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Indigenous Artists in the Movement to Protect Their Homelands Embedded in the mountainscape are pages from a large-scale printing of the Declaration of Independence. The bottom half of the pages are intentionally singed as they meld into distinctly pueblo black and white line work, accentuated by two cornstalks and a prickly-pear cactus at the center with ripe red fruit, seemingly ready for picking.
Read six selected Sze poems published in this issue here. At age twenty-one, Arthur Sze hitchhiked from El Paso to Santa Fe in a single day. Knowing no one, and accompanied only by his boundless curiosity, he arrived seeking a place to build a life as a poet.
Driving to the southern New Mexico town of Mesilla feels like slipping into a peaceful dream. Leave behind the noise and frantic energy of I-10, and soon the wide, winding road takes you past pecan orchards, chile fields, and acequias that have been used for generations.
If you are walking on the New Mexico Highlands University campus in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and you find yourself on the south side of Hippie Hill, and you know where to look, you can see the phrase “Viva la Raza” scratched into the sidewalk.
After the Spanish introduced wheat to the Americas, molinitos (small gristmills) in New Mexico played a major role in the agricultural economy for centuries. Wheat, in its ground form as flour, was a staple during the Spanish colonial period of the fledgling Province of Nuevo México.
When violence erupted in early 1935 after the Gallup American Coal Company attempted to evict striking miners from its coal camps, Robert Minor, the famous union activist, raced to Gallup, New Mexico, from New York to help.
The City of Española, New Mexico, officially turns one hundred years old this year. But the land and people of the valley tell a deeper story—one that slips past the barbed-wire borders of time, place, and stereotype, refusing to be hemmed in by the bias of public imagination.
By Simón RomeroPhotographs by Adria Malcom The sun was setting over Santa Fe’s Canyon Road. An opening at Ernesto Mayans Gallery had attracted an assemblage of artists and collectors who were sipping wine from plastic cups and energetically discussing art and politics as cigarette smoke wafted overhead.
![A white antelope skull with long, dark, straight horns mounted on a plain white background. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Chormicle_Oryx12-e1741814763512-400x225.jpg)
As the desert transitions from deep blacks to dim greys and blues, we creep through the mountain pass. We leave the city lights behind us and roll into the dark nothingness.
Talking about ancient life and the Paleozoic Era (252 to 541 million years ago) in New Mexico elicits various unexpected responses. Oh, cool! The ancient Puebloans. Well, no. A little further back.
