Winter 2025

2025 / Vol. 130 / No. 4

In this issue, buried New Mexico histories are brought to the surface.

Monika Dziamka writes about Taylor-Mesilla, the newest official New Mexico Historic Site that helps to tell the layered stories of the southern-most part of the state.
Laura Paskus writes about the Pueblo of Acoma’s approach to ensuring community knowledge guides archaeological excavations.
Myrriah Gómez writes about the women central to the Chicano Movement in Las Vegas, New Mexico, in the 1970s as demonstrated through the photos taken by artist and activist Adelita M. Medina (view a video of a plática hosted by El Palacio in February 2026 here).
Rica Maestas writes about two artists, Daisy Quezada Ureña and Charisse Pearlina Weston, who disrupt the histories and sites of power within the Palace of the Governors. f detachment.
Leah Romero profiles one of the 2025 Governor’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts recipients, Nacha Mendez.
Santana Shorty’s poem invites readers to reconsider where they choose to focus their attention.

Seven young women and one adult pose on stage, some holding certificates, in front of a screen displaying Nacha Mendez Music Scholarship for New Mexican Girls of Color.

Traveling the Latin World through Nacha Mendez’s Music

Notes from a guitar and Spanish lyrics float out of the Hotel Santa Fe as the lobby doors open on a Friday, inviting residents and visitors to step inside and travel to Latin America. Accomplished musician Nacha Mendez’s (Chihene Nde Nation) right hand strums her Córdoba wooden guitar, laying down chords and syncopated rhythms. Her rich, full voice enters effortlessly, bringing in Spanish melodies to mix and float across the room.

By Leah Romero

Categories: Music, Southwestern history

An art gallery with walls and ceiling covered in crumpled paper, wooden floors, benches, and a projected image of a plant on one wall.

Shards of Paper, Shreds of Glass

The descent into the depths of the Museum of International Folk Art for the Once Within a Time exhibition involves immersion in paper. Paper forms forest creatures, funeral scenes, and walls, transforming the space into a newsprint cave. At this lair’s heart, a film features paper writhing through a sequence of transformations. In the final moments of Compound Eyes of Tropical, shards of paper flash into scraps of mirror as they crash through the air.

By Wesley Cannon

Categories: Framework

Bright sunlight shines through tree branches against a clear blue sky, with visible lens flare and sun rays spreading outward.

Sun Series

Sunrise, accept this offering. Sunrise. –From Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko Part I: Sunsetting The end is full of waiting. Of willful meandering. The kind that compels you to put candles of too many varieties into your cart, despite your fear of fire. There is moxie in doing something you don’t want to. In finding feral. In seeking an unachievable solace. At the windowsill, sitting at the battered and water-stained pane, you will notice your breath is too shallow to properly fog your view.

By Santana Shorty

Categories: Uncategorized

Contemporary art gallery with wooden floors, sculptural glass pieces on white plinths, a large abstract painting on the wall, and exposed wooden ceiling beams.

Pathways Through Opacity and Apocalypse

To arrive at SITE SANTA FE’s 12th International: Once Within a Time installations at the Palace of the Governors, a visitor must first proceed through a series of doorways. Following an uncanny eyeline best suited for a dream sequence in a Hitchcock thriller, the eerie recursion within this ancient structure creates the sensation of re-entering the same room again and again.

By Brad Trone and Rica Maestas

Categories: Uncategorized

The Art of Time Travel

When I’m out walking I often pause to consider the landscape, trying to imagine what a specific place may have looked like one hundred years ago, or five hundred years ago. I take in the shapes of the hills and mountains and conjure other people, other forms of settlement, and other relationships to the land. And when the wind feels particularly harsh, it comforts me to know that others across time have also endured it.

By Emily Withnall

Categories: Editor's Letter

Two people walk beside a donkey on a dirt road near a wooden fence and rocky landscape under a cloudy sky.

Connecting Time, Place, and People

On a warm August morning about 150 years ago, the people who lived on the sandstone promontory above Di’ Chuuna would have looked east at the slumbering lines of Kaweshtima. Even with the summer harvest underway, they might have wondered when snow would start draping the mountain. Today, the people of Acoma still time spring plantings to the shifting of that white shawl, so that when snowmelt arrives in Di’ Chuuna and the ancient irrigation canals, they are ready.

By Laura Paskus

Categories: Uncategorized

A rustic lantern with amber panels hangs from a wooden beam beside a blue-and-white ornament; framed artwork is visible in the background.

A Gathering Point

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. Get closer to the plaza, and the adobe buildings begin to cluster tightly together. The sound of church bells drifts above narrow streets and tiled portillos.

By Monika Dziamka

Photographs by Tira Howard

Categories: Featured

Five people stand outside holding protest signs with messages about unfair wages and cost of living increases.

Art and Activism at Highlands University

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. You can see it best during golden hour, when the sun starts to set across the plains of Nuestra Señora de los Dolores de Las Vegas Grandes.

By Myrriah Gómez

Categories: Featured