Category: Albuquerque & New Mexico

Rio Rancho as the New Dallas

This from New West Network:

Speaking of in-migration, Rio Rancho, New Mexico is about to bump Santa Fe down a notch in the largest cities category. The sprawling suburb on the north[w]est edge of Albuquerque is waiting for the official count before proclaiming itself the third largest city in the state, behind Albuquerque and Las Cruces. That would put Santa Fe down to number four. Earlier this year the city of Albuquerque took offense when an Albuquerque Journal reporter mentioned that Albuquerque may become the Fort Worth to Rio Rancho’s Dallas.

The Gadsden Purchase

… was signed by James Gadsden, U.S. Minister to Mexico, and General Antonio López de Santa Anna, President of Mexico, in Mexico City on this date in 1853. The treaty settled the dispute over the exact location of the Mexican border west of Texas and gave the U.S. approximately 29,000 square miles of land in what is now southern New Mexico and Arizona for the price of $10 million.

The Mexican Republic agrees to designate the following as her true limits with the United States for the future: retaining the same dividing line between the two Californias as already defined and established, according to the 5th article of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the limits between the two republics shall be as follows: Beginning in the Gulf of Mexico, three leagues from land, opposite the mouth of the Rio Grande, as provided in the 5th article of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; thence, as defined in the said article, up the middle of that river to the point where the parallel of 31 47′ north latitude crosses the same; thence due west one hundred miles; thence south to the parallel of 31º 20′ north latitude; thence along the said parallel of 31º 20′ to the 111th meridian of longitude west of Greenwich; thence in a straight line to a point on the Colorado River twenty English miles below the junction of the Gila and Colorado rivers; thence up the middle of the said river Colorado until it intersects the present line between the United States and Mexico.

Read the entire Gadsden Purchase Treaty.

Christmas 2005

NewMexiKen is in the San Francisco area for Christmas. Christmas Eve afternoon we went to Union Square in The City to see the lights, the beautiful white pine Christmas tree, the puppies and kittens in Macy’s window, and all the people. It was wonderful, people of every type celebrating — whether they were celebrating Christmas or some other holiday seemed of no consequence. That they were together sharing the sites seemed all that was important.

Later, a thousand miles away in Taos, New Mexico, John Farr describes an entirely different, but equally pleasing holiday scene:

I just stepped outside, around midnight. It was about 20 degrees and breezy, no snow. The Milky Way stretched from horizon to horizon (!). A hand-rung church bell was tolling in the distance. There were coyotes howling loudly very close by.

We had posole and tortillas for dinner. Later today we’ll go out to the Pueblo for the deer dance. Not half bad at all…

Wherever you are, whomever you’re with, Merry Christmas to you.

Windows Live Local

Microsoft has updated Virtual Earth and now calls it Windows Live Local. It’s just one more online mapping site until you look at the Bird’s Eye Images. Wow! I can count the skylights here at Casa NewMexiKen.

Here’s an example — Albuquerque’s Sandia Casino (with hotel that has just now opened shown still under construction). You can zoom in.

The software is beta and seems more difficult to navigate than some, but the Bird’s Eye Images (taken from aircraft, not satellite) are amazing.

The places with these images is limited. The site lists these metropolitan areas so far:

New York City, NY
San Francisco, CA
Boston, MA
Los Angeles, CA
Washington, DC
Seattle, WA
Philadelphia, PA
Las Vegas, NV
Atlanta, GA
Albuquerque, NM
Indianapolis, IN
Lexington, KY

Update: When viewing the aerial photos, be sure to click on the direction arrows on the compass to see the same object from every direction. Awesome!

Bandidos

From a report in The Albuquerque Tribune:

The proudest man in Albuquerque this weekend might be a 57-year-old Peruvian with an eye for talent and a knack for teaching.

Three of the four teams still kicking in the College Cup [the NCAA Division I men’s championship] have Albuquerque natives who played club soccer for the Classic Bandidos, coached by Ricardo Beraun. …

Three of the four were part of Beraun’s core of original Bandidos, formed when the players were 9 years old. Albright joined the team when he was 13. …

Beraun, who briefly played in Peru, focused much of his coaching on technical skill. Each practice began with about 30 minutes of juggling exercises, and Beraun awarded players with special soccer pins if they reached certain milestones.

