Every Day is Magic: Ada Limón

In her 2015 collection, Bright Dead Things, a National Book Award finalist for poetry, Ada Limón writes of moving to Kentucky: “Confession: I did not want to live here.” It’s perhaps not a surprising sentiment coming from a coastally oriented person who was raised in Northern California, attended college in Seattle, and then spent over a decade in New York City.

 

But Limón and her husband, Lucas, have been in Lexington for seven years now and the effects of settling into this place are noticeable in her new book, The Carrying (Milkweed, Aug.). It’s a phenomenally lively and attentive collection replete with the trappings of living a little closer to nature. While Bright Dead Things is marked by a preponderance of light, such as images of fireflies and neon signs, The Carrying features numerous appearances by various trees, birds, and beetles. Limón also demonstrates a greater willingness to be explicit in naming colors, particularly green. “It’s crazy green, the whole book,” she says. “Lexington is the greenest place I’ve ever lived.” Similarly, where in Bright Dead Things, Limón tells a lot of stories and anecdotes, in The Carrying she is very present in her thoughts and experiences.

As it turns out, these shifts in focus have another, altogether unexpected source. While putting Bright Dead Things together, Limón was diagnosed with chronic vestibular neuronitis, which can cause bouts of vertigo. “If I’m really having vertigo, it’s pretty intense and I really have to focus,”
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New Mexico: Outstanding Multicultural State – Four Out Of Five Stars

Mural at a popular New Mexico restaurant

Mural at a popular New Mexico restaurant

When I travel to Santa Fe, New Mexico, I marvel at how the Native American, Spanish, and Mexican cultures exist within one state. At least on the surface, there seems to be a great deal of respect for each other’s customs and inclusion of all culture in art and architecture.

The photo below is a good example of the blending and inclusion represented in the Zimmerman Library at the University of New Mexico campus. It shows Pueblo Revival architecture at its finest, with its heavy wood lintels to its striking viga-and-corbel ceilings.

New Mexico - Zimmerman Library at UNM

The photo below is another good example from the Rio Grande Nature Center State Park near Albuquerque. Here we see the entrance to the center showing a corrugated culvert that was probably salvaged from a nearby acequia.

New Mexico - Rio Grande Nature Center State Park

Many years before Spanish settlements, ancestral Puebloan peoples had developed an organized manipulation of water resources as early as 800 A.D.

This skill continued to be developed and by 1400 they had managed to create a gravity-fed irrigation system on the major rivers in New Mexico.

The very word acequia is from early Spanish settlements that inherited an amalgam of irrigation systems from the Roman Empire and the Moors. With the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, this amalgam of Spanish and Indian laws and customs was mixed with existing American law and custom.

Beyond New Mexico’s cultural inclusiveness and diversity, there are still several areas that the state has failed at achieving.

New Mexico’s population is 47.7% Hispanic and 38.9% white (not Hispanic or Latino), but only 23.6% of firms are owned by Hispanics, and 5.3% are owned by American Indians—a very poor showing. According to the National Center for Higher Education, “New Mexico’s personal income has fallen from 83% of the U.S.average in 1960 to 74% in 2000.”

Speaker on Student Quad at UNM

Speaker on the Student Quad at the University of New Mexico

The National Center for Higher Education also concluded: “The education system in New Mexico (from high school to college completion) fails to retain Hispanics and Native Americans at nearly the rate of whites and Asians. These racial/ethnic disparities are also evident in the graduation rates of baccalaureate students…”

In summary, New Mexico is an outstanding example of a multicultural state but has some work to be done in addressing the disparities of their majority and minority ethnic groups.


  

Poem
“…And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while…”

T.S. Eliot
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Mexican American Proarchive Annual Report for 2022

The American Community Survey is an annual survey administered by the federal government to help local officials and community leaders and businesses understand the changes that take place in their communities. It includes percentages of our population’s graduate school attainment and the employment of Mexican Americans in various occupations.  These important factors influence the allocation of federal resources. Mexican American Proarchives uses the data provided by the American Community Survey to better understand how Mexican Americans compare to the general population.

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