Troubling the Archive
When Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez traveled from Mexico City to the far frontier of New Mexico in 1776 on behalf of the Church and the Spanish Crown, he was on a record-keeping mission.
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Cruising the Mother Road
I found my first taste of freedom crisscrossing cornfields shadowed by windmills in rural Indiana in a hand-me-down Oldsmobile. Burnt CDs from friends and lovers made my small-town life feel cinematic.
A Question of Power
The power of protest suffused the smoky air in Window Rock, Arizona. It was January 2007. Diné men wearing respirators held signs that read “Defend your right to clean air.” Diné women held American flags and faced off against police with hands on their pistols.
When Atomic Testimony Becomes Art
“Dear Journalist,” the letter starts. “You have been tasked with investigating recent deaths linked to alleged creature sightings in the Tularosa Basin area. It is speculated that these deaths have been occurring in Southern New Mexico ever since ‘the sun rose twice’ last year.” These are the initial instructions for a 3D point-and-click video game called El Sol.
The Loss of the Commons: A Historic Context for the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire
In April 2022, the largest and most destructive wildfire in New Mexico history, known as the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, erupted in the Santa Fe National Forest.The wildfire originated from two U.S.
Remembering as Resistance
My mother was adopted through the Indian Adoption Project, a federal program that ran from 1958 to 1967 and was designed to assimilate Native children by placing them with white families.
Reckoning with 1776
It is known today as New Mexico, a place where time is recognized as “immemorial.” Here, the footprints of people in motion, likely left 23,000 years ago, remain impressed upon the land.
El Placio Plática: The women of the Chicano Movement
On February 22, 2026, 120 people in Las Vegas, NM, attended the El Palacio Plática at the New Mexico Highlands University Donnelly Library. The plática featured writer Myrriah Gómez and photographer and activist Adelita M.
Art as Inheritance
Poetry is my inheritance. My dad, raised by Scottish immigrants in New York City, was taught by Catholic nuns to memorize poetry. He passed the practice on to me; I remember standing at the edge of the Pecos Wilderness as a child, repeating the lines of “The Fairies,” by William Allingham, until I could recite it by heart.
From Javelinas to Oil Refineries: Building the New Mexico Epic Poem Project One Community at a Time
Lauren Camp: The goal was to go everywhere, county to county across the state, reaching many small, rural communities. I started in Alamogordo, in the south-central part of New Mexico, reading poems and answering questions, then watching with delight as everyone in the vast crowd wrote in response to a prompt I gave.