Photo credit: Adria Malcolm

Because of high costs, some high school graduates have opted to delay, drop out of or forgo attending college altogether to avoid student debt that could hang over them for decades.

Graphic by Mikka Kei Macdonald

“The violence women and queer people experience in the political arena comes in many forms. Although the national conversation around threats to women in politics is often centered on citizens outside of the political arena waging threats and attacks at politicians, not as much is being said about the violence that happens between politicians.” 

Photo credit: Alanna Romero

When Patricia French saw Big Bird building an horno on Sesame Street in 1975, she knew she wanted to live in New Mexico.

In 1978, she moved to the state with her husband and two-year-old son in tow. As they drove across the country from New York, French remembers singing Buffy Sainte-Marie’s refrain from the series: “Sunny day, on my way to Santa Fe.”

French is the mind behind the New Mexico Historic Women Marker Program, which launched as a 2005 initiative to commemorate women’s contributions to the state’s history. And although she didn’t know it at the time, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s influence on Sesame Street’s New Mexico series proved to be an auspicious beginning to a project that honors women from many cultures in New Mexico.

In economically poor states like New Mexico, the lack of federal funding for education and childcare has had severe consequences. Republican Governor Susana Martinez’s cuts during her time in office from 2011 to 2018, followed by the pandemic, hurt the state even further. New Mexico now ranks 50th overall in the 2022 Annie E. Casey Foundation Kids Count data profile, which takes into account indicators of child well-being, including poverty and education levels.

The recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade threatening women’s and people who can get pregnant right to choose puts these statistics in an even harsher light.

“I feel with the recent changes regarding women’s rights to abortion and the recent changes to reproductive health, women need support,” says Martinez. “Low-cost or no-cost childcare is a must. Money should never be a determination of help for a child.”

Artists marked, pierced, tore, crumpled, or otherwise used and challenged the fine art world’s notion of the photograph as inherently truthful or sacred.

“The transgression is that the fine-art print was considered this pristine thing everyone has to wear gloves to handle,” says Ware. “But these artists added old photo processes, used ink, wrote and sewed on their prints. Most of them are unique objects rather than something that can be reproduced from a negative.”

Photo credit: Leon Bustos

Although Cabeza de Baca’s wealthy upbringing initially presented some barriers in visiting small villages, her natural curiosity made her successful. “She represented the government going into households and introducing new food traditions,” Romero says. “That was really an interesting period because you think it would be somewhat antagonistic to have government workers going into communities and telling locals how to cook their food.”

Pico del Hierro-Villa, Espiritualidad, 2021. Digital photograph, 12 × 18 in. Courtesy of the artist.

“Gutierrez says la Virgen de Guadalupe has been a common thread in the ten years he’s been taking photographs. His work in Tempo y Tiempo captures pandemic life in New Mexico, and most of his photographs are paired with in-depth personal reflections on what it means to be human in the midst of so much turmoil and tragedy.”

The data is clear: Direct cash assistance helps families and individuals who are otherwise very vulnerable and cannot make ends meet in an economy that values profits over people. The pandemic has disproportionately affected women, children, people with disabilities and compromised immune systems, and Black, Indigenous, Latino and Asian people, among other marginalized populations.

While much needs to be done to reform the child support system so that it truly provides necessary financial support to children across the U.S., there is an opportunity now to extend the child tax credit and help lift single-parent homes out of poverty. For many single parents, $3,600 or $3,000 per child in a year is much more than they would hope to receive in child support from a co-parent.

Photo credit: Tom Aldrich

Ask anyone who lives in Missoula, Montana, and they'll tell you jobs that pay a living wage are hard to come by.

The small mountain town of 75,000 has always been a draw for people who appreciate a slower pace of life and easy access to the outdoors. But if Missoula was once a well-kept secret, it's not anymore. Although the population has been steadily growing since the 1990s, the " Zoom boom" of 2020 has put Missoula on the map for good. Like many other hip mountain towns across the west, Missoula became an attractive option for people from out of state who — due to the pandemic — could work from anywhere and retain their high home-state wages.

