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Posts Tagged ‘New Mexico’
August 3rd, 2009
by Ned
 On our second night in Gallup, we met Brian and Sahara. They were from the other Gallup, the one that we hadn’t seen on Highway 66—both of them were white, not Navajo, and had recently graduated from the local private Christian high school. Nonetheless, they had some interesting stories about the local folklore—in particular the supposed beyond-the-grave hauntings at the local church and surrounding area. They also told us about the Navajo legend of the skinwalker, a mythical beast that used to be a man and could assume the form of a wild animal. In order to become a skinwalker, Brian said, you had to kill two of your own relatives.
It was nice to meet both of them, but the next morning the exchange left a funny taste in my mouth. In a mostly poor Navajo town, it seemed strange to me that our only extended interaction had been with the two people whose socioeconomic background was most similar to our own. It made me wonder if we were sequestering and sheltering ourselves just like if we had not started traveling at all–in other words, if we were just being tourists.
I should have known that history had already proven that fear mostly unfounded. And the next day, we got to finally meet two gentlemen from the “other” Gallup that Brian and Sahara had so little to do with. While we were still hanging out in the Wal-Mart parking lot, two Navajo men approached the bus and asked for some food or money. They explained that they had just been released from prison (although they did not say for what) and had nothing.
Their names were Chet and Bill. We invited them on the bus and gave them some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Over the course of the meal, they started talking about a four-day event that was starting in Piñon, Arizona that Thursday, a Navajo ceremony called a Sun Dance. We knew practically nothing about it, but they said we were welcome, and we resolved to make a stop there on our way to Phoenix.
Tags: class, Gallup, New Mexico
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July 30th, 2009
by Ned
 Sadly, we had to drop Audrey (pictured, right) off at the airport before departing from Albuquerque. Once she was gone, it was just me, Ali, Peter and John—the core group, the people who had been on the bus from Day 1 and stayed the whole time.
After departing the airport, we headed for Gallup, New Mexico. Along the way, we passed through the Pueblo reservation which resident Leslie Marmon Silko described in her book Ceremony. Peter, who was reading the book at the time, hopped off the bus and asked some locals if the knew her. They knew the Silko family, they said, but Leslie had moved a while back.
That encounter was the first indication that we were in Native American territory. As we trundled along, a sign pointed out for us that we were now in Navajo County.
Gallup isn’t technically on a reservation, but we were clearly in a heavily Navajo town. As if to underscore how distinct from the rest of New Mexico the town is, they don’t observe daylight savings time—meaning that, while we were there, we were closing to pacific standard time than to the mountain time of the surrounding regions. That caused more than a little confusion.
There are, it seems, two Gallups, and we encountered people from both of them. The night after we stayed in their Wal-Mart parking lot, we headed out towards Highway 66 to hunt for some veggie oil. It was a discouraging trip—practically all of the restaurants we stopped at had oil that was too clogged and dirty to be usable. And the poverty of the neighboring residential areas was obvious. On multiple occasions, people came to the bus asking for food or money, and the people we saw on the street had the worn-down, dejected look of people living in a place where industry had collapsed.
We were eager to get out of there, but we not very much veggie oil and some other technical issues, we were forced to stay another night. Yet as frustrating as it was at the time, our extended stay actually turned out to be an unexpected stroke of luck.
Tags: Gallup, Navajo, New Mexico, veggie oil
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July 29th, 2009
by Ned
As I mentioned in the last post, Albuquerque has a really odd mixture of different subcultures all occupying the same space. It’s something that we haven’t quite encountered in any other area.
One of the examples that really sticks out to me is Robin’s neighborhood alone. Robin lived near a park, in a nice area of faux-adobe houses. Her roommates were, like her, both Americorps volunteers. The guy down the street, outside of whose house we parked the bus, was a shaven-headed, goateed, tattooed chef. Those of Robin’s friends that we met seemed to fit into the hip subculture that we’ve encountered in a lot of cities—it reminded me a lot of being in Austin, in particular.
None of this was unusual or surprising. But when we walked a block down from Robin’s place, we found ourselves in front of a motorcycle shop with the Nazi SS sprayed in various spots on the exterior. The place was closed during the day, but as we drove by at night we caught a glimpse of an aging biker with a scraggly white wizard’s beard reaching down to his chest inside dealing with customers. Robin confirmed our suspicions; this was a genuine neo-Nazi bike shop, operating out in the open.
