State of New Mexico’s State Historic Preservation Officer survey - provide your input

On May 12, 2021, the State of New Mexico’s State Historic Preservation Officer Jeff Pappas sent out a survey asking interested parties to provide their thoughts to “plan to identify current preservation challenges and successes.” Please find the letter below and a link to the survey below. Fill in the survey if you wish to provide feedback to this important state organization.

Find the survey link here

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Dear Friend of Preservation:

I am asking you to get involved in the future of historic preservation in New Mexico. Every five years my office develops a state plan to identify current preservation challenges and successes. With your involvement, we will set goals through 2031 to guide preservationists working in New Mexico.

Part of the process is gathering as much public opinion as possible. This year we are encouraging participation through a survey that takes about 5 minutes to complete. We are asking our colleagues—preservation organizations and nonprofits, architects and archaeologists, firms, governments, state and national parks, Indian nations and Pueblos, consultants, students and university departments—to help us out.

If you could send the link to the online survey to people on your mailing list or post it on your website, or both, this would help us ensure the broad-based response we need to develop a preservation plan for New Mexico.

The survey is posted on the Historic Preservation Division’s website. The survey is available in English and en español.

We look forward to your involvement and encourage you to take the survey yourself.

Sincerely,

Jeff Pappas
State Historic Preservation Officer

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Find the survey link here

Richard Miller on Col. John Slough - Salon on YouTube

SALON EL ZAGUAN with Richard Miller
Col. John P. Slough, “Gilpin’s Pet Lambs,” and the Union Victory at Glorieta Pass

Historic Santa Fe Foundation presented the April Salon El Zaguán with Richard Miller on Col. John P. Slough, “Gilpin’s Pet Lambs,” and the Union Victory at Glorieta Pass.

About the talk:
The Confederate Army of New Mexico, its ranks filled with 2,500 Texans, swept into New Mexico Territory in January 1862, intent on claiming the American southwest for the rebel cause. The invasion’s possibilities seemed endless: arms from captured Federal forts, ore from the Colorado gold fields, perhaps even Pacific Ocean ports for the blockaded Confederacy. But in northern New Mexico Territory, a Federal force largely composed of Colorado Volunteers stopped the Texans’ advance at the battle of Glorieta Pass. Commanding the Coloradans was an inexperienced and unpopular officer, Col. John P. Slough, whose ill-conceived battle plan almost led to Union disaster. Shortly after the battle, Slough abruptly resigned his command, claiming that he feared for his life from his own men. Richard Miller, the author of John P. Slough: The Forgotten Civil War General (University of New Mexico Press, 2021), will tell the story of Colonel Slough, his struggles to discipline the hard-drinking and at times mutinous Colorado Volunteers, and their miraculous victory over the Confederate Army of New Mexico at Glorieta Pass.

Richard Miller earned a B.A. in history from Carleton College and an M.A. in history from Princeton University. Although he spent his career in health care management and consulting, he returned to reading and writing history upon his retirement in 2014. He is a past president of the Puget Sound Civil War Roundtable and is a frequent presenter to Civil War roundtables and other history groups. He lives in Seattle with his wife Karin.

Victor Yamada - Confinement in the Land of Enchantment - Salon on Youtube

SALON EL ZAGUAN with Victor Yamada
CONFINEMENT IN LAND OF ENCHANTMENT (CLOE) Japanese Americans in New Mexico during
World War II

About the talk
The CLOE project’s aim is to reach a wide & diverse audience in New Mexico & US about the history of Japanese Americans internment in state; inspire thought & conversation about issues of citizenship, identity, civil liberty. This project is part of a multi-year program discussing the three phases including research of sites in Santa Fe, Lordsburg, Old Raton Ranch (Baca Camp), and Fort Stanton. The second phase includes markers at these sites, outreach publication, and a project website. The third phase includes a traveling exhibition, community forums, and presentations. Yamada will talk about the history of Japanese American internment in New Mexico and the team’s progress. For more information on the project, the team, and the website links, visit the pages below.

Links to Preparatory Resources
Website / Story Map Confinement in the Land of Enchantment: Japanese Americans in New Mexico during World War II (arcgis.com)
Roster of Prisoners Film Documentary, Journey of Discovery, Kori Kobayashi  https://www.las-cruces.org/2417/Big-Read-2021

Victor Yamada has a degree in engineering from University of Washington and business administration from Pepperdine University. He was strategic environmental policy manager for 40 years at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, consulting organizations, business firms, and utilities. Yamada has volunteered for the New Mexico Japanese American Citizens League, Japan America Society of New Mexico, and Asian American Association of New Mexico. He led many key project activities in the New Mexico Japanese American Citizens League including the preparation of Confinement in Land of Enchantment traveling exhibition and community forums for Santa Fe, Lordsburg, Fort Stanton, Clovis, and Old Raton Ranch (Baca Camp), prepared oral histories of local Japanese Americans as part of the Asian American Legacy Stories project, and directed Japanese to English translations project including Lordsburg / Santa Fe prisoner letters, and Santa Fe prisoner scrapbook.

