Category: Albuquerque & New Mexico

Albuquerque is New Mexico’s biggest city, but tends to get short shrift from tourists. Outsiders on the hunt for the usual Southwestern signatures — turquoise, adobe, intermingled cultures, blue skies, chiles — often fly into the Albuquerque International Sunport, then drive right away to Santa Fe or Taos and miss an opportunity. Albuquerque has the requisite turquoise and chiles, too, and charges less for them. But more, it has a lived-in, bustling, modernized kind of charm, with no forced quaintness. Unfreighted by tourists’ ideas of how it should look and what it should offer, it often surprises. There’s a buoyancy to the Southwest style here, and, in a not-unrelated development, probably more resident balloonists per capita than in any other city on earth.

36 Hours: Albuquerque from The New York Times

From the Albuquerque Tribune:

Don’t mess with these New Mexicans.

The teens in Rhonda Stanfield’s communication skills class at Robert F. Kennedy Charter School unsettled a bottling company, a distribution company and a marketing plan – all in six weeks.

Billboards put up in the spring as an advertising campaign for Tecate beer featured a bottle at a 45-degree angle surrounded by the words “Finally, a cold Latina.”

The class wanted the billboards removed from their community in the heart of Five Points in Albuquerque’s South Valley.

“I didn’t think we were going to change anything because we are so young,” Lauren Hermosillo, 18, said.

But their success has led them to take on all alcohol advertising in their community.

“We want to do more,” she said.

They’ve already completed research that they say shows there are five times more alcohol advertisements in Hispanic communities than in white communities in New Mexico.
…

Surely, they thought, anyone who worked for the distributor would understand their frustration at stereotypes. But, Hermosillo said, a woman who answered the phone at Labatt USA in Miami – which distributes Tecate – asked him “What’s a Latina?”

From CNN.com:

ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court sided Friday with a New Mexico church that wants to use hallucinogenic tea as part of its Christmas services, despite government objections that the tea is illegal and potentially dangerous.

The high court lifted a temporary stay issued last week against using the hoasca tea while it decides whether the Brazil-based O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal is permitted to make it a permanent part of its services.

The legal battle began after federal agents seized 30 gallons of the tea in a 1999 raid on the Santa Fe home of the church’s U.S. president, Jeffrey Bronfman.

Bronfman sued the government for the right to use the tea and the church won a preliminary injunction, which was upheld by 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver. The Bush administration then took the case to the Supreme Court.

Link via dangerousmeta! who’s staying on top of this tea story.

From The New York Times:

New Mexico may not have any major league teams, but members of the New Mexico Game Birds Association, the state’s largest cockfighting advocacy group, say it is proud of the sports it does have. One is cockfighting, a practice, particularly popular among Hispanics, that is believed to have originated in ancient Greece and Persia, pitting gamecocks against each other with metal spurs attached to their legs. The birds often fight to the death.

Massachusetts was the first state to ban cockfighting, in 1836, and has been followed by 47 others. But New Mexico’s “galleros,” as cockfighting practitioners here call themselves in Spanish, are determined that their state will not be next, even as they face their strongest challenge yet from animal rights activists and some celebrity friends.
…

Purses in New Mexico can reach more than $10,000, making the loss of a prized gamecock, bred through generations of pedigree to fight to the death, a risk that most galleros are prepared to take.

Nor is cockfighting the only practice involving roosters that some outsiders would find shocking. Another, common in some Hispanic villages or Indian pueblos until a couple of decades ago, was “correr el gallo,” the rooster pull, in which the bird was buried up to its neck in a dirt mound and men on horseback competed to uproot it. The rooster was usually killed in the process.

Usually.

From New Mexico Politics with Joe Monahan:

A member of the powerful state Public Regulation Commission who advocated zero tolerance on drugs and alcohol in the PRC workplace has been arrested on drug charges. E. Shirley Baca, 53, of Las Cruces, was taken into custody shortly after 7 a.m. Wednesday at Albuquerque’s international airport. She was booked into the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Detention Center on charges of possession of a controlled substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.

John Roberts, deputy chief of Albuquerque Aviation Police, told The Associated Press that the controlled substance was marijuana. Baca’s bond was set at $1,000, and she bonded out by early afternoon, jail officials said. Fellow Commissioner David King said he was stunned when told by the AP that Baca had been arrested. “I know that she was one of the advocates to have zero tolerance for drugs or alcohol” at the PRC, King said. She advocated immediate dismissal of any PRC employee when it comes to drugs or alcohol, he said.

Link via Pika.

There’s a lot of history packed into Ghost Ranch, a beautiful high-desert spot tucked into an upper corner of New Mexico. Read what the Los Angeles Times‘ Christopher Reynolds has to say about it.

At its highest points, Ghost Ranch rises as a set of chalky red slopes, slopes that you know you’ve seen somewhere before. At its lowest points, along the Chama River, a thousand cottonwoods wear their fall robes of gold.

If New Mexico is leaning red, it’s not because the state is any closer to declaring a presidential winner. It’s because some New Mexicans are embarrassed about how long it’s taking to get the votes counted. Again.

“It’s embarrassing to know this state has not been able to count all it’s votes,” said Tom Torres of Edgewood. “It’s not like this is a surprise. We saw it last election.”

