Summer 2024 – El Palacio

Pico del Hierro-Villa, Las virgencitas enamoradas, 2022. 12 × 18 in., digital photograph. From Breaking the Borders of La Virgen de Guadalupe.

Who Gets to Be a Saint?

By Jacks McNamara What is love? What is holy? Inside ovals of radiance, two girls holding hands, nearly matching—white tank tops and jeans, narrow sliver of sun on their cheeks, their left arms. I want to know if they are lovers, sisters, or friends. Their bodies are frank and factual, their bodies are surely sexualized nearly everywhere they go, they are just at that age of turned-enough-toward-adulthood,turned-enough-toward-curves to no longer be entirely their own.

By Jacks McNamara and Pico del Hierro-Villa

Categories: Framework

Traversing the Memory Field

There are several threads running through the articles and essays in this issue of El Palacio, but as I edited the work, Diné poet Jake Skeets’s idea of the memory field kept returning to me. In his essay, Skeets writes that time and memory are not just cognitive, but physical. Just as the light we receive from the stars comes from the past, he argues, our memories are woven together with the land and within our bodies.

By Emily Withnall

Categories: Editor's Letter

Japanese Americans at the Santa Fe Internment Camp, New Mexico, 1944. National Archives. Courtesy of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), PAMU.233.2.

Monuments of Mutuality

The documentary begins with a close-up view of an apparent snowscape. The camera eye sweeps slowly across what must be packed snow, glittering in the sunlight of the Southwest. Text surfaces on the screen, revealing haunting lines that confirm what we must be seeing: In the field of white snow I starve for the love of my own people. Yuki Shiroki No Ni Nikushin No Ai Ni Ue.

By Almah LaVon, Claudia Katayanagi, and Nikki Nojima Louis

Categories: Featured, New Mexican history

Harmon Parkhurst, Burros at Acequia Madre, Santa Fe, New Mexico, ca. 1915. Courtesy of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), 011047.

Acequias de Santa Fe:

By Adele Oliveira Kyle Maier, Shrine alongside the Acequia de la Muralla, 2020. Courtesy of the Historic Santa Fe Foundation. Last spring, after a wet winter yielded a decent snowpack, if you walked the narrow dirt path alongside the Acequia Madre in Santa Fe, between the ditch and the curb, the water gurgled companionably downstream beside you, following its centuries-old course, banks choked with green grass and apricot blossoms.

By Adele Oliveira

Categories: Featured, New Mexican history

Dylan McLaughlin, Skowhegan, 2023. Courtesy of artist.

Dylan McLaughlin: The Alchemy of Art and Science

A drone glides across an empty riverbed, then transitions to a seemingly endless double line of tanker cars transporting oil on train tracks in the video art piece, In Transition Is the Most Honest. Another drone flies downward from atop a mountain overlooking Questa, near Taos Pueblo, in the video, In So We Sing the Land. In this piece, the drone follows erosion lines down a mountain from a point of view no human being could naturally see; aerial footage of the aftermath of mining from the top of the mountain downward.

By Jason Asenap

Categories: Essays and memoir

Couple at Prom, Robertson High School, Las Vegas, New Mexico, 1981. Courtesy of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), 164812.

So Far From Paris or Santa Fe

BY SAMANTHA DUNN · PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALEX TRAUBE Las Vegas, New Mexico. Fifty-four miles east of Santa Fe and worlds away from its golden adobes, art galleries, trustafarians. Across the ragged current of the Pecos River, beyond piñon and juniper to taller Ponderosa pines. Las Vegas translated means “The Meadows,” and the town spreads in a malachite ribbon of fertile soil.

By Alex Traube and Samantha Dunn

Categories: Essays and memoir, Featured, New Mexican history

Laura Gilpin (1891-1979), Agnes Sims, 1946. Gelatin silver print. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas, Bequest of the artist; P1979.130.955. © 1979 Amon Carter Museum of American Art.

Filling Gaps in the Archive:  

By Robin Babb At the entrance to the gallery, a quote on the wall provides context and raison d’être for the Out West exhibition. It’s from Santa Fe author Walter Cooper’s recent book Unbuttoned: Gay Life in the Santa Fe Art Scene: So much of our queer history has been swept under the rug, it’s almost as if we never existed.

By Robin Babb

Categories: Featured

Middle Fork of the Gila River in the Gila Wilderness. Digital photograph by Jay Hemphill.

Nde Benah

By Joe Saenz One hundred years ago, on June 3, 1924, the U.S. Forest Service designated the Gila Wilderness as the country’s first official wilderness area. The designation was spurred by the advocacy of writer and conservationist, Aldo Leopold. Leopold had been working for the fledging Forest Service for ten years when, in 1922, he proposed that the federal government set aside protected land for a wilderness area.

By Alastair Lee Bitsóí (Diné), Jay Hemphill, and Joe Saenz

Categories: Essays and memoir, Featured, New Mexican history