Those incentives were so strong that the ex-Bandidos still remember their best juggling performances. Ashwill once juggled a ball 2,000 times without it hitting the ground. Moss reached 1,000. Albright said his personal high is about 500.

C’deBaca is precise; his record is 1,029. …

Two of the four play for the New Mexico Lobos, the third for Clemson and the fourth for Maryland. SMU is the other team in the soccer final four.

Beraun, the coach, is a thermal scientist at Sandia National Laboratories.

Update: The New York Times also reports on UNM and Classic Bandidos.

America’s Most Literate Cities

The Top Ten

1. Seattle, WA
2. Minneapolis, MN
3. Washington, DC
4. Atlanta, GA
5. San Francisco, CA
6. Denver, CO
7. Boston, MA
8. Pittsburgh, PA
9. Cincinnati, OH
10. St. Paul, MN

“A total score was tallied for each city across six different literacy categories: Booksellers; Educational attainment; Internet Resources; Library Resources; Newspaper Circulation; and Periodical publications. All categories were compared against the city’s total population.” Central Connecticut State University

Sixty-nine cities with more than 250,000 people were surveyed. Complete rankings.

36. Albuquerque

One for the road

This from a report in The New York Times on New Mexico’s increasingly ineffective fight against drunk driving.

After pleading guilty to drunken driving, Joseph Tapia followed the judge’s orders and showed up one night in November at a forum at Santa Fe Community College to hear from accident victims.

The trouble was, Mr. Tapia appeared to be drunk.

More on the problem:

Recently, an Indian tribal police chief was charged with drunken driving after a wreck; the chief business officer for the Albuquerque school system was accused of driving drunk and pleaded no contest; a judge was forced to resign after intervening to release a friend arrested for drunken driving; a chief state district judge resigned after pleading guilty to aggravated D.W.I. and possession of cocaine; another judge quit after being accused of altering court records to make her appear to have been tougher on offenders, and two Albuquerque police officers in the D.W.I. unit were found to have drunken-driving convictions.

NewMexiKen wonders if the solution might be one that was once made to me, I assume in jest. If you drive drunk and kill someone, they hang you along the road at the spot and leave your body hanging there.

Go Lobos

The University of New Mexico’s nationally top-ranked men’s NCAA Division I soccer team advanced to the Final Four tonight. The Lobos defeated California 1-0 in OT to move on to the national championship finals in Cary, North Carolina, next weekend. New Mexico’s two previous wins in the tournament have also been in overtime, 1-0 over Cal State-Northridge and 2-2 (5-4) against Wisconsin-Milwaukee. New Mexico will face Clemson in the semi-final next Friday. Clemson has not been scored upon in four championship round games.

‘I never wanted to kill anybody, but if a man had it in his mind to kill me, I made it my business to get him first.’

The History Channel tells the fascinating story of Elfego Baca for This Day in Old West History — December 1, 1884:

Elfego Baca, legendary defender of southwestern Hispanos, manages to hold off a gang of 80 cowboys who are determined to kill him.

The trouble began the previous day, when Baca arrested Charles McCarthy, a cowboy who fired five shots at him in a Frisco (now Reserve), New Mexico, saloon. For months, a vicious band of Texan cowboys had terrorized the Hispanos of Frisco, brutally castrating one young Mexican man and using another for target practice. Outraged by these abuses, Baca gained a commission as deputy sheriff to try to end the terror. His arrest of McCarthy served notice to other Anglo cowboys that further abuses of the Hispanos would not be tolerated.

The Texans, however, were not easily intimidated. The morning after McCarthy’s arrest, a group of about 80 cowboys rode into town to free McCarthy and make an example of Baca for all Mexicans. Baca gathered the women and children of the town in a church for their safety and prepared to make a stand. When he saw how outnumbered he was, Baca retreated to an adobe house, where he killed one attacker and wounded several others. The irate cowboys peppered Baca’s tiny hideout with bullets, firing about 400 rounds into the flimsy structure. As night fell, they assumed they had killed the defiant deputy sheriff, but the next morning they awoke to the smell of beef stew and tortillas–Baca was fixing his breakfast.

