New Mexico Mercury

Senator Dennis Chavez

As the treacherous zealots of the Republican Party lick their wounds, again, and plot new ways to make life miserable for most Americans, the career and political triumphs of a native son who may well be our state’s greatest U.S. Senator, Dennis Chavez, comes to mind to dispel the sourness of the last weeks and replace it with pride in being a New Mexican.

Senator Chavez’s political life and conflicts mirror the partisan trench warfare that’s half-stymied America for the last six years. And Chavez’s accomplishments mirror, as well, the progressive spirit of this country that, since FDR, has cared more about human lives and equal opportunity than it has about the mathematical abstractions of economists and the blame-the-poor policies of Ebineezer fat cats and Scrooge Republicans.

The first Hispanic-American to be elected to a full term in the U.S. Senate, Chavez served the nation from l934 till his death in Washington, D.C. in from a heart attack in l962, two years from completing his fifth term. At the time, he was fourth in Senate seniority.   

He saw to it that New Mexico’s people had a chance to thrive during the bitter class warfare waged against the Roosevelt Administration during the early days of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), both of which gave jobs and hope to thousands of working class New Mexicans. The CCC, which was run by the army, employed young men from 18 to 25. CCC camps could be found in virtually every community in the state. Young men worked on soil conservation. They built public parks, helped farmers, restored forests, maintained national parks, and built schools and roads among their many tasks. The WPA employed some 13,000 New Mexicans who worked in the Federal Art Project, the Federal Music Project, the Federal Theatre Project, the Federal Writers Project, and the Historical Records Survey. And Senator Chavez was one of its strongest backers.

While Republicans were muttering about socialism and “communism,” Chavez was helping to put economically marginalized, but hard working and talented New Mexicans to work, with no threat to “capitalism” and the Constitution. “Marginalized” might be too soft a term. During the Depression and before World War II, New Mexico was consistently the poorest state in the Union. Senator Chavez’s allegiance was to the poor and jobless people of his state, that would be the majority of the population.

Chavez brought to New Mexico an almost uncountable number of buildings and projects many of which have become iconic monuments to our state and its unique history and cultures. Chavez’s devotion to the public good, and his astonishing gifts for achieving political consensus, allowed him to overcome the small minded bigotry and stingy solipsism of the Right, and helped him serve the needs of real people.

Senator Chavez, it seems to me, was the embodiment of what William James meant when he said “The art of being wise is to know what to overlook.”  As he remarked from time to time “If they [Hispanics] go to war, they’re Americans; if they run for office, they are Spanish Americans; but if they are looking for a job, they’re damned Mexicans.” But Chavez never let such maliciousness get in his way for long, even when he took the floor of the Senate to be sworn in for the first time to an almost empty chamber protesting his appointment after the death of Republican Bronson Cutting.

Chavez, Roosevelt, and the WPA helped bring to our state many dozens of new school buildings, and in Albuquerque the Harwood Art Center, the Albuquerque Little Theatre, the Heights Community Center, Milne Stadium, the New Mexico State Fair Grounds, old Albuquerque High School,  the famous old Albuquerque Airport, the Monte Vista Fire Station, Roosevelt Park, Tingley Beach, iconic buildings at UNM including Scholes Hall, Zimmerman Library, the Anthropology Annex, and probably two dozen murals in various buildings around campus.

Chavez was a visionary when it came to getting New Mexico a share of the Colorado River and backed early plans for the San Juan/Chama Project. And despite his allegiance to the Roosevelt Administration, he was an early opponent of what became a notorious episode in Navajo history – the federally enforced livestock reduction program which, without consultation with the Navajos, resulted in the slaughter of 80 percent of their herds of sheep and horses.

Dennis Chavez was a master political craftsman. He knew how to make the “system” work for New Mexico. He delivered for decades what New Mexicans needed the most – hope and work.  Would that we had a statesman of his caliber and humane values, with his powerful seniority, in the bickering, near fruitless Senate of today.

Free Speech Amid the Roar of Money

Out here in New Mexico, the fifth largest and the poorest state in the union, a lot of us know what it’s all about to be alone crying in the wilderness. Free speech in poor and powerless places often thrives in private, and in the realm of local politics. But when it comes to national and even state issues, free speech for most of us is a cruel illusion.

No one can hear us, so no one can listen to what we have to say.

Most of us are drowned out by the roaring propaganda of big money, which moves faster than the speed of sound.

For individual people, or even for small active political groups with an opinion, free speech is more often like whispering into a howling storm. Our free voices, and what we have to say, are erased by the din of the rich.

Free speech here is like standing in a dusty gale on the West Mesa trying to convince the weather to calm down. Or being in the middle of the dry grass lands around Tucumcari and reasoning with the sky for a drop or two of rain.

And this yowling wilderness of blather that drowns us out has a human source – the conservative, Republican wing of the United States Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts.  Because of their ruling in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission in 2010, my freedom of speech, and yours, which has no microphone because we are singular and poor, has to compete with corporations and PACs that have unlimited microphones and unlimited amps everywhere you look.

