New Mexico Mercury

Yucatán Journey, Part II: Where poison and antidote are seldom far apart

This is the second and final column about a Yucatán journey. Read Part 1 here.

We traveled around Yucatán exclusively by public bus, which does have the advantage of giving you lots of idle time to study the people and countryside. Everybody has their own opinions on when and where the buses run, so you have to be resigned to long waits and occasional dead ends. Even though the distances in Yucatán are modest by U.S. standards, it takes a day or two to get just about anywhere by bus...

Yucatán Journey, Part I: The most beautiful beach in the world

On a warm, bright morning, with high white clouds scudding over the dense tropical forest, four Frenchmen, four Germans, a Dutch couple, an American couple and three Mayas, jabbering in half a dozen languages, including Spanish and Yucatec, puttered slowly down a canal dug 1,500 years ago by residents of the Mayan city of Muyil.

For centuries their descendants stubbornly fought off the Spanish and Mexican governments with the result that the canal is still there and so are the Maya, as well as the magnificent ruins of their old city. Soaring above the jungle panoply, it is a victory over time and endless tribulations...

Play Illustrates Idealism vs Reality in American Corporatocracy

“What laws ever made men free?” Henry David Thoreau asks in The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, a thoughtful new production at the Adobe Theater in Albuquerque. If his question has more than a passing resemblance to the rhetoric of the Tea Party 170 years later, the parallels deserve close examination.

I have published a detailed review of this brilliantly acted and skillfully directed play on talkinbroadway.com and won’t repeat that here, but I do want to discuss further the idea of freedom that is the core of this play—and of much of the political debate in the U.S. today...

The Best and the Worst Economic News

Due to the vicissitudes of our flailing media, the best and the worst economic news of the year, both released over the holidays, seem to have gone entirely unreported. The explanation is that the media are short staffed over the holidays. But so what? News is news.

First, the worst. It has been repeatedly reported that the state’s long term population growth has slowed sharply. This downturn is due to the fact that more people have been moving out of the state than into it. But it had also been repeatedly reported that due to natural population increase—the excess of births over deaths—the population was still growing. Now we know that comforting thought is a fiction...

Education in New Mexico, Part 4: What is to be done?

Exploring solutions for New Mexico's education woes and acknowledging poverty as a major determining factor in outcomes. 

When fiction meets life: “Last Night of Ballyhoo”

On Saturday night, I sat in an Albuquerque theater as actors discussed the hospital in which I was born, the street on which I lived, the store that my father managed—and it was all transpiring in my native city within eight months of my birth. As assimilated, non-practicing, non-believing Jews living in a city notorious for earlier incidents of antisemitism, my family could have been the subject of this play—except for the fact that unlike the play’s characters, my family never discussed Judaism. For two hours, the parallel tracks of fiction and life did indeed seem to meet, even if in the far distance.

Such was the moving but rather unnerving experience I had watching Last Night of Ballyhoo, an effective and affecting comedy being staged by Mother Road at the Tricklock Performance Laboratory...

Education in New Mexico, Part 3: Comparative Paradoxes

Standardized education reform is taking place internationally while each country grapples with its own complexities. 

Education in New Mexico, Part 2: Classroom wars

Charter schools are circumventing many public school obstacles, but funding structure puts them at odds in a fight for dollars. 

Education in New Mexico, Part 1: ‘I felt lost’

Wally Gordon explores the plight of education in New Mexico in this four-part series.

Giving thanks for what we can get

Just in time for Thanksgiving, we finally have some good economic news. Without anybody really paying attention, New Mexico’s economy seems to have quietly turned the corner.

Although the evidence is tentative and not easy to read, for the first time since the Great Recession struck seven years ago, substantial signs suggest the New Mexico economy is slowly dragging itself out of the swamps. While one or two months may not establish a trend, these signs have been visible long enough that it is reasonable to conclude New Mexico has hit bottom and is starting to bounce back...