the Southside Presbyterian church in Tucson, Arizona. On March 24, 1982 he started the Sanctuary movement and initiated an “underground railroad “system to move refugees to other parts of the country and to Canada where they would be safe...

Immigrants or Refugees?

In the media barrage over the “flood” of Central American children arriving along the United States’ southern border, the refuge-seekers have been typically labeled as “illegal immigrants” by many media outlets.  

But Central American migrant advocates have a diametrically opposed take on the crisis, contending that the children on the U.S. border should be considered not as immigrants but refugees meriting international treatment standards, which does not generally include detaining children, according to Human Rights Watch...

Juarez Valley Strives for Recovery

Travelers headed south of Elephant Butte Reservoir in New Mexico might have noticed a full, flowing Rio Grande in recent days. The coveted water was on its way to Mexico where, under a binational 1906 treaty, the U.S. is annually obligated to deliver 74 million cubic meters of the liquid. Once past the border, the water is used for irrigating farmland in the Juarez Valley of Chihuahua state, which encompasses the municipalities of Praxedis C. Guerrero, Guadalupe Distrito Bravos and Juarez.

Long known for its fertile farmland as well as contraband corridors, the Juarez Valley was one of the hardest hit areas in the so-called Narco-War, especially between 2008 and 2010 when thousands of residents fled their homes and abandoned farm land...

Letter from México: Part 1

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

The James Boyds of Juárez

It’s Sunday morning and I’m driving through the desert east of Juárez, Mexico, only a few miles from the New Mexico border. Suddenly I see a scraggly line of some thirty or forty men and women coming towards me in the sandy pathway that parallels the two lane highway. These are mental patients in Visión en Acción, a private asylum founded by Pastor José Antonio Galván, an ex-addict who repented and has spent the last eighteen years caring for approximately one hundred of Juárez’s mentally ill. These are the James Boyds of this city that has suffered so much...

Provincial Matters, 5-6-2014

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

El Machete: Wendy’s Ketchup

Wendy's Ketchup... background info.

A Pig named Melissa

Yeira pulls back a strip of chicken wire and points into the little pen. There is Melissa, a tiny pig. She had been given to Yeira and her family by Pastor José Antonio Galván, the founder of the nearby mental asylum, Visión en Acción where Yeira’s grandmother, Elvira once worked as the cook. They, in turn, were going to fatten Melissa for a birthday celebration for me next January. This is not only an extraordinary gift from this impoverished Juárez family but a new insight into the role of animals here...

Cesar is not a Museum Piece

As the life of Cesar Chavez hit the big screen in recent days, the media rediscovered the man who has become a symbol for the Chicano movement, non-violence and labor rights.  And while the complexities of Chavez’s celebrated life were revisited by the pundits, the annual Cesar Chavez day events began unfolding across the land.

At a well-attended March 29 gathering in Albuquerque, New Mexico, another legendary farm labor leader and former colleague of Chavez had a message:

“Don’t put that cause in the museum. It doesn’t belong there. It belongs on the streets"...