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

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.

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Fortunate Son: Selected Essays From the Lone Star State

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

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Leech/O'Malley Salon El Zaguán on YouTube

Historic Santa Fe Foundation and the New Mexico History Museum hosted a discussion with Cormac O'Malley and Tom Leech on March 24, 2021. This conversation was presented on the occasion of publication of the limited-edition handmade book 'I Call My Soul My Own: Ernie O'Malley and Dorothy Stewart in New Mexico' featuring the writings of Ernie O'Malley and the artwork of Dorothy Stewart.

Contact: Melanie McWhorter at melanie@historicsantafe.org or call 505.983.2567 for more information.

Recording now available on HSFF’s YouTube page

ORDER THE ARTIST BOOK THE GIFT SHOP ONLINE

ABOUT THE SALON PARTNERS
Cormac O’Malley is the son of Ernie O'Malley, Irish author of his autobiographical memoirs, On Another Man’s Wound, and The Singing Flame, military historian and militant nationalist from the 1916-1924. Cormac’s mother was Helen Hooker from Connecticut. Cormac was born in Ireland but came to the USA at age 14 to live with his mother after his father died in 1957.

Tom leech inside the Palace of the Governors Gates, 2021.

Over the last 30 years Cormac has helped preserve his father's literary and historical image by republishing his earlier works including the well-known books and newly discovered manuscripts. He has co-edited two volumes of his father’s letters from 1922-1957 and in recent years has published a multi volume series of his father’s military interviews with survivors of the War of Independence and the Civil War, entitled The Men Will Talk to Me: Ernie O’Malley Interviews. These now include Kerry, Galway, Mayo, West Cork, Clare and the Northern Divisions.  His 2015 book was Western Ways, a book of photographs by his parents on Mayo in the 1930s. In 2016, he edited Modern Ireland and Revolution, Ernie O’Malley in Context. In 2017, he published Nobody’s Business: Aran Diaries of Ernie O’Malley. In 2019, he helped put on a joint exhibit of his mother’s photographs in the National Library of Ireland and the Gallery of Photography Ireland and publish A Modern Eye: Helen Hooker O’Malley’s Ireland. In 2020, he produced a documentary film on his parents’ artistic journey in Ireland, A Call to Arts.

Cormac now lives in Stonington, Conn.

Tom Leech is the Director of the Press at the Palace of the Governors, and has more than 40 years’ experience in printing, paper-making, and related book-arts. A curator at the New Mexico History Museum since 2001, Tom has organized a number of successful exhibits, including The Saint John’s Bible; Jack Kerouac and the Writer’s Life; Gustave Baumann and Friends: Artist Cards from Holidays Past; Out of the Box: The Art of the Cigar; and Album Amicorum, which also traveled to Spain, Germany, Switzerland and Turkey.

In 2019 at El Zaguán, Tom exhibited fifty Palace Press poetry broadsides, and in 2020 he and Patricia Musick showed their marbled paper and calligraphy collaborations in the exhibit Something Wicked this Way Comes.  A number of Tom’s marbled and handmade papers are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Palace Press titles include award-winning Jack Thorp’s Songs of the Cowboys and O’Keeffe Stories, and also Doctor Franklin and Spain, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and most recently, Gustave Baumann’s Indian Pottery Old and New.

Tom is a 2013 recipient of the Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the 2014 Carl Hertzog Award for Excellence in Book Design, and the 2015 Edgar Lee Hewett Award from the New Mexico Association of Museums. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in painting and sculpture from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He was a member of the 1990 and ’92 Everest Environmental Expeditions, and in 1994 co-founded the Paper Road/Tibet Project that reintroduced the ancient art of papermaking to Lhasa and rural areas of Tibet.

More historic presses fill the shop, and while each one has seen years of service in the noble art of printing, they all stand ready if called on to get out the news.

Profundo Heritatge Archive: An Interview with Harry Vasile

Nuevo Mexico Profundo started on an oral biography/heritage archive project last year, and completed forty plus interviews, conducted by Frank Graziano. The folks recorded cover a cross-section of experience in New Mexico. Frank is ready to begin phase two of the project in April, 2021, interviewing and capturing the history of more New Mexicans over the course of this year.

We present today a fascinating interview with Harry Vasile at the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico. Harry, as you will discover, was instrumental in restoring the magnificent St. Joseph Apache Mission church at Mescalero. (This is the location of the Apache Christ altar painted by Robert Lentz, screen, a stunning depiction of Christ as an Apache shaman on the fourth day of the puberty ceremony.) He also worked with kids as a coach and counselor at the rehabilitation center, and instituted a job-skill training program by hiring young at-risk workers for the restoration project. “Historic restoration as self-restoration”, to quote Frank Graziano from his book Historic Churches of New Mexico Today.

We hope you enjoy listening to Harry tell his life story.

More on Nuevo Mexico Profundo here.

Grill-Lucero House on the Register of Properties Worthy of Preservation

Intro to Grill-Lucero House
658 Granada Street, the Grill-Lucero House, is a notable example of a Spanish Pueblo Revival bungalow and its history illustrates the importance of middle-class contributors to Santa Fe’s architectural development.  The home was built in Don Gaspar in 1928 during a building boom that marked the Spanish Pueblo Revival bungalow’s popularization and its eclipse of other competing bungalow styles.  Fred Grill, an overlooked but pivotal local builder, constructed the house.  This project helped launch his career, which went on to include significant collaborations with John Gaw Meem.  He became perhaps Santa Fe’s most active builder and architect during the 1930s and early 1940s.  Blanche Lucero (née Cadman) and her husband Antonio Lucero Jr. were the first owners and inhabitants of the home.  While Antonio soon died in 1932, Blanche continued to own the house for decades.  She spent her career working for the New Mexico State Treasurer’s Office, ultimately becoming the highest-ranking female state employee.  Her ownership of the house illustrates that the adaptation of the Santa Fe style was contingent upon the tastes of not just artists and tourists but also the city’s burgeoning professional population.  The house that is the namesake of Grill and Lucero is thus testament to their impact on Santa Fe’s cultural development.

The Grill-Lucero House is a fusion of the craftsman bungalow with Santa Fe’s local vernacular style.  Structurally, 658 Granada is an archetypal craftsman bungalow in its construction.  Made out of pentile bricks, the house is a simple square design with an open floorplan.  Grill added six-pane, light wooden casement and hopper windows throughout the house, arranging them in double and triple sets to adhere to the craftsman style’s preference for balanced asymmetry.  At the same time, however, Grill masterfully incorporated features of the Santa Fe style into the design of the house.  He installed a flat rather than pitched roof with raised parapets and projecting canales.  To make the walls resemble adobe and give the house simplified, rounded massing, he covered the pentile with brown stucco. Along the raised front porch, he installed wooden trim, exposed vigas, and corbels to make it resemble a recessed portal.  The result was a house that maintained the ethos of bungalow functionality while also adhering to the key elements of the city’s Spanish Pueblo Revival style.

Biography
Oliver Horn and Robynne Mellor both received PhDs in History from Georgetown University. They have experience teaching at Georgetown University and Western Carolina University. Oliver is the co-author of The Roque Lobato House (Schenck Southwest, 2014) a New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards Finalist in 2015 and Robynne contributed a chapter about uranium mining in Grants, New Mexico to Mining North America (University of California Press, 2017).

Currently, Oliver and Robynne run Sunmount Consulting in Santa Fe, where they are working with the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division to develop and write the ten-year state historic preservation plan. Among other services, Sunmount Consulting also helps clients navigate the process of obtaining tax credits for historic properties. To learn more, please visit www.sunmountconsulting.com.