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Category: Front Page News Front Page News
Published: 30 October 2017 30 October 2017

Photos and article by Hallie Richwine

Turn On, Tune In, Act Up, the community storytelling project presented by the New Mexico History Museum Palace of the Governors and Viewpoint Productions, came to WNMU’s Miller Library on Wednesday, October 25, 2017.

Judy Goldberg, co-facilitator of the project, opened the panel-style presentation and explained that Silver City was one of only five communities chosen, along with Las Vegas, Taos, Dixon, and Placitas. The theme of counterculture weaves throughout everyone’s story and the project focused on the iconic ethos of the 1960s and 1970s, a time of great strife and conflict but also an amazing time for people to say, “I’m not part of this system”, and to choose their own lifestyle and identity.

The nine residents of Silver City chosen to participate in the event embody that spirit, beginning with the first speaker, Linda Danielson. Danielson is one of six siblings, a mother of three children, grandmother of two children, and has her Master’s degree in art education and art therapy. She was born in Los Angeles in 1951 to a mother under the influence of twilight sleep, a mix of opium and nightshade that they found later made the birthing mothers hallucinate wildly. The long hard labor led her mother to believe her child was sent to Earth to harm her and their relationship suffered. Danielson moved to Alaska with her family at age six. Her parents had “land grab fever” and her thoughts were simply that if she could get away from her mother she could find peace. In 1964 Danielson lived through the great Alaska earthquake. During the 9.2 magnitude shift she found herself home alone on the mountain and something deep inside her said to build a temporary shelter. She made a lean-to and sat upon the earth as the event took place. Her consciousness shifted and she found herself existing without movement, disappearing into herself. She woke temporarily in the form of a wolf, with her memory as clear as getting up just a moment ago, and felt herself running through the forest. She woke again singing and naked in a clearing as people began to appear around her. Then as clear as her other thoughts she came back into herself, got back up, and returned to her chores. Danielson didn’t tell anyone about her experience until she was 32 and it still remains vivid to this day.

Art Martinez was the second speaker, professor emeritus of political science after thirty years of classroom teaching. Martinez volunteered to go on a 1800 mile trip when he was studying at the University of Denver. The group travelled to Atlanta to a complex of universities - historical, traditional, African American colleges. There were eleven students; one Chicano, two African Americans, an Indian, and seven Anglos. They arrived in Atlanta at Morehouse College and were greeted by students that would help them get around during their stay.

Martinez said, “It was an indelible remembrance, the sun was setting after a day with students and ministers from their respective organizations. We gathered in a meeting room while the sun was going down and it was getting dark and they gave each one of us a candle which we lit. We heard a prayer and held hands and we began to sway to ‘We Shall Overcome’. There I was with a white person and a black person and in fact, right there, we were in the Civil Rights movement of the United States.”

Martinez said the idea was to be there and learn about what was going on so they could work to do something. The guides took the students to Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta and met Martin Luther King, Sr. who gave them an inspiring message. Martinez said while they were listening they were making plans for marches and boycotts and hoping that all of that courage and strength would carry over to other movements. Martinez said, “it is true, we are all together and we do have the courage.”

Following Martinez was Bea McKinney, a newcomer to Silver City who loves promoting “good people doing good things for our communities”. McKinney said all her life she has been blessed, especially by her mother who put a lot of restrictions on her and also suggested she become a teacher.  In the mid-60s while Bea was completing  her degree in Huntsville TX, Bea noticed there were  white and "colored" drinking fountains and protests in the community. After graduation she found herself in Corpus Christi in a one story red brick schoolhouse that was hot in the summer and cold in the winter. There were few white students but Corpus Christi had closed the other, “colored”, school after the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling. The school was in rough shape and was eventually condemned and students began going to the former “colored” school and McKinney saw some of her students come to class bloodied after having to come into a different neighborhood. Times were changing and, newly married, her husband was up for the draft and joined the National Guard. Another thing that McKinney said “changed her life” was the gaining popularity of the birth control pill, and her mother, doctor, and priest all told her to “go for it.” Simon and Garfunkel were on the radio, Vietnam was on the television, and amidst the waves of change McKinney will cherish the good times, particularly her time at Texas A and I University alongside Carmen Lomas Garza and Amado Maurilio Pena.

