Columns

On the morning of Jan. 6, the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors will host a first-day-of-issue event on behalf of the U.S. Postal Service and its New Mexico Centennial stamp. That we’re kicking off a year of Centennial activities at the History Museum with a stamp-related event delights my historian sensibilities by inviting New Mexico’s citizens to take part in a letter-writing project.

Like Banquo’s Ghost, “it will not down.” The Stapleton-Espinoza-Gov. Martinez brouhaha keeps appearing in the press and on TV. Since it seems everybody has had a turn, here’s mine:

To review: Angry at KRQE’s Larry Barker for his investigative piece, the Albuquerque Democrat State Rep. Sheryl Williams Stapleton, directed some of her umbrage at a Republican representative, Nora Espinoza, from the southern part of the state, accusing her of “carrying water for the Mexican on the fourth floor.”

After the railroad arrived in 1879 and east Las Vegas began to grow, its Catholic population decided to establish a church on the eastside,  apart from Our Lady of Sorrows.  

They enlisted  the support of the Italian  priests who had earlier founded the Jesuit College in Old Town, and by the early 1880s, the Rev. Blasé Antonio Schifinni of the Jesuit College began holding religious services in a building on Railroad Avenue. (The history of the Jesuit College appears in  Nuestra Historia, June  2011.)

A lot of you can relate to the fact that I come from a large family. My dear ol’ ma (I use “ma” to honor my hillbilly roots) gave birth to five boys in eight years, and a sixth popped out eight years after that. Then my parents “adopted” a seventh son who happened to come home with one of my brothers over a holiday break and “adopted” us.