Contributors

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

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

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

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).

Les Daly

Les Daly has reported for such publications as Smithsonian and The Atlantic, and frequently on a variety of interesting people and subjects for El Palacio magazine.

A rustic dining room with exposed wooden ceiling beams, a metal table with four chairs, wooden cabinets, art on the walls, and concrete flooring. [gen-ai]

The House of Mirth

BY LES DALY Meet James Holmes, “Compulsive Artistic Humorist.” That wouldn’t all be on his business card, of course. But if he had a full-disclosure card, it could legitimately say, at least, “Sculptor, artist, woodworker, cabinet-maker.” Maybe “art on impulse.” Maybe “collector of the curious.” And on the other side, a view into his whimsical mind: a full-sized pie, the kind Mother used to make, except Holmes crafted his in detail from sheet-lead, patterned in the crust, scalloped at the edge, with a servable slice.

An adult and child in traditional clothing stand in a grassy field with mountains, as the adult says, Someday, son, none of this will be yours. [gen-ai]

Drawn to Truth

Ricardo Caté's Humor Knows No Borders - or Bounds BY LES DALY “ALL I WANT IS TO BE FUNNY, ” says Ricardo Caté. Well, maybe. Caté is the country’s only American Indian newspaper cartoonist. Six days a week his drawings, wryly titled Without Reservations, crown the comics page of the Santa Fe New Mexican. [wonderplugin_slider id="38"]   (more…)

Two young girls in dresses sit on donkeys in a dirt street, with two adults standing nearby and buildings visible in the background. [gen-ai]

Dates With History 

Behind The Scenes At The Palace Of The Governors Photo Archives BY LES DALY Like a ghost, the photograph of an elderly woman appears unexpectedly from time to time among the vast photo archives of the New Mexico History Museum. Curator Daniel Kosharek has come across her a couple of times. Digital archivist Hannah Abelbeck thinks she saw her, too, before she quickly disappeared again.

A bearded man in a red robe rides a white horse over fallen figures, holding a staff with a flag, in a stylized, historic painting. [gen-ai]

Red

BY LES DALY This, it may be said, is a story to dye for. It is a story about a diminutive, unusually endowed female spirited out of the New World by Spanish conquistadors nearly five hundred years ago to make her mark across at least four continents and contribute more wealth to the Spanish Empire than anything else they took home from the Americas except silver.