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For over a century, El Palacio has been a forum for voices exploring New Mexico’s art, archaeology, history, and landscape. Explore the writers, photographers, historians, and scientists whose perspectives have defined the magazine’s pages—past and present.
Arthur Sze is the current U.S. Poet Laureate. Sze is a poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of twelve books, including Into the Hush, Sight Lines, and others. Sze’s poems have been translated into fifteen languages, and he is the recipient of the National Book Award among many other honors. He lives in Santa Fe.
Deborah Jackson Taffa is a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo. Her memoir Whiskey Tender was a 2024 National Book Award Finalist and was longlisted for the 2025 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Taffa serves as the director of the MFA in creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Cara Romero is an award-winning contemporary fine art photographer. An enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, Romero’s expansive oeuvre has been informed by formal training in film, digital, fine art, and commercial photography. She maintains a studio in Santa Fe, regularly participates in Native American art fairs, and was featured in PBS’ Craft in America (2019).
Hannah Abelbeck (opens in a new tab) is the photo archivist in the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives at the New Mexico History Museum and is actively working to increase access to its photographic collections.
![An older man and a young boy wearing hats and suits stand in front of a rough stone wall, looking directly at the camera. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/SamAdams_02-e1638821821386-400x225.jpg)
As a New Mexican, Samuel Adams stands out. Of African American heritage, Adams arrived in Colorado as a young man, one of a generation of freeborn and formerly enslaved people who courted new opportunities in the American West during an era of rigid, oppressive racism and rapid territorial expansion. He enlisted in the Civil War, serving the Union with the Colorado Volunteers, perhaps as their only African American recruit.
![A smiling man wearing sunglasses and a black shirt holds a red glassblowing piece in a workshop. Text reads: Encounter Culture, Season 1 Episode 4. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/S1E4-blue-blue-400x225.jpg)
![Black-and-white photo of six people working in an office with desks, papers, filing cabinets, and office equipment, likely from the early to mid-20th century. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/101271-scaled-1-400x225.jpg)
Publications are the work of many people, and the Federal Writers’ Project, founded in 1935, was no different. This WPA-era photograph shows only a few members of the initial New Mexico team—relief roll workers, folklorists, researchers, translators, historians, news writers, typists, illustrators, editors, students, and volunteers—assembled by project director Ina Sizer Cassidy. Working under the guise of a proposed five-volume grand overview of the history, scenery, and wonders of America, in its first year the Writers’ Project employed fifty-five people for New Mexico’s contribution to the American Guide.
![A person wearing a sombrero rides a dark horse on a street beside a white stucco wall with a tiled roof. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/101492-400x225.jpg)
Idella Purnell started the small poetry magazine PALMS in 1923 when she was twenty-two years old, while supporting herself by working as a secretary for the American consulate in Guadalajara. For the next seven years, she was the magazine’s editor and publisher, carrying it through political upheavals, marriage, moves, personal tragedy, and divorce. The magazine never made any money. Purnell wrote, “The joke of poetry magazine publishing is that it is a lot of hard work, a big expense, and not very much fame for the editor, because, if the magazine is bad, who cares who the editor is?
![Five men in old-fashioned red uniforms pose indoors, four holding scrolls and one with a sword; the photo has a vintage, hand-colored appearance. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/145773-400x225.jpg)
BY HANNAH ABELBECK Photographs taken in the Southwest before 1866 are exceptionally rare, which is why this stunning but unidentified quarter plate ambrotype—with vigas and corbels—caught our attention. Ambrotypes, collodion positive images on glass, became popular in the 1850s but were supplanted by tintype and glass negative processes by the mid-1860s. The cased image hadn’t aged well, but inspection by conservators suggested the problems were superficial.
![Two women stand outdoors with their arms around each other, both wearing long skirts and sweaters, in front of a bush and a house. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Edit2_isabel-and-margaret-001-400x225.jpg)
BY HANNAH ABELBECK A friend of mine, Annie Sahlin, often comes in to work on some of the materials she donated to the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives. Now and then, after seeing one of our posts on Facebook, she’d say, “Oh, I saw that photograph by Margaret. My grandmother, Isabel, was friends with Margaret.” She said it enough times that I asked her what she was really saying.
![A room with a fireplace and chairs. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/EP_PEACH-6446_resized-400x225.jpg)
BY ETHAN ORTEGA On March 28, 2019, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed legislation designating Los Luceros (formerly a Historic Property) as a State Historic Site, thus securing funding, staffing, and preservation of the site in perpetuity. As a result, Los Luceros and its complicated history were thrust into the limelight and embraced by its visitors. (more…)
![A sepia-toned, faded photograph of a large group of people outdoors, posed in rows under trees, with most sitting and some standing. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/P20819-scaled-1-400x225.jpg)
BY HANNAH ABELBECK One hundred and fifty years ago, thousands of Navajo people undertook a second arduous 300-mile journey across New Mexico as the first Native nation to—with the 1868 Bosque Redondo Treaty—negotiate a return to their homeland. This year, two significant historical records turned up just in time for the commemorations. The first is a copy of the 1868 Treaty, recently unearthed from the attic of a descendant of negotiator Colonel Samuel Tappan.
![Historic sepia photograph of a young Indigenous woman in a patterned dress, standing in profile, carrying a woven basket or cradleboard on her back. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/037416-400x225.jpg)
BY HANNAH ABELBECK Carl Newland Werntz was a painter, fine arts photographer, advertiser, illustrator, cartoonist, world traveler, and educator from Illinois. Trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, he founded a rival school, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, in 1902. He likely took this photograph prior to that, while traveling in the Southwest. Unlike in more common, stiffly posed portraits of the era, Werntz’s subject steps forward with care and deliberate grace, her burden basket behind her as she moves across a vague space.
