New Mexico Mercury

Brook’s suspension warranted but Governor’s stance hypocritical

The suspension of Albuquerque Public Schools superintendent Winston Brooks last week for disparaging tweets against state education-designate Hanna Skandera was the right thing to do, but Governor Susan Martinez’s public remarks about the matter contradict her own inaction toward a high-ranking member of her own administration for a far worse offense against a woman...

The High Cost of Candy:  Death Toll Climbs in Factory Disaster

The fatal toll from the October 24 explosion and partial building collapse at a Mexican border candy factory now stands at eight workers.  The death of Miguel Armando Reyes Castro was announced this week after the critically injured worker succumbed in a Guadalajara hospital where he had been transferred for treatment of severe burns sustained from the pre-Halloween disaster that struck the Dulces Blueberry factory hundreds of miles to the north in Ciudad Juarez.

The Blueberry plant manufactures Sunrise Confections candy products which are sold in large retail outlets in the United States for El Paso-based Mount Franklin Foods, which in turn is a subsidiary of the Elamex company.  Blueberry’s workers are not directly employed by the candy maker, instead laboring for the ELI labor sub-contracting agency...

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...

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...

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 ...”

Protecting the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks

There is an important time in any young person’s life when they feel anything is possible. They are open to new things and new ideas and they truly come into their own as individuals.

As a leader for Groundwork Doña Ana County (GWDA), a non-profit youth conservation and education group based in Las Cruces, I have had the pleasure of getting to know some remarkable young people as they have expanded their own horizons by exploring and working to preserve the world around them.  Our group has been surveying and learning about the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks (OMDP) region near Las Cruces...

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...