A short while later, two lawmen and several of Baca’s friends came to his aid, and the cowboys retreated. Baca turned himself over to the officers, and he was charged with the murder of one of the cowboys. In his trial in Albuquerque, the jury found Baca not guilty because he had acted in self-defense, and he was released to a hero’s welcome among the Hispanos of New Mexico. Baca was adored because he had taken a stand against the abusive and racist Anglo newcomers. Hugely popular, Baca later enjoyed a successful career as a lawyer, private detective, and politician in Albuquerque.

Baca was 19 at the time of the shootout and lived until 1945. In 1958, Walt Disney Studios produced The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca. Robert Loggia played the title role, with a cast that included Annette Funicello (as Chiquita), James Coburn and Alan Hale, Jr. (Gilligan’s skipper).

A golf tournament of sorts, the annual Elfego Baca Golf Shoot in Socorro, New Mexico, celebrates the deputy — “competitors are loaded into four-wheel drive vehicles to ascend Socorro Peak, 7,243 feet above sea level. Here they will battle in a one-hole shoot. The hole, a fifty foot patch of dirt, is located on the New Mexico Tech campus, about 4 hours long, 2550 feet down, and almost three miles away.”

You can read more about Elfego Baca here.

[Reposted from December 1, 2003.]

Rattlesnake Lawyer

NewMexiKen became intrigued at a book-signing Friday evening in Albuquerque’s newest Borders (on the westside at Coors Bypass and Ellison). The author, Jonathan Miller, looking a little forlorn in the mostly empty bookstore, told me proudly that The Albuquerque Journal had written that he “may just be the next John Grisham.” So I bought one of the two novels displayed on the little table — Rattlesnake Lawyer — and Miller signed it for me.

The story centers around Dan Shepard, a recent and somewhat unambitious lawyer who ends up in New Mexico as the junior public defender in an fictional eastern county. As the “baby lawyer,” he is assigned the case of a minor, Jesus Villalobos — Hay-Zeus, not Jee-zus, Shepard learns. The kid, a known troublemaker is accused of battery. The charge turns into murder when the victim dies and Miller tells the story all the way through the boy’s trial as an adult.

NewMexiKen read the book in one day, finding the characterizations and the story intriguing. A good hook, in other words. I cannot be certain that Miller gets all the details right — I doubt you can find any rattlesnakes to kill in early January, for example — but most of what he describes — the people, the community, the one-mall town, the everyone-knows-everyone sense of it, the police and prosecutors — all ring true. A reader will not confuse the setting or the characters with any place other than New Mexico, that much is for sure.

Miller has a second novel — Crater County — also published last year. Rattlesnake Lawyer was good enough I’ll look for this second one, too, even if Miller isn’t around to sign it.

Miller, who’s business card says “Attorney/Author,” attended the Albuquerque Academy. Locals will appreciate the name of one incidental character — Juan Tabo.

Update: Miller emails to say he’d been at Borders eight hours and “sold 62 books, one of the most for a one day signing by an independent author in NM.”

Now that’s what I call archival quality preservation

This archivist is impressed with the Church of Scientolgy installation in northern New Mexico reported on by local station KRQE, with a follow-up by Richard Leiby in Sunday’s Washington Post:

Secret Flying Saucer Base Found in New Mexico?

Maybe. From the state that gave us Roswell, the epicenter of UFO lore since 1947, comes a report from an Albuquerque TV station about its discovery of strange landscape markings in the remote desert. They’re etched in New Mexico’s barren northern reaches, resemble crop circles and are recognizable only from a high altitude.

Also, they are directly connected to the Church of Scientology. …

The church tried to persuade station KRQE not to air its report last week about the aerial signposts marking a Scientology compound that includes a huge vault “built into a mountainside,” the station said on its Web site. The tunnel was constructed to protect the works of L. Ron Hubbard, the late science-fiction writer who founded the church in the 1950s.

The archiving project, which the church has acknowledged, includes engraving Hubbard’s writings on stainless steel tablets and encasing them in titanium capsules.

The Post has a KRQE aerial photo.

Update: Even better photo from TerraServer.

