Tag Archives: Albuquerque

Great Albuquerque Adventure Read

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Clearing CustomsClearing Customs, by Martha Egan (July 2009), is a new and rollicking good read!  And a lot of it takes place in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

It is worthy noting that this story takes place in 1988-99, long before the Patriot Act’s privacy invasions became commonplace.  The book’s protagonist and heroine is Beverly Parmentier, owner of a small Latin American folk aft and antiques importing store in Old Town.

How Beverly finds herself and her store under surveillance by U. S. Customs Service is a humorous happenstance of President Reagan’s Central American policies and a relentless and opportunistic Customs Service Albuquerque Station Chief. The story shifts into high gear from there and never lets up until the last pages.

Beverly (Martha) relates in detail her surveillance as the story careens from Albuquerque across the country.  They include Customs Service employment of Vietnam Vets and taxpayer funded junkets to “surveil” Beverly from Albuquerque’s Old Town, North Valley, Santa Fe, Washington, D. C., a Colorado river raft trip, and a Caribbean island “getaway.”  You’ll howl both in laughter and in anger, over the ineptness and relentlessness of the federales abuses of power.  And then you will smile wickedly at the justice of the finale.

Lots of familiar territory and names and places throughout should make Clearing Customs a particularly enjoyable read to everyone familiar with Albuquerque, Santa Fe, New Mexico … or U. S. Customs.

New Mexico historical sports teams

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Danny Schrader researches former New Mexico sports teams, such as the Albuquerque Six Guns, a professional hockey team that played one season in the ’70s. He is also a supporter of  the Animal Humane Association. I learned of his website  and operation in Sunday’s Albuquerque Journal Careers section.

He researches team histories and produces logo T-shirts for such old teams as:

  • Madrid Miners – AA Minor League: 1020s, ’30s and 40’s
  • Artesia Drillers – Longhorn League: 1951-1953
  • Carlsbad Potashers – Longhorn League, Southwestern League and Sophomore League: 1953-1956
  • New Mexico Storm – American Indoor Soccer League: 2004-2005

Regrettably, the only two sports teams I mentioned in the Albuquerque Timeline are Albuquerque’s first pro baseball team ‘The Albuquerque Dons’ in 1932, and the 1984 El Dorado High School Girls Basketball team that won 74 consecutive victories – the longest winning streak in the nation. It’s neat to learn that Danny is filling the blanks.

I think you will enjoy visiting Danny’s website at www.pdvintage.com and taking a look at his great logo T-shirts. Myself, I’m looking forward to seeing what other fascinating and interesting former New Mexico sports teams he finds.

New Mexico History – ‘El Gringo’ by W. W. H. Davis

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I have just finished reading El Gringo, by W. W. H. Davis.  Davis’ 1853 description of New Mexico is one the earliest full-length accounts to appear in English. It provides a beautiful picture of a newly conquered land, its customs, languages, landscapes and histories.  He really captures the protected and unique nature of New Mexico in this paragraph:

“There is no country protected by our flag and subject to our laws so little known to the people of the United States as the territory of New Mexico. Its very position precludes an intimate intercourse with other sections of the Union, and serves to lock up a knowledge of the country within its own limits. The natural features differ widely from the rest of the Union; and the inhabitants, with the manners and customs of their Moorish and Castilian ancestors are both new and strange to our people. For these reasons, reliable information on this hitherto almost unknown region can not fail to be interesting to the public.”

Davis was a veteran of the Mexican War of 1846-48, and returned to New Mexico in 1853 to become United States Attorney for the territory. He traveled with only a few changes of clothes, a two-book law library and a ravenous curiosity, and he thoroughly journaled his entire travels to and throughout New Mexico.

His thousand-mile journey from Independence, Missouri to Santa Fe would take 25 days by mule train, traveling   in torrential rains and drifting blizzards. Many nights were spend sleeping on the ground under the wagons for shelter, and many meals were skipped due to inclement weather.

El Gringo was written by W. W. H. Davis (1820 – 1910) and first published in 1857. You can order from the Books page; enjoyi!

Delightful morning presenting Albuquerque and New Mexico history

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NELDOC 2009 The talking part was fun, but I really enjoyed the question and answer portion. They asked for more about the uniqueness of the Indian Pueblos, their sovereignty and cultures, our flying saucer incidents (Roswell and Albuquerque), Oñate and the Duke of Alburquerque, “the missing R,” Spanish and Mexican impacts on New Mexico, New Mexico authors, and New Mexico futures.