Felipe Ortego y Gasca followed McKinney, introduced as the “Chicano from Chicago.” Ortego was born in Illinois but grew up in San Antonio, TX. He began his story by reminding the audience that “the unexpected reveals treasures that we are not aware of,” and that life is like Pandora’s box. In San Antonio there were White, Black, and Mexican/Native American schools, but he found most of his teachers were English-speaking and was held back. Ortego joined the Marines at 17, never completing high school, and served the United States in World War II. After the war he spent some time in the steel mills of Pittsburgh, PA before using the GI bill and attending college where he perhaps ironically studied English and even pursued his doctorate degree. In 1966, at the age of 40, he was at the University of New Mexico and had the intent to present a dissertation on Chaucer when Louis Bransford approached him and asked that he organize a course on Mexican American literature. Ortego agreed, and that course changed his life. His dissertation was delayed and the topic changed from Chaucer to the backgrounds of Mexican American literature. Three million people with extensive literatures were represented and his article, “The Chicano Renaissance”, was published in 1971 and still remains a keystone article in studying Chicano and Mexican American literature.

Then Cordelia Rose spoke. The Englishwoman who left midtown Manhattan for Whitewater Mesa. Rose recalled the first moment in life when she didn’t feel like a square peg, sitting with her uncle who happened to be an artist. “You don’t have to do what’s expected of you,” he told her. She didn’t want to be a secretary, so she went to a fashion house. She became the assistant to the keeper of textiles and soon after the rebel within her resurfaced and she broke the rules in order to wear pants to work. Women of the time had to wear skirts and appropriate hosiery, without “runs” or “ladders.” Rose dressed mannequins and laddered her stockings often, leading to her ability to wear trousers in the workplace. Later she met her husband, Mike Rose, and they went to Kenya. Rose learned Swahili so she could talk to people in their own language. They lived in a mud hut off the grid where they met peace corps volunteers, surfers, and American hippies. Rose was inspired by the activism she saw and empathized with the need to do so. In 1975 the Roses moved to Manhattan with 130 dollars where Cordelia began working for the Smithsonian. She volunteered at a gay men’s health center after seeing so many artists dying from AIDS. She retired to New Mexico in 2000 and still considers herself an activist.

Next to share their story was Susan Golightly, who identified as part of the beat generation. Golightly said growing up they were concerned about creating their own values but then were absorbed by the broader hippie culture. She said even though the period has been romanticized, she saw a lot of tragedy and “crash and burn.” Golightly had travelled to San Francisco and was surprised to find the old commune she had once been a part of. It had moved from time to time but she settled back in. In the spirit of defining themselves and going wherever life took them, the group collected Christmas trees shortly after the holiday and put them all in one room, calling it the “Forest Room”. One night a tiny girl, maybe fifteen, crawled under the trees and stayed with her. Little Patty was her name, and she travelled with Golightly and two friends from San Francisco back to New York City. When they got to Stockton, CA, their friend Dennis taught them how to catch a freight train. Tossing a mattress onto an open car and leaping on top, they rode across the country, stopping in Austin, TX where the group found some work painting a living room. As they were painting, people started showing up, then the Hells Angels, then maybe thirty people. The next thing they knew a gun went off and everyone ended up in jail. When they got out, Little Patty had stop communicating in English and just made buzzing sounds. Golightly joined in and they drove their friend crazy as they travelled. Once they reached Chicago even Dennis started buzzing. The group stayed there about two weeks. An abandoned gurney was in the apartment and they took turns laying on it, pretending to be dead. “We really just let ourselves go as an experiment,” Golightly said as she remembered continuing on to New York, living on the street and practicing survival sex. She escaped in the middle of the night and fled south, never to see Little Patty again, but she remains in her heart today.

