New Mexico Mercury

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...

Redemption at the Rock

“Boom!” It’s only one minute and forty seconds of the first round and suddenly Natalie Roy from Santa Fe lands a tremendous punch on her opponent, Nikki Lowe, and the fight is over.

This is “Redemption at the Rock,” a night of mixed martial arts (MMA) fights at the Camel Rock Lodge in Tesuque, a night with 10 fights and a cheering audience of about 1,000. Put on by Orthrus Promotions, its leaders, JR Rodriguez and Sal Mora and their staff, it was an exciting and well organized event for a sport that has a big future in New Mexico and across the country. It was their fifth such event in New Mexico, Texas and Iowa and another is coming up on June 14...

Policing problems don’t end with APD

“It’s not just the Albuquerque Police Department,” the caller told me before narrating his own tale of a violent encounter with law enforcement. This caller was not looking for money or publicity or revenge or even justice. He did not tell me his name or the name of the deputy, and he has not filed a lawsuit or a criminal complaint.

He just wanted me to know that he had read a column I wrote recently about the U.S. Department of Justice investigation of the Albuquerque Police Department and that the problem of excessive violence did not stop with the Duke City. “It’s everywhere,” he told me...

Let’s show our support for moms—not just on Mother’s Day, but every day!

On this Mother’s Day, the staff at New Mexico Voices for Children wanted to tip our hat to all of the moms out there and celebrate them for doing all they do. As a working new mom myself, I thought we might also talk about some of the unique challenges that working moms face.

Working mothers are now the primary or co-breadwinners for two-thirds of American families (see Figure 1). Among low-income families, 39 percent are headed by mothers, according to the Working Poor Families Project. Yet, just as there is a wage gap between men and women, there is a significant wage gap between mothers and fathers...

NM Twittersphere: ABQ City Council, Mother Jones, Gov. TV Ads

This is the first in an ongoing installment that takes a weekly look at how New Mexican's are utilizing Twitter to digest, comment on and reformat the news of the day.  For those unfamiliar with Twitter, it is a social web application that allows users to connect and "follow" other users, giving the ability to post messages and view messages of the created network in real time.  Each post is limited to 140 characters.  The brevity of the format, its accessibility by smartphone, and its ability to reach large audiences immediately, has transformed the world of "breaking news"...

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...

El Machete: Presidential Artistic License

Presidential Artistic License

Time for Leadership and Action

Last week, while sitting at the Sunport, I picked up a copy of The Economist, and in the United States section, an article leapt off of the page that was much closer to home: “Breaking, and Bad,” a piece about Albuquerque’s struggles with our police force and our floundering economy. As I read the article, I hoped that other readers would believe that these struggles are part of a recent one-off phenomenon that we will move past, because I love this state, where I was born and raised, and am grateful for the opportunity to raise my own family here.

But reflecting on the story, I couldn’t help but recognize that many of our current issues have been with us for a long time...

The Machine

It is truly sad to see how the Albuquerque Journal has become part of the GOP machine.  Today's editorial decrying the peaceful but noisy civil disobedience in the city council meeting Monday evening seems to forget the importance of such actions to this nation's history.  Gee, remember the Tea Party?  And all to protect the Mayor who was once again no where to be seen.  And then the Journal puts in a snippet about how the adjourned meeting might have cost the city $200,000 in higher interest charges because some bonds were not purchased.  How about the tens of millions of dollars that the city has paid out in lawsuits for the killing spree from APD?...

Get some air

Go outside. Get some air. This used to be something mothers routinely urged our children to do. Most adults who are able enjoy walking outside, enjoying nature and breathing in that clean crisp air we all need in order to survive. New Mexico, with its vast space, huge cobalt skies, and beautiful mountain trails, is an ideal place for this. Or was.

It’s not so easy to breathe fresh air today. Not anywhere. According to figures recently released by the World Health Organization (WHO), pollution killed seven million people worldwide in 2012...