New Mexico Mercury

And the Winner Is…

A meditation on a retracted state award and the true meaning of recognition.

Health Reform In The Cross Fire

As the Federal Exchange continues to frustrate all of us, we are also seeing other aspects of the ACA surface and become the fodder of attacks and misinformation.  While some benefits started early in 2010, other, more complex changes specifically related to the infrastructure of insurance reform start now that is causing further angst.  But then, as we see, it’s easy to blame everything on the ACA...

Water, Water Everywhere, But Too Much Salt To Drink

The possibilities and pitfalls of water desalination are being explored at a research center in Alamogordo.

Whistleblower Solidarity

So what about the Veterans of our country the day after the parades and the backslaps? The country returns to business as usual where veterans take their own lives at a rate of nearly one an hour, every hour, of every day.  Since the U.S. engagement with Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, roughly 2.5 million service members have fought in two bloody wars, many through multiple deployments, leaving a wake of wrecked lives that ripple through every pocket of our society...

Movement Against Standardized Tests Resurges

The national wave of resistance to standardized testing continues this week, with teachers in Chicago launching a campaign to push back against the tests they see as a "major drain on classroom time, undermine education, and stand in stark contrast to the proven student assessment tools" developed by classroom teachers...

Provincial Matters, 11-11-2013

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

Across the Ethnic Divide

The headlines are all too familiar to a New Mexican: Cop shoots, kills unarmed suspect. It has happened so often in Albuquerque that the FBI is now investigating the city police department at the request of the city council. But the headlines of the past week are not from New Mexico but from a small California city 10 miles from where I have been temporarily living.

At 3:14 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 24, two Sonoma County sheriff’s deputies radioed that they had spotted a suspicious person. Ten seconds later, the suspect had been fatally shot...

The Winnie and Skandy Show

It’s one of those moments when I feel I should take off my hat, bow my head, kneel down, and give thanks that indeed I live in New Mexico, where the bracing and slightly bitter essence of horseshit can suddenly waft through nuestro Burqueville.

I strongly believe anyone who doesn’t like the clean, strong smell of horseshit is a degenerate.  With great joy  therefore have I  just learned APS Superintendent Winnie Brooks has made livestock references about NM’s uncrowned Queen of Education Hanna Skandera...

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 ...”

Insight New Mexico - Denise Tessier

V.B. Price talks with Denise Tessier about her work at the ABQ Journal Watch and the state of local, regional and national journalism.