INVIGORATING METAMORPHOSIS

By Jack Loeffler
“The flow of Nature has carried me through many rapids as I row my way through my decades. Running rivers in my own raft has inspired the enduring metaphor of my lifetime.”

WHY IS EL PASO IN TEXAS?

By Ellen Dornan
“Today, Southern New Mexicans frequently cross the border to El Paso, TX to enjoy shopping and entertainment, perhaps appreciating the culture without understanding the long history of why El Paso feels so much more familiar than other Texas communities. Arguably, El Paso is the oldest New Mexican settlement. So how did it end up in Texas?”

HISPASIAN

By Melissa Auh Krukar
“The questions are always the same: ‘Where are you from?’ or worse, ‘Where are you really from?’ or worse yet, ‘What are you?'”

GROWING UP “COYOTA” IN NEW MEXICO

By Nicolasa Chávez
“Did being a coyote make me any less New Mexican? What exactly did it mean to be a ‘Coyota’ in New Mexico?”

MAP OF THE INDIAN TERRITORY, NORTHERN TEXAS AND NEW MEXICO, SHOWING THE GREAT WESTERN PRAIRIES

By Ellen Dornan
“Josiah Gregg’s 1844 map is ostensibly included in Commerce of the Prairies to help the gentle reader follow the ‘Wild West’ adventure to an exotic, foreign destination, but that neutrality is quickly belied by a closer look.”

HOW HAS THE PANDEMIC AFFECTED MUSEUMS? EXAMPLES FROM THE BLACKWATER DRAW MUSEUM AT EASTERN NEW MEXICO UNIVERSITY

By Samantha Bokamp
“The Blackwater Draw Museum (BWDM) was among the many museums in the country whose daily operations were disrupted during the pandemic.”

ART CANNOT BE CAGED: DETAINED MIGRANT YOUTH CREATE AN EXHIBIT

By Kayla Myers
“’Uncaged Art Tornillo Children’s Detention Center’ is fundamentally about Central American children who came to our nation seeking security and safety and found themselves incarcerated within the walls of a sterile detention center built in the Chihuahuan Desert.”

THE FOOL’S JOURNEY

By Bethany Tabor
“It’s impossible to travel through Albuquerque without encountering at least one beautiful, larger-than-life mural on the side of a building or wall.”

MANITO

By Leeanna Teresa Martinez y Torres
“Manito: Examining and Deconstructing New Mexico’s Tri-Cultural Myth; ‘Patterns of Migration’

Mama’s easy, un-flinching and quick-to-respond reply to this unfamiliar term, word, name, was curious to me. Manito.”

THE SANTA FE TRAIL

By Thomas Chávez
“For much of its history New Mexico was an island in the wilderness, a unique European settlement among Native cultures in the middle of the continent distant from the so-called frontier lines of the United States and Mexico.”