New Mexico Mercury

Friday Voyage: Cuba, Part 4

In the chasm between American and Cuban health care systems, the standout distinction is a mission to serve the poor and underrepresented populations.

Friday Voyage: Cuba, Part 3

The neighborhood of Jaimanitas, Cuba is a fantasyland within the revolution and represents the creativity and playfulness that has helped this social experiment endure for over half a century. 

Friday Voyage: Cuba Part 2

Vigía, a unique Cuban publisher that produces hand-made books, embodies the creativity and resilience often born out of social upheaval.

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...

Friday Voyage: Cuba, Part 1

Margaret Randall explores the history and social mechanisms of the country that keeps on keeping on.

Friday Voyage: Moving Sands

Margaret Randall explores a couple of the the awe-inspiring mini Saharas of the American West.

Climate Foreclosure / Climate Migration

Climate migrants may soon be a new breed: the latest wave of those forced to leave their homes and seek refuge elsewhere. These will not be people fleeing political violence or poverty. Or not simply those two things. They won’t be leaving only their homes and the graves of their ancestors behind. These will be the hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—forced to migrate because their homes, ancestors’ graves and every bit of familiar landscape will have disappeared, beneath the rising sea levels caused by global warming...

A Review: The Day of Shelly’s Death

On October 11, 1981, the second day of what was to have been several months of joint fieldwork in a remote region of the Philippines, Renato Rosaldo’s wife and companion anthropologist, Michelle (Shelly) Rosaldo, fell from a precarious trail to her death 60 feet below. These are the facts. Suddenly, the woman he loved was gone, their two small children motherless, their immediate and long-range future dramatically reorganized.

In The Day of Shelly’s Death (Duke University Press, 2014), Renato Rosaldo calls on his most painful memories and all his skills—as poet and social anthropologist, as husband, father and someone who sifts through time and feeling in multi-faced testament—to give us the finely woven layers of a tragic event and the people who inhabited that event...

Friday Voyage: Petroglyph National Monument

One of the largest collection of ancient rock drawings in the world sits in Albuquerque's backyard.  Lightly visited, these testaments of prior cultures aren't without controversy. 

Too Little Isn’t Enough

I write this on March 29th, 2014. The inscription period for President Obama’s Affordable Healthcare Act has been moved from two days from now to mid-April, as long as subscribers start their sign-up process by March 31st. This has been President Obama’s signature effort. He prioritized it at the expense of many others. Under the guise of “bringing everyone to the table” he gave seats at that table to the very industries that have kept healthcare in the United States so perverse and expensive: the large insurance companies and pharmaceuticals. Not surprisingly, they had their say and, in many cases, got their way...