We’ll be coming back to this post often between now and election day

“If they weren’t blowing them up in Amman, they would be blowing them up in America. We are much better off hunting them down there, and I have no problem at all articulating that whether it’s an election year or not. … I think we’ve made quite a bit of progress in the past eight months.”

Representative Heather Wilson, R-NM (official Congressperson of NewMexiKen)

“One of the great failures of Vietnam was when the politicians started running the war. We can leave or we can stay and work through very difficult circumstances. Just because no one anticipated the things we would be facing is no reason to get out.”

Representative Steve Pearce, R-NM

“Anybody that doesn’t have doubts right now is not paying attention.”

United States Senator Pete Domenici, R-NM

Quotations via AP in The Santa Fe New Mexican

A slippery bunch of varmints

Steve Terrell has a review of Jay Miller’s Billy the Kid Rides Again. Steve begins:

Untold numbers of books have been written about New Mexico’s most famous outlaw, Billy the Kid. However, a new one, Billy the Kid Rides Again: Digging for the Truth, by longtime Santa Fe political columnist Jay Miller, is as much about Bill the Governor as Billy the Kid.

Barely six months into Gov. Bill Richardson’s administration, the governor called a news conference where he announced the state would get involved in a new investigation into the death of the outlaw — whom most serious historians believe was shot and killed in Fort Sumner in 1881.

A trio of law-enforcement officials — DeBaca County Sheriff Gary Grays, Lincoln County Sheriff Tom Sullivan and Capitan Mayor Steve Sederwall (a Lincoln County reserve officer) — had started the investigation.

“This is not a publicity stunt,” Richardson — with a straight face — told reporters at the announcement. “It’s an effort to get to the truth.”

The review continues and Steve has more background on his blog.

In a bad political year

At The Washington Post, Chris Cillizza’s Politics Blog, called “The Fix,” handicaps the 10 House seats most likely to change parties next year. NewMexiKen’s own Congressperson is rated the 6th most likely.

New Mexico’s 1st district — Rep. Heather Wilson (R): The story remains the same in this ultimate swing district. Democrats have their best candidate in state Attorney General Patsy Madrid, a Hispanic in her second term as a statewide officeholder. Wilson has shown remarkable resiliency in holding this Albuquerque-area district and continues to impress with her fundraising prowess — $732,000 on hand at the end of September. Republicans have always conceded that in a bad political year Wilson could be one of the first to go. This race could move up the line if Madrid turns out to be as strong a candidate as expected.

Chilis — Hot, Hotter and Omigod

Henry Shukman writes about chilis in a New York Times review of three new Santa Fe restaurants: Aqua Santa, Trattoria Nostrani and Kasa Soba.

One of the many things I’m grateful to New Mexico for, now that I’ve lived there on and off for over a decade, is converting me to the chili. It happened one afternoon, on a long, lonely drive through the Black Mountains. I stopped at a small general store and bought tortilla chips, and on a whim, a jar of hot sauce called Religious Experience: The Wrath. It was the name that did it. I set the jar between my legs as I drove, and began by touching just the corner of a chip to the oil on the salsa’s surface. As I drove I kept mechanically doing it. Something happened. The pain started up, but instead of shying away from it, I dipped back for more. Soon I was shoveling it in. By the time I reached my destination, I was a high, happy devotee. And the jar was empty.

Among hot sauces in NewMexiKen’s kitchen (all unopened I confess):

Dr. U.B. Burnin
Dave’s Insanity Sauce
Viper Venom Hot Sauce
Whoop Ass Hot Sauce
Two Flaming Arrows
Smart Ass Hot Sauce
Arizona Gunslinger
Sudden Death Sauce

The Santa Fe Trail …

opened on this date in 1821.

William Becknell, under forced escort by Mexican troops, arrives at Santa Fe. New Mexicans, who are still celebrating their newly won independence from Spain, quickly purchase all of his goods, which he initially intended to trade with the Indians. This marked the birth of the Santa Fe Trail, originating from Independence, Mo.

New Mexico Magazine

The 1940 film Santa Fe Trail, with Ronald Reagan playing George Armstrong Custer — and starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland — has little basis in historical fact other than that there was a Santa Fe Trail.

