New Mexico Mercury

Mexico Forced Displacement on OAS Agenda

The growing issue of people forcibly displaced by violence in Mexico is getting scrutiny from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).  At a November 1 session of the Organization of American States’ commission in Washington, D.C., a representative of the IACHR asked the Mexican state to enact “specific” policies for forcibly displaced persons.

Laura Leal, a researcher with the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (IATM), testified that upwards of 170,000 people could be displaced in the country, but the number is hard to pin down since many displaced people operate below the radar screen to avoid reprisals...

El Machete: Bad Dog

El Machete: Bad Dog

Educational ‘Reform’ Movement Not What It Appears

Most of our dedicated public-school teachers must deal with a myriad of social challenges that are often rooted away from the classroom and not directly related to actually teaching students. Yet somehow, they too often must shoulder the blame for not solving the ills of society and the many things that are simply beyond their control.

Teachers in our public schools are tasked with teaching all of our children, regardless of the student’s environment outside the classroom...

Violence is as Violence Does

In Albuquerque we’ve become accustomed to hearing about another police shooting in which an unarmed person is killed. In the past several years we’ve had two dozen of these, with 17 fatalities. This past week our city saw two civilian shootings, each of them resulting in high-speed chases and terrorizing neighborhoods for several hours. It feels as if we are trying to catch up with notoriously violent cities such as Chicago or Los Angeles...

Freedom Isn’t Free, and Neither is the Web: a PRISM FAQ

PRISM is a large scale, government-run, metadata surveillance platform.  In other words, it’s a complex computer program built to gather, evaluate and communicate automatically generated personal information.  It was created and supervised by people working for the United States National Security Agency.

PRISM’s functions are to collect, store, sort and generate reports on how people act on the Internet.  This is also called behavioral tracking...

Ignorance by Design

We know for sure education consists of giving tests to children in order to prepare them for the rigors of life in this complex era. The undesignated Queen of Education in New Mexico, Hanna La Skandera wants to come up with a single test that might not only be the summative evaluation of each and every kid, no matter what age, no matter what cultural background, no matter what language, no matter what economic status, no matter what family situation. Don’t worry about a thing.  The Great Exam will take care of everything that’s anything worth knowing...

Dear Climate Scientists, Please Note the Global Terror at Fukushima Four

Four climate scientists have made a public statement claiming nuclear power is an answer to global warming.

Before they proceed, they should visit Fukushima, where the Tokyo Electric Power Company has moved definitively toward bringing down the some 1300 hot fuel rods from a pool at Unit Four.

Which makes this a time of global terror...

New Mexico Parents, Refuse the State Tests

Standardized testing is no longer a valid measure of student learning.  It has become an institution unto itself—created to unfairly evaluate teachers, punish schools, and create business opportunities for investors.  The tests drive the current “reform” movement in public schools, which has nothing to do with preparing our kids for life and success.

Race to the Top infused a whole new nightmare into our public schools, and privatization groups, like Jeb Bush’s ironically named "Foundation for Excellence in Education," have taken it all and gone full-sprint.  Thanks to Jeb’s foundation (and the cash they generously raised), our governor was happy to hire Florida’s former Education Secretary to “reform” New Mexico’s schools...

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...