In the 2000 election, it took about a month for the state to determine that Al Gore had defeated President George W. Bush by 366 votes.

Election officials said they are working to count all ballots by Friday in the race between President Bush and Sen. John Kerry. In Bernalillo County, the actual counting of more than 13,000 provisional and in-lieu-of ballots might not start until Tuesday, election officials said.

Albuquerque Journal

NewMexiKen would fail to live up to my name if I don’t mention this op-ed piece by Tony Hillerman in Monday’s New York Times.

Now, with polls showing the race undecided, our puny five-vote delegation looks very important. And New Mexicans are not used to this. We are used to being ignored. We love it that way. One of the most popular monthly features in New Mexico magazine is called “One of Our 50 Is Missing.” It consists of reports about folks in other states refusing to accept our “foreign” credit cards, asking if one needs a visa to visit a friend in Albuquerque, or demanding a foreign postage charge to send the pair of shoes you’ve ordered from their catalog. Now, it seems, our fellow Americans finally know what country our state is in. I’m not the only one hoping that after tomorrow, they’ll forget.

At a restaurant just off Interstate 40 in Tucumcari, N.M., four women from Arkansas, en route to a fat farm in Arizona, appeared flush with excitement, New Mexico magazine reports.

The excitement, it turned out, was due to the fact that they were able to cross over into New Mexico without showing their passports — which all deemed necessary for the trip.

From Porter’s People in the Akron Beacon Journal

Thanks to Dwight Perry for the link.

Albuquerque readers need to check out the Nob Hill photo at Albloggerque.

One of the reasons NewMexiKen likes looking up at balloons, but doesn’t ever intend to be a passenger. If God intended for us to fly he’d put is in 757s.

The final day of the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta ended with high drama Sunday when a balloon became entangled in a radio tower, forcing the pilot and two young passengers to shimmy most of the way down the nearly 700-foot-tall structure.

Bill Chapel, 69, of Albuquerque, was piloting the Smokey Bear balloon when winds blew into the radio tower near the balloon fiesta park.

“All you can do is grit you teeth and hold on to your passengers and prepare them for the impact,” he said.

The hot-air balloon’s canopy — shaped like the face of the famous bear that warns children against forest fires — got wrapped up around the triangular-shaped tower, leaving its gondola resting up against the structure and Chapel and his young passengers, Aaron Whitacre, 10, of Tucson, Ariz., and Troy Wells, 14, of Rio Rancho, stranded.

“I hung onto the tower with all my strength, and I got them calmed down,” Chapel said.

The pilot said he didn’t need to tell the boys what to do: “They climbed down the tower and I followed them.”

The trio made their way slowly down the tower’s interior ladder.

From AP

The radio station, KKOB, shut down its 50,000 watt transmitter during the emergency. Damage to the tower is estimated at $10,000. The Smokey Bear balloon was destroyed.

NewMexiKen attended the Balloon Fiesta but took no photos. Alas. (For the record, at the Special Shapes Glow I’d forgotten my glasses and had to view the balloons as though an Impressionistic painting. I got so confused I thought the Jesus balloon was Johnny Damon of the Red Sox).

Fortunately Garth at Musings from America’s Outback has an excellent collection of photos that I think you’ll enjoy.

If you’ve never been to the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta (which closes tomorrow morning), I strongly urge you to make the trip at least once. The Special Shapes especially draw oohs and aahs from children of all ages.

NewMexiKen’s house has seven skylights. I’m grateful our hail was a more moderate marble and pea sized during the series of storms that passed through Monday night and Tuesday. This photo was taken at Socorro, New Mexico, Tuesday (from The Albuquerque Journal).

Tomorrow through October 10.

Pika at Quirky Burque describes one of the reasons people love the New Mexico State Fair —

First off, you enter a tent draped with pillows and purplish fabric. Then, the noise of The Fair dies behind you and incense lures you towards a selection of silver toe rings as the proprietor, a sweet little hippie with a possible foot-fetish, invites you to sit down and try one on. She props a pillow on her knee and takes your foot like a queen. A quick spritz to wash off any dust and soon you’re trying on toe rings as she gently attends to your feet on the pillow. So peaceful. So attentive. It’s like Mary Magdalene perfuming up the Messiah’s feet and making him try on toe rings before dinner. It’s the closest you’ll get to being a princess and it’s all yours for the price of a toe ring at the State Fair Grounds.

NewMexiKen is going to The Fair this evening, but I think I’ll pass on the toe ring tent.

Pika at Quirky Burque sums up the relationship between Albuquerque and Santa Fe in a few words —

JUST 60 MILES TO THE NORTHEAST, as we all know, the situation is quite different. Our fair sister-city, Santa Fe, prances around LIKE A BLEACH-BLONDE TROPHY WIFE whom writers can’t stop telling us is oh-so-pretty, so popular, and did we mention she married a Texas billionaire? All while poor dusty Albuquerque worries whether she’ll ever get a date to the Prom.

NewMexiKen likes them both, but Albuquerque is definitely the better prom date. For one, we’ve got Pika Brittlebush.

This year’s Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta poster suggests the chase crews are going to be in for a long drive. The nearest saguaro cacti to Balloon Fiesta Park are about 350 miles southwest.

Idea and link from Metaquerque, who appears to have gotten it from this article in the Albuquerque Journal.