New Mexico Mercury

Torture

During Insight New Mexico’s interview with professor and police-violence protester David Correia last week we heard a disturbing description of what it’s like to be arrested by the Albuquerque Police Department for speaking your mind in a public place during a peaceful demonstration. It sounded like a description of Mississippi in the l960s.  I’ve heard similar accounts from others of the basics of this description, which in my judgment amount to torture.

Some of the thirteen demonstrators arrested at the sit-in in the Mayor’s office two weeks ago, one of them a grandmother in her mid sixties -- had their hands restrained so tightly they lost circulation and some had actual bruises and cuts from the handcuffs or plastic ties. All of them were placed in police vans that had been sitting in the sun for a long time with the heaters turned on. They were kept there for more than a half an hour, roasting and sweating before being driven across the street from City Hall to the police station.  It was like being kept in a mobile version of a black hole, left to cook and suffer, risking severe damage to their health.

It’s illegal to leave children or animals in over-heated cars but apparently it’s just fine to bake peaceful demonstrators for exercising their Constitutional rights to peaceably assemble and seek a redress of grievances from their government. Not only have employees of city government shot and killed one of their children or relatives, but now city employees with badges torture them for objecting.

How could the mayor let such things happen? What kind of city have we become?

This heat torture was meted out by officers of the law as an almost nonchalant form of inflicting pain and torment on purpose. If that isn’t malicious and sadistic, I don’t know what is.

And now horrific stories are surfacing again about what goes on in the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center (BCMDC) – including a jailor standing by watching an inmate beat another inmate half to death, an almost routine use of mace and Tasers supposedly to keep order, and last year a female inmate accused BCMDC guards of spraying mace on her genitals.  Some of the sit-in demonstrators have told of being strip searched at BCMDC for the alleged crime of trespassing on public property.

One of the police officers taking the sit-in demonstrators to the BCMDC reportedly said, “you think we’re bad, wait till you see those guys in there,” referring to the BCMDC guards. The jail has been involved in so many lawsuits, complaints, and settlements it’s hard to keep track of them.  An organization named the Private Corrections Working Group’s website, called New Mexico Hall of Shame, has a list of news accounts and reports on conditions at the BCNMDC that’s 138 pages long.

And to grind salt into the wounds of those families who’ve suffered from police violence, the Mayor and City Council are hiring, at outrageous prices, two middle men from Cincinnati to negotiate between themselves, the APD, and the U.S. Department of Justice which has presented a many page list of needed reforms. But who is negotiating for the aggrieved, the victim’s families? Not two guys from Cincinnati, that’s for sure. They probably hardly know where New Mexico is. Certainly not the Berry Administration which just jailed family members and submitted them to barbarous abuse. In fact nobody is negotiating for them, not the governor, not the attorney general. That is why they have been forced to negotiate for themselves through demonstrations and political sit-ins. They have no other recourse. No one in official Albuquerque is speaking for them.             

Downtown Phoenix/Downtown Albuquerque

If you compare downtown Albuquerque with downtown Phoenix you get a sinking feeling -- if you love the Duke City. The barren waste of our downtown  with its demolished buildings and vanished historic hotels, some still left as parking lots 34 years after they were torn down, is symbolized by the shadeless, treeless, frying pan of the metallic Civic Plaza,  one of the most inhospitable public spaces in America. Compared to the beautifully landscaped, palm lined, shaded Arizona Center site in downtown Phoenix, it really makes you wonder what in the world  Albuquerque has been doing all these years. 

Yes, we’ve preserved some magnificent historic buildings, but not as many as we demolished. Yes, we added a few fine modern buildings, did some handsome renovation on existing hotels, and even put in a movie theater. But in some 40 years, despite urban renewal, Albuquerque’s splintered leadership has never managed to give us a cohesive downtown heart of the city.  In fact it allowed downtown’s dismantling, putting courthouses north of the core, the best eateries and apartments east and west of the core, and allowed the once vibrant, architecturally rich Central Avenue to languish.

But downtowns notwithstanding, if I had to pick winners and losers in the city wars of the future in the Southwest, I’d pick Albuquerque any day over Phoenix when it comes to sustainability. In the year 2050, lets say, no one will be able to deny climate change any longer. Drought and heat will leave everyone with no doubt that the Southwest is drying up and that certain kinds of sprawling cities are just no longer workable. It won’t be hypothetical anymore.

I’ve been writing about this possibility since the l970s, worrying that Albuquerque would metastasize past its carrying capacity like Phoenix has. But metro Albuquerque is still under a million people while the Phoenix metroplex is at nearly 4.5 million souls. And despite Albuquerque’s grim economic outlook and terrible press lately, our situation is much healthier than either of the two fastest growing cities in our region, Phoenix and Las Vegas.