This is a photo of me with Rick Chase, the District Director of Purdue’s Extension Service and one of the organizers of the conference. Rick was the gent that came across the 5 Perspectives on Albuquerque YouTube video and asked for an introductory presentation on Albuquerque’s and New Mexico’s history.

Great fun. Good people.

National Extension Leadership Development Conference talk

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Talk about social networking — I got a FaceBook note last week asking if I could present the Timeline at the annual National Extension Leadership Development Conference here in Albuquerque! This came from the conference organizer from Purdue University who happened to come across the 5 Perspectives on Albuquerque video on YouTube.

I can’t quite say how tickled I am to have the opportunity to tell them some Albuquerque and New Mexico stories from the timeline. This is what I put the two years in for – so there would be a one-stop-shop for 600 years of our histories and cultures for people who would like such a summary. I’ll be taking one of the 2 ft x 8 ft copies to speak from, mounted on a plastic backing board so it can stand on two easels, and leaving it there the whole day so the 44 attendees from 13 North Central states can read it more closely on their breaks. Interestingly, their mission statement is … to build leadership in Cooperative Extension at all levels and provide current and future Extension leaders with the vision, courage, and tools to lead in a changing world.

I hope to get some pix of the event that I can post later this week.

Your very own 2 ft x 8 ft copy of the Albuquerque Timeline

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A number of people ask me, “Where and how can I buy a copy of the Timeline?” Here is the info if you are one of those folks and have a couple of hundred bucks lying around – and – a large wall space to fill.

There are a couple of things you will want to know if you would like to purchase your very own  copy of the Albuquerque Historical Timeline:

  • the 2 ft x 8 ft size is the smallest that is easily eye-readable
  • each copy is a full-color exact replica of the 4 ft x 16 ft Convention Center original
  • each copy has a very resilient laminate protecting it
  • a single copy reproduction  goes for $200, and that includes any tax and shipping

New Mexico Big Prints are the good folks that produced the 4 ft x 16 ft copies of the Timeline at the Convention Center and at the Airport. They also produced the smaller, 2 ft x 8 ft copies for high school and middle school use throughout Albuquerque and the Archdiocese, and it’s this size that is available for  purchase. I suppose you could order a 4 ft x 16 ft size, but expect to come up with about $3,750 or so per copy.

The URL to contact the good folks at New Mexico Big Prints is http://www.nmbigprints.com/index3.html.

New video: Mexican Immigration

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I just put the finishing touches on this video overview of Mexican Immigration through New Mexico and the Southwest and uploaded it to YouTube at  http://twurl.nl/gmqs07 . This was about a month in the making, what with the researching, scripting, recording, editing and all, but it holds together pretty well. It’s a nine-minute summary or overview “from 30,000 feet,” so it covers quite a lot of ground in a short time.

It follows the 600-year period from 1400 to 2009 covered by the Albuquerque, New Mexico Historical Timeline, and correlates historical events in Mexico, New Mexico and the Southwest. It begins with the thousand years of native populations trading from New Mexico into Mexico and over to the coastal areas that would become California. It covers the northward pull of silver mining from Mexico City to Zacatecas and Chihuaha in the 1500s, and Oñate’s extension of El Camino Real an additional 700 miles northward, establishing the first permanent settlement in Nuevo Mexìco in 1598. Other events affecting Mexican immigration in this period include:
•    The 1803 Louisiana Purchase
•    1821 Independence from Spain and the Mexican Republic period
•    Creation of the Lone Star Republic of Texas in 1835
•    The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo’s massive land transfer
•    Railroads arriving in the 1880s
•    The Mexican Revolutionary period from 1910 to 1930
•    The Great Depression and the Mexican Repatriation Program
•    The Bracero “guest worker” program from 1942 to 1964
•    Operation Wetback in 1954
•    The Maquiladora Program from 1964 to now
•    1994 NAFTA
•    Corporate globalization
•    The 2005 California Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program
•    The effects of the current economic downturn

In these events, you can see a “we want you – we don’t want you” pendulum swinging for over 150 years, and some acknowledged racial profiling of U.S. citizens of Mexican descent in the Mexican Repatriation Program of the ‘30s and Operation Wetback in 1954.

The intent of the video is to bring some hopefully neutral historical information and perspective to the current discussion of immigration. If you have comments or observations, I would appreciate your sharing them with me on this blog post so  interested individuals may see and appreciate them.

If you’d like to know more about the Timeline itself, click on 5 Perspectives On Albuquerque or Creating The Timeline.