Exit West: A Cultural Confluence


TRADITION ANd change


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THE INHERENT IMMIGRANT NATURE OF NORTH AMERICANS has evinced itself once again in a revived population shift to the American West. In 1994 by relocating to the convergence of  the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the Great Plains in Northern New Mexico, I became one of those immigrants. As a cultural chronicler with companion cameras, my years living in the Mora Valley have been spent observing, as well as being observed.


The profiles of Indigenous, Mexican, and European bloodlines can be discerned in the faces of my neighbors, twelfth-generation descendants of this mix with Spanish conquerors for the cross and crown, some yet speaking in sixteenth-century Andalusian and Nahuatl idioms. Residents have been reluctant to embrace those from the “outside” and remain grounded by their faith in traditions, family, community, the church, and the land’s fecundity. With that is a depth of cultural wealth here that no outsider can easily grasp.

Long a land-based people, rocks, trees, livestock, wildlife, and produce continue to be harvested and sold for financial sustenance. And in retiring from urban centers that provided crucial jobs, children of the valley are returning to a less complex life with renewed appreciation for their distinctive culture. As well, the area's abundant natural attibutes have attracted people whose joint contributions establishing growers' cooperatives, the restoration of historic properties, cottage industries, and local news publications signify an honoring of the "old ways" while bringing an influx of possibility for a vibrant rural existence. It is in a visual fusion of memory, perception, and form, that these images offer contemplations on the social, economic, familial, and religious influences that continue to define the cultural landscape of Northern New Mexico.


Christmas Day, Chacón
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