Of course, this has to do with water, which is, even now, still an almost verboten subject in the halls of power in all three cities.

In 36 years Albuquerque and Phoenix, and Las Vegas too, will have seen their populations shrink considerably because of desperate climate conditions. And because Phoenix, like Las Vegas, is dependent on water from the drought stricken Colorado River Basin for its growth and survival, the undependability of that water source will play havoc with Phoenix’s capacity to sustain a large population and the business opportunities that go with it. If the drought continues as predicted and becomes the new normal for our area, Albuquerque will see its population reduced as well.

By 2050, it will be clear that the KAFB jet fuel spill has compromised perhaps as much as 20 percent of Albuquerque’s underground drinking water, a massive blow to growth and prosperity.  Combined with the drought and the loss of dependable Colorado River water to drink, the jet fuel spill and the hundreds of other contamination sites in the Middle Rio Grande Basin will become not only a public health concern, but a public relations catastrophe.

Still, when you compare Albuquerque’s landscape and resources with those of Phoenix, it’s clear who the winner will be.  I don’t mean that people will flee Phoenix and Las Vegas and move to Albuquerque, swelling our population. I do mean that the Phoenix-Mesa-Chandler-Glendale-Scottsdale-Gilbert metro area will eventually start to lose its basic employer – home builders.  With unreliable water from the Colorado, and with the Valley of the Sun’s incredible heat and shallow aquifer, which has been drawn down so much that subsidence has already had a destabilizing impact on certain communities and neighborhoods, the city’s economy will sputter.

While Albuquerque has been using its tiny share of Colorado River water to drink for the last six years, historically it’s been dependent entirely on ground water and could become so again. That’s Albuquerque’s Achilles heel. If our flabbergasting recklessness with pollutants spoiling our most precious life-or-death resource proves to be even worse than we think, the loss of Colorado River water, combined with droughts in the Rio Grande watershed, could be a disaster for Albuquerque’s sustainability.

Still, I think our population is small enough that if we see an exodus because of the end of housing growth, and other downturns in the economy owing to climate change, it will put us more in alignment with our carrying capacity than even a sizable exodus from Phoenix could do for that city.

  It seems that Phoenix has more “moving people” than “staying people” anyway and we have just the reverse, despite our transient military residents. Our rooted population is historically grounded in Albuquerque’s rich cultural heritage over the last 500 years. Phoenix is basically a mid-l9th century city of “moving people,” job seekers and businesses looking for the advantages of an economic synergy of companies. What this could mean is that in a climate change caused downturn, Albuquerque might lose fewer of its core inhabitants, the people that love it, call it home, and would work hard to preserve it.

The Middle Rio Grande Valley is a much more hospitable place to live than the Valley of the Sun, with our dominating river and mountains which we’ve taken pains to preserve. There is a long, though interrupted, tradition of local produce farming in our valley with our river water which was once referred to as the American Nile. We are not massive producers of water intensive pima cotton like Phoenix still is today.  Alfalfa is a feed crop and, while water intensive, is a necessity for the dairy industry and the state’s horse culture. And the majority of our water does not come to us through a 336 mile uncovered, evaporation prone diversion canal from the Colorado River known as the Central Arizona Project(CAP) one of the great feats of engineering in the west. The problem with the CAP is that it will need to be retrofitted with a 336 mile long roof to protect it from the increasing heat that ramps up evaporation to a dangerously wasteful degree.

I make this speculation not to attack Phoenix, but to highlight once again the inherent good fortune of those of us who live in the Middle Rio Grande Valley and what a monstrous folly it is for us to allow our landscape to be degraded, our groundwater to be polluted, and our downtown to degenerate into a lifeless heat sink.

Even though I feel we’ll fare better in the future than Phoenix, we have something to learn from that massive place which is symbolized by its downtown redevelopment.  Arizona Center, in the heart of downtown Phoenix, is a massive shopping center and office complex designed by the Rouse Company, which wanted to create a similar “festival market place” in Albuquerque around Central and First Street in the l980s. I opposed the complex then, and I was right to. Retail in Arizona Center has never really worked as promised. But Arizona Center’s plaza is one of the handsomest and most comforting of such places that I’ve seen in the Southwest. The landscape design is perfect even though retail could not compete for customers with fancy air conditioned malls and shopping streets in Phoenix’s many suburbs.