And soon, I’m sure, the Roberts Court will make a ruling on McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission to allow individuals, not just corporations or unions, to make as many campaign contributions as they like and do away with the total cap of $48,600, and all in the name of free speech and the First Amendment. Many are asking that if the court does that won’t it soon strike down all laws that limit campaign contributions and loose a floodgate of relatively large scale campaign bribery in every election?

Freedom of speech becomes a farce if you’re only allowed to freely speak in a sound proof room. The vast money of others makes a deafening noise around the voices of the poor and the not well off. Let’s say that McCutcheon leads to unlimited campaign contributions from everyone under the protection of the First Amendment, equating money with free speech.

That can only mean one thing. The people with more money are more “free” to speak than people with less money. Money, then, becomes literally the arbiter of freedom.

Out here in impoverished New Mexico that means almost all of us are less free to speak our minds than most people in other places.  Equating money with speech amounts to sewing up the lips of the poor and less well off while giving satellite megaphones to the super rich. They will then “own” all the speech and all the freedom to be heard.

Airport as Museum and Cultural Artifact

Flying around the country getting stranded in Chicago or Newark or Houston, or any other airport, when you finally get back home and walk through the great hall of our airport, you know you’re actually some place, not just any place, but a distinct place, Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Albuquerque takes a lot of hits. Some folks rightly decry our sprawl, the inattention to our growing water scarcity, the strip malls, the bar-ridden downtown, the lack of hotel space in the center of the city, the long derelict but almost face-lifted convention center, the solar heat sink of civic plaza, our history of police violence, and the general horrors of our traffic. And contrary to a, by now, international misperception brought on by Breaking Bad, we are not the meth capital of the cosmos.

If you’re looking for what Albuquerque does right, it’s pretty obvious – it’s the city’s emphasis on public art, on cultural institutions, and on preserving open spaces and semi wild areas in and around our city, including the Bosque, the volcanoes, the Ellena Gallegos, and much of the west face of the Sandias.

Perhaps the most obvious symbol of Albuquerque’s long struggle to maintain its honest identity in the face of the colonialization of franchise architecture, big box stores, Californicated strip development and suburbia, is the Sunport.

It’s an amazing place when you stop to think about it.  It is a museum as well as an airport. It is beautiful, if I may be so bold as to say so.  From the tiles on the floors, to the great corbeled vegas in the main hall, to the art on the walls, the Curtiss Pusher Biplane floating in the air as a testament to history, the Sunport represents Albuquerque and New Mexico in a way that alludes to the virtues of its surroundings like no other airport I’ve experienced. If Chicago Midway or O’Hare are indications of the true Chicago, or if Newark International, or LAX, or Heathrow, or Charles de Gaul, are indications of the depth and cultural richness of their communities, no one would ever be lured to enter them.

It’s those vegas that set the tone for the airport, that and the brown and turquois color scheme. The vegas are a direct reference to the reading rooms at Zimmerman library which are, themselves, a reference to the church on top of the mesa at Acoma Pueblo. It was an inspired move and thoroughly in keeping with the beloved 1939 WPA airport that the Sunport replaced. Throughout its construction and expansion for more than 30 years, from l965 to l996, the Sunport has kept its New Mexican identity and integrity surviving and flourishing in many mayoral administrations, Republican and Democrat, including those of Harry Kinney, David Rusk, Ken Schultz, Louis Saavedra, Martin Chavez, and Jim Baca.

Aside from the clean space, New Mexican character, and handsome furniture, what distinguishes the Sunport is that it really is a museum. Along with prominent outside public sculptures, there are some 113 paintings and other art works inside the airport itself—these range from magnificent Wilson Hurley landscapes of New Mexico to Nancy Koziwowski’s hand-dyed wool tapestry entitled “Runways” that adorns the high wall above the escalators, from the retablo “La Huida a Egipto” by Charlie Carrillo to a sculpture entitled “Guardian of the Fourth World” by Clifford Fraqua, from an earth pigment painting by Pablita Velarde called “Why the Coyote Bays at the Moon” to Lincoln Fox’s “Dream of Flight” that stands in the center of the A and B concourses.

The museums of many mid-sized cities don’t have as fine a collection of art from their region as our airport does. This is really as it should be. New Mexico probably has more serious artists working per capita than anywhere else in the country. It’s true for scientists, for poets and writers, and probably for architects and landscape architects too.

The reality of the Sunport puts a new twist on the badmouthing Albuquerque gets when when folks say they only come here to go to the airport. They’ll see a lot there, and if they take in the views from the windows in all the concourses, they’ll see mountains, mesas, and the vast landscapes of central New Mexico. And if they make it past their snide little slanders and get to Old Town, they’ll find some first-class museums there as well.

Whenever we return home from a plane trip out of state, there’s always a sense of relief as we walk through those concourses that could only be here, nowhere else. “Ah, Albuquerque,” a sigh exhales.  “What a comfort to be home.”

(Photos: Large pot by Matt Grommes; Citizens United by Donkey Hotey)