Festival of the Cranes

Friends of the Bosque del Apache keep the census of waterfowl at one of America’s great wildlife refuges. Click to see the lovely photos, which rotate every few seconds.

And this photo is a must! Read the caption and listen to the recording. Isn’t nature awesome?

In the 1930s, the Rocky Mountain population of greater sandhill cranes was severely declining. Habitat loss in wintering and breeding areas, land use changes and other factors had taken their toll on the population. In 1941, fewer than 20 sandhills wintered on Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge (NWR).

Since 1939, refuge staff, volunteers, cooperators, and other agencies have worked to restore wintering habitat along the Rio Grande for the cranes. Intensive management on the refuge, including moist soil management (growing natural wetland foods), cooperative agriculture, and crop manipulation have helped the population recover dramatically. Bosque del Apache NWR hosts about three-quarters of the Rocky Mountain sandhill crane population each winter, totaling up to 15,000 birds.

In addition to the sandhill cranes, the refuge is also a wintering stopover or home for snow geese, Ross’ geese, pintails, shovelers, mallards, and a host of other waterfowl. The spectacular wildlife viewing opportunities contribute to the fact that Bosque del Apache NWR is consistently recognized as one of the top birding areas in the country. Enjoy our trails, observation decks, and tour loop during your Festival visit.

Thanks to Pika at Duke City Fix for the reminder.

One Well-Read Home Has Some New Pets: 1,082 Penguins

It is the Land of Enchantment and Kathryn Gursky is enchanted with classic literature. This from The New York Times:

Rushing to evacuate her home as a forest fire lapped at the edges of this high-desert town in May 2000, Kathryn Gursky took with her just one book, a British edition of “The World of Pooh,” by A. A. Milne, bought when she and her husband were vacationing in Dorset some 11 years earlier.

When she returned to Los Alamos after the fire, Ms. Gursky, a 49-year-old former librarian, found that the rest of her 2,300-volume personal library had burned, along with her house and everything in it.

Thousands of scorched tree trunks still range up the hillside across the street from Ms. Gursky’s new home here, but inside the house, her library is well on the way to recovery. In September, Ms. Gursky received a birthday gift from her husband that earned her the envy of her book-loving friends: the complete collection of the Penguin Classics Library, 1,082 books sold only by Amazon.com for nearly $8,000.

New Mexico to have float in Rose Parade

New Mexico Float

A sketch of the float via The Albuquerque Journal.

Additional information from AP via The New Mexican:

New Mexico’s float in the Tournament of Roses parade will feature a familiar lineup: Indian artists, flamenco dancers, a Buffalo Soldier, Smokey Bear — and Gov. Bill Richardson [and his wife].

… the 55-foot-long flatbed trailer with more than 30,000 roses will carry a depiction of the plaza at Old Mesilla flanked by artisans representing Navajo, Apache and Pueblo Indians displaying their wares against scenery ranging from high desert to alpine forest.

The $165,000 cost of the float will be offset by $25,000 apiece from the Santa Fe Opera and the Albuquerque Tricentennial, and $10,000 each from Acoma Pueblo and the Pueblo Indian Cultural Center…

New Mexico 48th smartest state

Vermont was named the country’s smartest state in a report released last month. But the rankings wouldn’t make my list of the smartest studies.

The education rankings are determined by Morgan Quitno, a small publisher that specializes in compiling statistics from government and other sources about education, health and crime. The rankings are based on data about attendance, class size and other characteristics of primary and secondary public schools. Vermont ranks in the top 10 in nearly all of the 21 factors Morgan Quitno includes. The Associated Press, Barre Montpeiler (Vt.) Times Argus and Augusta (Ga.) Chronicle were among those that covered the rankings. In its package on the list, Netscape News ran the subheadline, “The smartest state is Vermont. The dumbest is Arizona.”

The above from The Numbers Guy at the Wall Street Journal. He — Carl Bialik — disconstructs the study.

The rankings.

Last year New Mexico was last.

Computer error I’m sure

New Mexico has rebated some of this year’s income tax already to help pay our winter heating bills. (My amount is about one warm month’s payment, but welcome.)

However, the check managed to arrive with a spelling error in both my first name and my last name.

Think I can convince the bank it’s really me?