What would it be like for Albuquerque if our fragmented leadership finally tried to make downtown a welcoming, comfortable and beautiful place by redesigning civic plaza and the surrounding streetscape to become an arboretum of local vegetation. Would that help to draw the kind of retail that would make Downtown the heart of the city again?  It might. Unlike Phoenix with its half dozen retail centers, Albuquerque has only two, in Nob Hill and the Uptown area. The West Mesa shopping center at Cottonwood Mall has proved unsuccessful. The West Side needs a retail hub, and so does University Heights. A downtown that goes from Old Town to Nob Hill could be it. But it’s sobering to think we can’t elect people with enough pride of place to risk their political reputations on finally giving downtown and environs the welcoming countenance it deserves. 

If our leadership can’t revive downtown after trying for nearly half a century, how can we hope they’ll have enough moxie to clean up our groundwater and focus our city on sustainability in the perilous times ahead?  We have the brain power to do it.  The question is, will we?     

Deming Luna Mimbres Museum

In some ways cities are like people. Both are mostly known by superficial labels that are so incomplete as to be almost always misleading. He’s is a white male academic with a beard and lefty leanings. She is an overweight Latina comedienne with a scruffy following. He’s tall, handsome, rich.  She’s beautiful, smart, and dresses like she knows what she’s doing.  Albuquerque is a blue collar town with lots of crime and bad drivers. Deming is a hot dusty place near the Mexican border where they race ducks.

If that’s all we know of any one of them, we know next to nothing at all.

Take Deming.  It is hot and dusty from time to time. It is near the Mexican border on I-10, a patch of highway that can get so dusty that brownouts bring traffic to halt. In the late l9th century Deming was thought of as the “new Chicago,” with high hopes for rail traffic helping to boost the city’s population. A “silver spike” was driven into a railroad tie to symbolize the meeting in Deming of the Atchison, Topeka & and Santa Fe railroad with the Southern Pacific, making it the second transcontinental railroad in the country. One can also still feel the presence of Pancho Villa and the raid on Columbus not far to the south. The Deming Duck Race sponsored annually for quite a while by the Deming Headlight gave joy to many of us just thinking about it. It’s now called the Great American Duck Race of Deming. It’s still a delight.

But that’s not the deep story of Deming either. It’s really a history lover’s dream.  Eccentric, neat as a pin, far from the madding crowd, Deming happens to be the site of one of New Mexico’s great museums. If you’re anywhere near, get there if you possibly can.

Housed in the massive National Guard Armory built in l916 with its 13 inch thick walls to protect the troops from Villa’s raiders, the Deming Luna Mimbres Museum is an all-volunteer enterprise with such a vast array of collections it reminds me of the first time I saw a drawing of Aladdin’s Cave when I was child.

It’s utterly dazzling. And it’s all been put together from the collections of local people who turn out to be a very interesting lot indeed.

I can’t even begin to do it justice. But take the Doll Room, converted from a WWI small arms firing range later adapted into a bowling ally. The collection of over 1000 dolls started with a core of some 300 beauties collected in Deming by Louise Baumgardner-Southerland. People from all over the world have swelled the collection. With Kewpie dolls, Parian dolls of “untinted bisque”, china-headed dolls from Germany, Madam Alexander dolls from the l920s, and a doll named “Susie” taken from the rubble of a bombed-out building in Hiroshima, one could spend a day in the doll room if one had a mind to.

The museum is also known for its fabulous collection of Mimbres pots, one of the best I’ve seen in long years of looking. Iron Lungs from the early days of the polio scare in the l940s, a fully outfitted chuck wagon from ranching times, a tack room with gear that brings out the cowkid in every adult, rooms full of military memorabilia, and probably one of the greatest collection of geodes and nodules I’ve ever seen, not to mention the gem and mineral collection – it’s just a feast for the mind to be there. One of my favorite exhibits is Old Main Street with a dentist’s office, a barber shop and hair salon, grocery and hardware stores, a saddle shop, a café and a funeral parlor. There’s a collection of over 2,000 liquor bottles from a bar owner in town. A hand-made lace collection from Deming women who belonged to the International Old Lacers, Inc, is adorned with a hand cranked Victorian sewing machine. There’s even a huge bell collection with more than 2,000 hand bells, as well as vintage cameras and office equipment, a raft of beautiful Japanese fans, and a fascinating exhibition telling the story of the Czechoslovakian Pilgrims of Deming who came to the area to farm in the l910s to 1930s.

Historically, Deming had an inordinate number of serious collectors for its size. Today the museum is staffed completely by volunteers who are never flagging in their enthusiasm, geniality and welcoming spirit.

I hope we get back there again this year. In fact I think we’ll make it a point to.

(Photos: Nora Anaya by Willa Correia-Kuehn, Phoenix rail by KINKISHARYO, mimbres pottery by Nrico, China doll by Bellsonherfingers)