Jeff Pappas on New Mexico's Segregated Past - Salon on YouTube

SALON EL ZAGUAN
Jeff Pappas, State Historic Preservation Officer

New Mexico’s Segregated Past
Documenting Jim Crow and the National Register of Historic Places

About the talk:
The National Register of Historic Places does and is far more than its honorific title suggests. Sure, it’s the nation’s repository for significant structures and buildings, sites and districts. In fact, as of today, there are over 90,000 resources listed in the register, a list that grows by the day. In New Mexico alone, we have approximately 2,100 individually listed properties with an additional 2,400 contributing resources. There’s an entire office suite at SHPO filled with all kinds of files. Maps, nominations, correspondence, you name it. The collective history curated at SHPO operates like a small archive. It anchors our work and helps determine the historic fabric of our state. But despite these efforts there is still so much about New Mexico we don’t know. For example, certain topics and subjects like the African American story have hardly been explored. Part of what we do at SHPO is to try and find these stories, record them and make them accessible. Five years ago, my office began to research a small slice of the African American story focused on segregated schools in the eastern part of the state. This lecture will take a look at our progress to date and talk how we’ve engaged the national register to tell the story of New Mexico’s segregated past. It will also discuss a new research project that’s intended to broaden the story by looking at other types of buildings and structures associated with the African American experience.

Jeff Pappas holds degrees from Brigham Young University, Baylor University, and a Ph.D. in American Indian and Environmental History from Arizona State University.   Before joining NMSHPO, Pappas worked for National Park Service at Yosemite splitting his year between California and Fort Collins, CO, where he taught in the history department at Colorado State University.  He was appointed State Historic Preservation Officer in 2012 and teaches part-time in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of New Mexico.

Jeff Pappas, Ph.D., Director
Historic Preservation Division &State Historic Preservation Officer
New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs
407 Galisteo Street, Suite 236
Santa Fe, NM  87501
jeff.pappas@state.nm.us
(505) 629-6510

Moving a historic building - a feature from San Jose, CA

We often partner with Tom Leech, the curator and director of the Palace Press at the New Mexico History Museum. He recently shared this video of some of the historic preservation efforts by his son in San Jose, California. We thought the video was engaging and very relevant for our audience. Take a look at this short video which dicusses the varied partnership to save this apartment building for posterity while allowing for development.

Book Review: Fortunate Son: Selected Essays From the Lone Star State

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REVIEWED BY PETE WARZEL

I have been working on a second book of essays, having abandoned the first to publishing individual pieces in magazines and literary journals, the concept of “book” depreciated.

And in this second book I feel that the voice, tone, rhythm of detail is right. The book is sound. Then I pick up Rick Bass, any Rick Bass writing, and realize how much work I have yet to do.

Bass is a widely published, numerous awards-winning writer, naturalist, environmental activist, writing mostly essay and short fiction. The Lives of Rocks: Stories (2006) is stunning short fiction. Fortunate Son, here, is a collection of essays that in his own words is a “…journalist’s Texas scrapbook”, the premise being Bass exploring the roots, memories, and the connections, now an exile in Montana, to his birth and youth and family history in Texas. The setting maybe Texas, the writing is universal.

His former profession was petroleum geologist, and that, along with his upbringing by a family invigorated by the outdoors, generates the awe he has for nature, as well as the detail of process that fills his work with wonder. He is akin to John McPhee, the great creative non-fiction writer who lived at The New Yorker and taught, still, I believe, at Princeton. They both take on eclectic subjects in search for understanding a bit of the world around them. McPhee is eastern and has, at least, roots in academia. Bass is nothing but west. 

The first piece of the collection, Into the Fire is a tour de force, a night out in Houston with the author’s childhood friend as Fire Chief, learning about the emotions and mind set, the intricacies of those who put their life on the line to stop property from turning to ash, lives from being incinerated. Bass’s nature writing is at the core of this work as he interprets the fire as “…that seemingly rarest of things, the real thing – and you can see what a living thing, what an awful animal, the fire is.” The animal imagery is a theme of this piece, even to the people who fight it. As Bass notes the anomaly of the deviant firefighter who starts fires he describes how the rest of the tribe senses the sin. “It is elemental, the way they find out. It is the way animals communicate – the way animals, who have been here in the world so much longer than we, communicate. They are never wrong.” It becomes mystical in the detail as fire is everywhere, waiting to burst through. This is nature writing in an urban landscape, wild and beautiful in its destructive energy. This is fierce writing.

Moon Story is a non-linear reflection on his youth in Texas, the lure of NASA in Houston and its moon shots, and the primal experience of watching the great solar eclipse of 2018 at his home in the Yaak Valley, Montana. It is an abstraction that fascinates. Tying the universality of the pull of the moon regardless of place, Bass taps nature once again for the proof. “On full moons, zooplankton rise to the surface as if in the Rapture; oysters spread wider their limestone lips; deer, bedded down, rise as if in a trance no matter what the hour of day is when the moon (which is always full, we must remember) is either directly overhead or, curiously, on the other side of the earth, directly underfoot.” Those details place his narrative in a much bigger world.

The Farm is idyllic. A visit to his father’s farm with his two young girls, his mother off stage having passed away. It is a wonderful recollection, but also a brilliant reproduction of a natural setting on the page. Bass has a proclivity to translate the west succinctly. “Finally it was true dark.” We all know that timing of light here, as light hangs in the sky, lingering, and then extinguished.

And so go the fourteen essays collected in this book. Captivating, well-wrought, universal. The University of New Mexico Press has done well in bringing Rick Bass to their pages.

Fortunate Son: Selected Essays From the Lone Star State
$19.95

Fortunate Son: Selected Essays From the Lone Star State
By Rick Bass
University of New Mexico Press
216 pages
Paperback

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