Winter 2024

2024 / Vol. 129 / No. 4

The power of imagination is what propels new realities, helps us to survive difficult times, and allows for the recreation of relationships and systems. The essays and articles in this issue touch on these ideas in one way or another.

Nikki Nojima Louis writes a deeply moving, award-winning essay about her experience in WWII-era Japanese American Internment Camps as a young child and of losing her father to the Internment Camp in Santa Fe.
Coauthors Elizabeth Perrill, Lillia McEnaney, and Muziwandile Gigaba, write about the Zulu telephone wire weaving art that was a part of the iNgqikithi yokuPhica/Weaving Meanings: Telephone Wire Art from South Africa exhibition at the Museum of International Folk Art that was born from survival during Apartheid.
A profile of New Mexico rancher Tiffany Sanchez, written by Leah Romero, reveals the way adaptive technology can help people living with disabilities return to their work in agriculture. Sanchez was one of many people featured in the AgrAbility exhibition about adaptive technology in agriculture at New Mexico Farm & Ranch Heritage Museum.
Joelle Mendoz’s double profile of Raven Chacon and Candice Hopkins and their score Dispatch invites readers to consider the power of deep listening.
Ungelbah Dávila’s profile of one of the 2024 Governor’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts recipients, Jock Soto, recounts his story of growing up in Gallup and his journey to becoming a New York Ballet Company dancer.
Timotéo Ikoshy Montoya II’s article weaves a profile of Lipan Apache science fiction writer Darcie Little Badger with his experience at the Sci Fi & Sci Fact exhibition at New Mexico Museum of Space History to reflect on Indigenous Futurisms.

Abstract artwork made of various circles

Migration Patterns

In 2001, when I first arrived at the Roswell Artist-in-Residence program, a man followed me around the Farmer’s Country Market. Had he never seen an Asian in person? Throughout the year, I blocked out the constant stares. In those days, we still had thick telephone books with thin newsprint pages. I decided to write each name listed in Roswell’s white pages on lined notebook paper.

By Edie Tsong (Taiwanese American)

Categories: Framework

multi-colored round telephone wire weaving

Weaving New Meanings

Without traffic, it only takes thirty minutes to reach KwaMashu and Siyanda. Past Durban’s inner suburbs, stadiums, mansions, and malls, I reach the few highway entrances that connect these historically Black neighborhoods—home to over 175,000 people, over ninety percent of whom are isiZulu-speaking—to the rest of this 3.25-million-person harbor city. As I enter KwaMashu, the road narrows and the terrain becomes less grid-like.

By Elizabeth Perrill, Lillia McEnaney, and Muziwandile Gigaba

Categories: Featured, Visual art

landscape photograph of large rock formation

Collaborative Listening in a Time of Emergency:

Seated in a circle, the crowd patiently waited for the sold-out performance to begin. A static image of the Navajo Nation’s volcanic Church Rock was projected onto a white wall in a dark room. There was no podium. No mic stand. No stage. Raven Chacon and Candice Hopkins sat side-by-side in the circle. The performance began as the image moved and seemingly pulsated.

By Joelle E. Mendoza (JEM)

Categories: New Mexican cultures

Imagination as Necessity

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the power of imagination. It’s incredible to me that humans can create something tangible from a dream. Although many of us have access to infrastructure like roads and indoor plumbing—to name two basic ones—these things we take for granted were brought into being by imagination. Our imaginations have created nearly everything around us, from paintings and forms of dance to technologies and new forms of collaboration.

By Emily Withnall

Categories: Editor's Letter

Male ballet dancer mid jump with left arm overhead and right arm extended perpendicularly

Dancing Back to the Desert

I follow Jock Soto across the TV screen, measuring his movements in lengths. The length of an arm, reaching out, every finger engaged with emotion. The length of his neck as his head looks skyward, his black hair blending into the stage, his brown throat exposed, veins pulsing. The length of his legs fluttering through the air in a moment of ethereal flight.

By Steven Caras and Ungelbah Dávila

Categories: Dance, Featured, New Mexican cultures

illustration of an individuals placed within cloudlike drawings of wolves

We are in the Mountains and Skies

The New Mexico Museum of Space History is perched where the steep foothills of the Sacramento Mountains are flattened by gravity and erosion. The building is flared at the base as if a rocket were hidden at its foot, ready to blast into the sky. The museum rises four stories higher than most buildings in Alamogordo. From the windows of the third story, where the Sci Fi & Sci Fact: Two Worlds Collide exhibition is tucked in the corner, you can see a large swath of the Tularosa Basin—the infamous White Sands and the San Andres Mountains filling the horizon.

By Rovina Cai and Timotéo Ikoshy Montoya II

Categories: Essays and memoir, Featured, Space history and technology

Woman navigating the rough terrain of her farm in an adapted wheelchair

From Disability to AgrAbility

November 20, 2021, in Valencia County was just another crisp, clear autumn day on the farm for Tiffany Sánchez. As usual, she prepared herself for a full day of working with and training horses at Adelino Legacy Farms, her family’s op-eration. The Sánchez family grows hay on the farm, but Tiffany’s passion is raising and training barrel horses for herself and clients.

By Anna Lisa Padilla and Leah Romero

Categories: Farming and ranching, Featured, Visual art

sepia toned vintage portrait of a japanese man

Father, I Hardly Knew Ye

Pearl Harbor, Honolulu, was attacked at 7:55 a.m. Hawaii time. It was 10:55 a.m. in Seattle on Sunday, December 7, 1941, which also happened to be my fourth birthday. My mother often talked about that day, telling of the two tall white men who entered our home that evening: the FBI. The younger man wiped his feet on the welcome mat when Mommy answered the door.

By Nikki Nojima Louis

Categories: Essays and memoir, Featured, New Mexican history