With such an attractive market for sellers, property owners are either raising rents or selling rentals out from under occupants. To enjoy floating the Clark Fork River in the summer or hiking the meandering wooded paths in Pattee Canyon, it appears that you now have to have an out-of-state income.

For several people, this has meant leaving the place they love so they can afford to live. Here are their stories.

“Systemic reform of our child care system starts with us by way of organizing the community,” stated Wendoly Marte, Economic Justice Director for the national organizing group Community Change Action. “New Mexico is leading the way with women — caregivers and mothers — on the front line who are fighting for a comprehensive child care system that ensures every family has access to high-quality child care and that gives early childhood educators a living wage.”

Naysayers argue that student loan forgiveness wouldn't be fair to people who have paid their loans off, but it's a move that would boost the economy and benefit everyone. A 2018 report concludes that universal student debt forgiveness would increase the GDP by roughly $100 billion per year and would result in the creation of up to 1.55 million jobs per year. As the Debt Collective, a union organizing around debt forgiveness, writes, "Most people are not in debt because they live beyond their means; they are in debt because they have been denied the means to live." This should not be a partisan issue.

I was born in 1981—the year Ronald Reagan took office. In the early 1980s, my parents relied on food stamps to feed our family. My mom recalls one particularly upsetting incident while she was grocery shopping, me and my sister in tow. She’d just handed her booklet of food stamps to the cashier. “Ronald Reagan was right about you people,” the cashier screamed at her.

He traveled for hours on dirt roads through the desert to find Code Talkers, and sometimes he got lost. The Navajo Nation is large—approximately the size of Ireland—and rural, and many Code Talkers did not have telephones, so finding them required patience and persistence. Kawano had plenty of both.

The Albuquerque City Council has remained divided on prioritizing workers’ rights. Shimamoto says that if provisions like hazard pay are stalled long enough, a vote on the issue will eventually become obsolete. He says OLÉ will keep fighting for permanent sick leave when the City Council reconvenes in August.

When New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham gave early childhood education centers in her state the option to shut down alongside public schools on March 13, the vast majority of them did. Large, extended families are prevalent in New Mexico, so there is often someone to care for kids when school isn’t in session.

Not everyone, however, has that safety net.

Photo credit: Noël Lindquist

It’s Christmas Eve, 2019, and members of the Homeless Outreach Team in Missoula, Montana, pile out of a van near the Reserve Street Bridge. They unload rucksacks filled with sandwiches, hand warmers, and water bottles. Several volunteers tag along—one with blankets and another with gift-wrapped wool socks.

The outreach team goes down a steep, icy embankment to an island in the Clark Fork River behind the Walmart Supercenter, just upstream from a sewage treatment plant that delivers an intolerable sewage stench in summer months. On the island, homeless individuals camp alone in tents, or in small clusters.

Last summer, I spent a total of 30 hours on hold or on the phone over the course of three weeks because my income was miscalculated when I finally reached a caseworker. I had to call again, and then again. I spoke with a different case worker each time and so each time we had to start the processing of paperwork and the calculations from scratch. By the time it was sorted out, the interview deadline had passed and the system automatically cut my benefits. This required a fourth call so I could go through the lengthy process to reinstate my benefits.

If this sounds punishing and like far too much paper pushing, it is. Still, the support SNAP provides keeps my kids fed and despite the hoops I have to jump through it is nothing compared to the bloated government bureaucracy that Trump has in mind for SNAP if congress approves the administration’s proposed budget cuts.

One of Diego Romero’s favorite activities is watching people react to his art. He keeps a low profile and usually not even the security guards know he’s the artist. Hiding in plain sight, he looks on as people study his Pueblo-inspired pots with comics painted inside them. With work in places like the British Museum, the Cartier Foundation, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Romero has lurked in numerous museums around the world over his 30-year career and delights in the groans, sighs, and chuckles his art elicits. “It doesn’t matter whether they speak English or not,” he says. “They can take one look at my pot, look at each other, and then just start laughing.” Whether he’s combining Moche stirrup bottles with a Homer Simpson Chia Pet head or a neo-Mimbres style pot with a Pueblo version of Uma Thurman’s iconic Pulp Fiction pose on it, Romero is adept at eliciting reactions.