Women’s Murders, Justice and Corruption in New Mexico
Since 2009, Frontera NorteSur has followed the story of 11 murdered women and girls found in a common burial site on the West Mesa of Albuquerque, New Mexico. February 2 marked the fifth anniversary of the discovery. Although there has been much talk and speculation about who is responsible for the killings, the crimes remain mired in impunity.
What’s more, women with profiles similar to the West Mesa victims are still missing, prompting further speculation of another clandestine graveyard somewhere out there...
Tax Credit Increase for Low-Income Working Families Would Increase Tax Fairness
New Mexico lawmakers have at their disposal an effective tool for helping the working families in our state who need it most. The Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC)—a credit based on the federal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC)—goes to low- and moderate-income families that work, helping them meet their basic needs. Increasing the credit would do so much for these families struggling to get by on low wages, and there’s a way to pay for the increase that actually helps restore a little bit of fairness to our tax system...
Conscious Naming
In Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning: Her Lifetime in Photography by Elizabeth Partridge (San Francisco, Chronicle Books, 2013), I find the following paragraph: “Like many of the other San Francisco bohemians, Maynard [Dixon] and Dorothea found the label ‘artist’ highly suspect. In a kind of reverse snobbery, those who called themselves artists were thought to be more interested in being an artist than in making serious art ( . . . ) ‘I was a tradesman,’ Dorothea said. ‘I really and seriously tried, with every person I photographed, to reveal them as closely as I could.’” (p. 13)
This passage brought to mind the very different weights, different meanings even, that certain words hold for us, depending upon our cultural contexts and the time in which we live...
The Deportee Chronicles: The Girl from Guajajalmiton
More than 768,000 people were deported from the United States during 2012 and 2013 alone. While mass media coverage of the ongoing immigration debate focuses on events in Washington and other parts of the United States, little attention has been paid to the lives of people in Mexico and other counties who have already been deported.
A large group of people who were largely invisible on this side of the border are now in the same condition on the other side of the line. In an effort to help fill the media gap, Frontera NorteSur begins an occasional series on the faces, the lives and the dreams of deportees now residing in Mexico. Today's article is the story of one young woman who was suddenly ordered out of a country she called home...
Weekly Poem: Day One (a sestina)
Day One
the big bomb to win
the war of wars, the big
one, how many times
do you think, Doctor?
The Army wants to know!
Dr. Oppenheimer says he knows
the gadget will work and be one
big blast (in his doctoral
opinion), a dud would not win
us anything, we need more time
to develop a device that’s big
enough to blast a whole city...
The Pink Store
Crossing the border between Columbus, New Mexico and Palomas, Mexico, you see a large store painted pink called The Pink Store. It is, to me, the symbol of this small, poor town, a symbol of wellbeing or, sometimes, trouble.
Founded 25 years ago by Ivonne and Sergio Romero, a very special couple, it has a wonderful restaurant and a marvelous selection of ceramics, silver, jewelry and folk art from all over Mexico. When it is full of customers, you know that things are going well in Palomas. When there are no customers, it’s a signal of problems in the town...
An unlikely Jerusalem and its merry band of misfits
Beginning in early spring and continuing into late autumn, I often see a man walking on Raven Road in my neighborhood with a backpack, a shabby jacket and a smile. He is elderly, lean, with long hair and a beard as gray as my own. He wears dirty boots, a torn shirt and shabby pants. He is always by himself, although when I greet him, he responds with a friendly word and wave.
This man, with all his repulsiveness and attractiveness, is much like the protagonist of Jerusalem, an unusual play, in equal parts entertainment and philosophical statement, that opened last week at the Vortex Theater in Albuquerque...
New Mexico Water Wars and Their Implications
My friends and I spent the last months after our high school graduation making memories together before our college paths diverged. We refused to think of the challenges of adulthood that lay threateningly on the horizon but rather spent our time water skiing on Brantley Lake, on the outskirts of Carlsbad, New Mexico, reveling in the few remaining days of our boyhood. The winters of 2009 and 2010 had been excellent snow seasons and along with an unusually wet monsoon season, Brantley Reservoir was swollen almost to full capacity.
Over the course of the next three years, New Mexico suffered through a period of intense drought. The reservoir shrunk little by little, depleted by the water needs of the farmers and citizens of the local community...
What Does Real Reform Look Like?
When a state’s children protective services fails to serve or protect children it is supposed to help, what is to be done? What is the root of the problem a state faces in trying to help children who are abused in their own families? How can a system that almost everybody calls dysfunctional be reformed?
Since the death of 9-year-old Omaree Varela in Albuquerque last month, legislators, officials of the New Mexico Children, Youth and Families Department and advocates for children have been asking these questions. So far, they have no good answers...
There’s No Place Like Burque: Dimver Revisited
The esteemed journalist Wally Gordon has viciously attacked my blog scratchins about a place I call Dimver where I grew up and where, much to my utter disappointment, I spend every free waking hour of the day and night when I’m not in my beloved Burque.
Let me just say that Burque is as close to heaven as we get in this here life and that I love New Mexico to the point of abject drooling, but not so much Nuevo Colorado and certainly not so much that place I call Dimver.
Case in point: look what happened to Dimver in the recent Superbowl...