Columns

By Paula Garcia

Special to the Optic

Mora County is known for both its beauty and also for its persistent, rural poverty.

All this “return to civility” chatter since the wake of the Arizona massacre, which left six people dead and a congresswoman with brain damage, is a good thing. It’s about time we re-learned civility in our national discourse.

I realize it wasn’t hate-filled rhetoric that led to that shooting, it was a mentally deranged schizophrenic. But if that Arizona sheriff, who spoke from the heart about how the rhetoric contributed, caused the nation to tone down its hostilities toward one another, then maybe something good will have come out of it all.

Sometime in 1820, Luis María Cabeza de Baca traveled from his home in Peña Blanca to Santa Fe, and then to San Miguel del Bado.

Don Luis, as he was known, was apparently looking to expand the already large land holdings he owned in and around Peña Blanca, which is located in Sandoval County, west of La Bajada. In San Miguel he heard about lush and extensive pasture lands located along a river to the northeast, and he joined eight others from San Miguel in filing an application for a grant of those verdant vegas.

By Art Trujillo

After having struck out on my own — trying to survive by publishing my own weekly newspaper in suburban Chicago, I returned to the Meadow City, in 1964.

My smartest decision: re-enroll at Highlands University, the institution I had left five years earlier, following grades less than many-splendored. Pell Grants and lottery scholarships hadn’t been invented yet, so most students took a part-time job.