El Palacio Winter 2025 / Vol. 130 / No. 4

When I’m out walking I often pause to consider the land-scape, 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. The more I learn in editing El Palacio, the more vividly I can imagine these scenes from the past. There are plenty of gaps in my knowledge of New Mexico histories and cultures and I take pleasure in slowly filling them, issue by issue, and expanding the layers and nuance of my understanding so that…

El Palacio Garners Top Honors at International Regional Media Association Awards El Palacio has earned national and international acclaim for its comprehensive coverage of New Mexico’s art, culture, and history. At the 45th annual International Regional Media Association (IRMA) conference in Calgary, Canada, El Palacio received seven awards, including two Gold Awards and recognition as a finalist for Magazine of the Year. These honors follow a series of accolades earlier this year from New Mexico Press Women and the National Federation of Press Women (NFPW). “For more than a century, El Palacio has been at the forefront of scholarly and creative storytelling, capturing New Mexico’s rich cultural landscape,” said Daniel Zillmann, El Palacio publisher and director of communications and marketing for the Department of Cultural Affairs. Among the top awards:…

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. And, if you stand outside of Professor Eric Romero’s office, you can see a poster for the first meeting of the National Caucus of Chicano Social Scientists in 1973, the organization that would later become the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS). As a twenty-year-old Chicanita, I sought out that history when I was a student…

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. This phenomenological experience triggers an ominous feeling of timelessness, as if individual actors and actions have become gelled in the building’s material and historical heft. It is no coincidence then, that Once Within a Time exhibitions by contemporary artists Daisy Quezada Ureña and Charisse Pearlina Weston can be found at a deliberate sidestep from this rather Jungian passageway. In diverging from the main artery of the oldest continuously occupied public…

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. In the 1870s and ’80s, the riverbank would have been open, not yet choked with salt cedar planted by agents of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. And the stream would have run higher and more consistently, before a warming climate and upstream water demands started to drop and dry its…

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. Tea is tasteless. Coffee is too sharp for your tongue. The outdoors is calling but you cannot keep warm. And when you are looking for the cure, a cure, any cure, you will look back and be astonished by your own unwillingness to believe. Part II:…