The oddness of the city got further underscored when we went to go hunting for veggie oil. By 8 pm, it seemed, practically all of the restaurants in the area where we searched were closed. Despite what seemed like a fairly active youth subculture, practically everywhere we turned seemed to have shut down by before sundown. We had been to much smaller towns that were still significantly more active at night.
Little night life and neo-Nazis aside, though, Albuquerque was still a great town. It’s worth visiting for the food alone, not to mention the surrounding natural beauty. And I should add that practically everyone we met was perfectly nice and almost certainly not a white supremacist. Really, the fact that they found their little bigoted niche in Albuquerque indicates more about its strange eclecticism than it does any sort of trend.
Tags: Albuqurque, New Mexico, racism
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July 28th, 2009
by Ned
 We were lucky enough to have two friends in Albuquerque to visit—we spent our three days in Albuquerque at the home our high school friend Robin Dutcher (pictured) shared with two fellow Americorps volunteers. We’re lucky we caught Robin when we did—she told us she was only in Albuquerque for another month, and then was off to San Francisco to attend clown college.
Our other friend was my NYU Local colleague, Charlie Eisenhood. Charlie made the 2008 UWIRE 100 for his work blogging about the Take Back NYU! Occupation at NYU Local, and he’s currently blogging for the Albuquerque Journal. With the two of them and Robin’s boyfriend, we tried some local New Mexican food.
New Mexican food is, unsurprisingly, remarkably similar to Mexican food, but with some subtle differences. Charlie and Robin told us that New Mexican green chili was something of a local specialty. The meal also came with something called sopapillas—essentially fried dough that could be filled with either honey or the sort of ingredients one might put into a burrito.
But enough about the food, delicious as it was; the town of Albuquerque itself was a cool, but profoundly weird place. Part of that, I’m sure, has to do with its efforts to establish itself as a new Vancouver, one of the places that Hollywood goes to film thanks to the tax breaks provided by the state. According to some of the people we talked to, Val Kilmer has an estate in Albuquerque, from which he is contemplating a run for the governor’s seat.
But besides the growing Hollywood presence in Albuquerque, the pre-existing gestalt of different cultures and sub-cultures rubbing up against one another is just strange. And I say this with the utter certainty that we only saw a small glimpse of the whole story.
Tags: Albuqurque, New Mexico, NYU Local
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July 28th, 2009
by Ned
 Of all of the strange town names that we’ve encountered on the tour, two in particular stand out: Truth or Consequences, and Elephant Butte. It just so happens that those two places were both in New Mexico, bordering each other.
We saw Truth or Consequences first. We didn’t see much of the town, but we did find an interesting story behind the name; apparently the town was originally called Hot Springs, New Mexico, but in 1950 they changed it to the name of a radio show that was popular at the time. From the town’s official site:
Then in 1950, NBC television and radio producer Ralph Edwards, on the 10th anniversary of the Truth or Consequences radio program, called his staff together and said, “I wish that some town in the United States liked and respected our show so much that it would like to change its name to ‘Truth or Consequences.’” Upon hearing the proposition, the New Mexico State Tourist Bureau relayed the news to the manager of the Hot Springs Chamber of Commerce and the news spread like wildfire.
We weren’t there long, but we did have one interesting encounter—when we pulled into a gas station to fill up on reserve diesel, we rolled up alongside a pickup truck decorated on the back with Wiccan bumper stickers and, incongruously, a Star of David. A decal on the driver’s side door advertised tarot readings, and the owner of the truck—a portly, amiable man in a poncho—told us that he was a Wiccan reverend. He gave us his business card, blessed our bus, and then we were on our way.
After that, we were off to Elephant Butte, to swim in the lake there. The place was quiet, almost preternaturally serene, but peace and quiet isn’t what earned the surrounding area a place in the history books–Elephant Butte Lake is a little over 50 miles from the Trinity test site, where the first nuclear bomb was ever detonated.
Recharged and refreshed after a dip in the (thankfully non-radioactive) lake, we headed off to Albuquerque.
Tags: Elephant Butte, New Mexico, Truth or Consequences
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