Land, Migrants and Poets: The Day of the Dead 2013
New Mexico and the borderland will come alive this weekend with activities related to the annual Day of the Dead celebration, which falls on Saturday, November 2, this year. As befits a cultural boom that is drawing in thousands and thousands of people, this year promises bigger and broader events than ever before, encompassing art, music, literature, and culinary treats.
“Without a doubt,” the growth of immigrant and Mexican populations on this side of the border is “exponentially” related to the expansion of the Day of the Dead, said Albuquerque poet and longtime community activist Jaime Chavez...
Lobbying in the Land of Enchantment: Special Interests and their Hired Guns
Common Cause New Mexico (CCNM) just released its latest “Connect the Dots” report focusing on lobbyists and lobbying in New Mexico. The research looks at who are the lobbyists; who are their employers; political contributions to legislators by both lobbyists and their employers; and money spent by both lobbyists and their employers to entertain and feed legislators.
In 2013, there were 673 lobbyists registered in New Mexico, outnumbering legislators by over six to one.
The report takes a look at the lobbyist corps in Santa Fe and asks who they are and who they represent...
Book Review – The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
When Michelle Alexander took a job working on racial issues in the criminal justice system, she expected to find the same problems with racial bias that afflict all institutions of our society. Instead, she found a large scale, intentionally created, ostensibly race-neutral (“colorblind”) system of racialized social control reaching deep into the fabric of African-American life. What Alexander found shocked her. As I read her book, it shocked me. The New Jim Crow (The New Press, $19.95, 261 pages) should shock any reader...
The Anti-abortion Theocrats
Those kind and good people who want to ban abortion after twenty weeks really, behind the masks and shadow-dancing fetuses, are arguing for the establishment of a theocracy where God’s Law determines public policy.
They talk with great conviction about the sanctity of life and they say the aborted child-to-be feels pain. For example, let’s imagine the late-term fetus that has no brain, or no lungs, or no heart. Further, let’s imagine the mother-not-to-be and her doctor. If abortion is no longer an option, is it better to let this woman who bears such a child die in agony? Does this woman and how she wants to decide count for nothing?...
Book Review – Leaving Tinkertown: The story of a father, a daughter and a museum
The first sentence of Leaving Tinkertown,—“I was conceived in a pickup camper on the New Mexico State Fair Grounds when my parents were on the road with the carnival.” — is definitely a keeper. You immediately sense you are going to hear about some unusual people. And you do.
This memoir tells the story of Ross Ward, the artist and collector who created the unique Tinkertown Museum in Sandia Park. It is also a story of Ward’s developing Alzheimer’s disease, of his daughter’s love and effort to cope with her father’s decline, of a young woman coming to terms with the end that awaits us all...
Weekly Poem: At Gathering for Mother Earth | Tewa Women United, written on site
The corn is singing
all colors of corn are singing
and we are listening.
The sun is singing
the sky is blue singing
to all manner of listening.
The listening when
we don’t even know
we are listening...
Hidden Treasures
“Some people say that they are “basura humana” or human garbage but I feel that they are “tesoros escondidos” or hidden treasures, Pastor José Antonio Galván says of the one hundred mental patients in his asylum in the desert on the west of Juárez, Mexico.It’s been almost three years since my first visit with him, this imposing, quick witted, relentlessly optimistic man who has saved the lives of so many of Mexico’s mentally ill...
Albuquerque Police Oversight Review Concluding
A task force working on police accountability in Albuquerque is on track to wrap up its mission by the end of the year. Although the city council-appointed Police Oversight Task Force (POTF) held this month the last of three forums designed to gather community input, public comments are still being accepted for a final report.
Andrew Lipman, POTF chair, told FNS that his group should have recommendations for possible changes to the official police oversight commission ready for city councilors to consider by the end of December. “We need to keep on moving,” Lipman said...
Weekly Poem: Dad’s Visit
What did we do
to deserve this beauty -- our blooming cactus flowers, the emerald green shine of our chiles, the boys
and girls the backbones of our families, taking a stab
at adulthood in middle school? In a city of strong kids, under a sky so wide and this blue,
it’s as though we’re being showered
with praise by a gorgeously generous god...
Heavily Redacted Audit Continues Lack of Due-Process
In a feeble attempt to placate the public’s demand to know the details behind the Martinez Administration’s undisclosed accusations of fraud against as many as 15 New Mexico behavioral heath providers, the Attorney General’s office release of a heavily redacted audit only muddies and delays the issue further.
And one of the few things we were actually able to glean from the audit was that auditors from Massachusetts-based Public Consulting Group Inc. (PCG) wrote that “PCG’s Case File Audit did not uncover what it would consider to be credible allegations of fraud, nor any significant concerns related to consumer safety.”...