Earseye Ross, pastor of the Brewer Hill Missionary Baptist Church, spoke after Golightly. Ross graduated from high school in 1965, worked on a plantation, participated in sit-ins, marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., and met Rosa Parks only to find himself asking, “What am I going to do?” At one time Ross even entertained the idea of joining the Black Panther movement. His mother told him it was a bad idea, because if they didn’t kill him, she would. Around that time he received a divine message that he would be preaching the gospel, which he ignored, and his mother suggested he visit his cousin whom Ross had marched with before. Instead his cousin shared a parable with him that stuck with him over the years. He left Shreveport, IA and travelled to Los Angeles, CA, where began a short career of drinking and chasing girls. He even spent time playing baseball. He still had the parable his cousin shared with him in his head and he decided to pursue ministry and become ordained. He moved to Albuquerque and started working among Baptists in New Mexico, and became a pastor in Silver City, NM in 1977. The parable is still with him: in a little town there was a mandate that all the residents gather on Sundays at 3 PM to ask questions of the wise man. A group of teens wanted to avoid the gathering and made a plan to trick the wise man. They caught a bird and put in a boy’s hands, and decided they would ask the wise man if the bird were alive or dead. If he said, “alive,” the boy would crush the bird, and if he said, “dead,” the boy would let it fly free. They went to the gathering and asked the wise man and he said, “I don’t know - but what I do know is this - the destiny of that bird is in your hands.”

The next presenter was Cindy Renee Provencio, a lifelong resident of Grant County who recently received her Master’s degree in art. Provencio has had aninterest in local segregation after having an assignment on Apartheid in junior high. She told her grandfather about the project and he asked, “Did you know Hurley was segregated?” Over time Provencio did more research on the topic, including interviewing her grandparents her senior year of high school. Her grandfather grew up in Hurley and had very different views than her grandmother, who grew up in Bayard. Provencio had heard stories of some students who were abused and mistreated for speaking spanish in the classroom. She even interviewed a student whose brother was the teacher’s pet while she was being harassed, and she learned that the brother was light skinned. Provencio took that to heart and realized part of her grandmother’s experience was her fair skin. This was when she realized that colorism was present in Grant County. She refused to be ashamed of her heritage but recognized the difficulty in racially identifying. With terms like Chicano, Mexican American, Mexicano, Latino - for me I always identified as Hispanic, like the forms, but even that refers to a mix of white Spaniard, Native American, and African American.” Provencio said she started checking more than one box, “if you don’t check anything you are counted as white,” and this leads to invisibility. “My great grandmother always identified as “pura Mexicana,” and she always spoke to us in Spanish.” Provencio thought her great grandmother didn’t know English and found out when she was older that she did. She kept Spanish alive in their family so it would not be forgotten, “and that is why, now, in honor of my great-grandmother, I will identify as pura Mexicana.”

The last speaker of the project was Gilda Baeza-Ortego, a native of El Paso, TX, who celebrated her 65th birthday recently and said she felt reflective. Baeza-Ortego went to high school in the late sixties and said there were two major media outlets of the time: radio and television. She loved the radio, and the songs it brought her like “Turn, Turn, Turn” by the Byrds. She remembered television programmes during the Vietnam war and the casualty list that followed them. Her love of words drew her to being a librarian and one of her first projects was to collect “fugitive” literature for ethnic and women’s studies programs. Baeza-Ortego found that no one was publishing it. The opinion was that those groups couldn’t possibly write, let alone read, so they weren’t publishing. Her mission became going to rallies, coffee shops, and up to the authors directly to receive copies, which are now primary sources and worth a lot of money. Fast forward to Silver City, NM in the present, where she recently interviewed applicants and realized how similar their answers were to hers years ago. “That’s when I found myself in a profound moment, feeling I’ve come full circle, and I’m ready to pass the torch.”

The unique storytelling opportunity was held in concert with the New Mexico History Museum Palace of the Governor’s exhibit, “Voices of Counterculture in the Southwest,” showing through February 11, 2018.