Survival Along the Continental Divide: An Anthology of Interviews

Foreword

ix Foreword Craig L. Newbill Between Fences was originally a project conceived by the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum on Main Street (MoMS) program as a traveling exhibition for smaller communities. The New Mexico Humanities Council (NMHC) sponsored Between Fences in seven communities across the state: Belen, Española, Ruidoso, Hobbs, Raton, Las Vegas, and Columbus. The NMHC supported the endeavor for communities “to discuss historic events that draw the state’s diverse communities of humans together and divide them from one another.” The project traveled the state from July 2005 to August 2006 with funding support from the National Endowment for the Humanities We the People initiative. When the NMHC met at its summer board meeting in July 2005 in Ruidoso, no one participating in the planning session would have predicted that one of the final outcomes for Between Fences would be the publication of Survival Along the Continental Divide: An Anthology of Interviews. All of the participants at the board meeting recognized the public-humanities potential of projects related to “fences.” Such fences included the obvious physical forms of fencing Americans had used for more than two hundred years, but also some not so visible barriers and the effects that both have on human interactions. Yet the NMHC board was also committed to public programs, which centered on discussions x / Foreword about what unites people in New Mexico—what is our shared legacy, or, as one member suggested, “We all know too well what divides us from one another. Why can’t we also discuss what brings us together as human beings?” Duringtheboardmeeting,weoutlinedplansandideastobringmany issues related to fencing to public audiences. Although we discussed and approved many formats and means of engagement, we left the meeting with the challenge of how to bring together many complicated perspectives related to fences in New Mexico. We agreed that fences and other not so obvious forms of demarcation continue to influence and determine how people define space, move across it, and relate to it (or not). At the time, the relationships and similarities among various human habitats were our primary focus. As I drove home along the Sierra Blanca mountain range and emerged in the Tularosa Basin, a Cooper’s Hawk began to circle in front of me. I thought of Jack Loeffler. Jack Loeffler is a former jazz trumpet player, reforming anarchist, and former traveling companion to Ed Abbey. A self-taught aural historian (one who also records all sounds, including the biotic and the mechanical), he has become someone I simply refer to as “the Studs Terkel of the Southwest.” I do so because he has recorded hundreds of interviews throughout North America, but primarily in the American Southwest. He is well known both as a student and as a teacher. He has just recently donated his archival record of human interactions and recordings of the biotic community to the Museum of New Mexico. There, thousands of hours of recordings will ultimately become the core of the history museum’s oral histories archives. I set out to recruit Jack to the project knowing full well that he “hated fences,” that earlier in life he was known for climbing them and occasionally cutting them down. But I also knew he was my first choice to conduct oral history workshops in the MoMS project because, at this point in his forty-plus years of studio and fieldwork, he seemed more on a path of mending fences among the wide range of people he has come to know in his endeavors as an historian, folklorist, and ethnomusicologist . Jack is a scholar not only “for the public,” but “from the public.” He has lived among Navajo sheepherders, camped with and run rivers with Foreword / xi Native people, ranchers, environmentalists, writers, poets, and photographers . He has produced an impressive number of radio programs and recorded opera, chamber, jazz, and folk concerts and performances. Making him an even better choice for this place-centered project, Jack does not hold humans apart as distinct from the places they inhabit, so the future public discussions for Between Fences would naturally involve his ongoing work on species interactions. Fortunately for the NMHC and me, Jack patiently listened to my suggestions of how we could help prepare the seven towns in the MoMS exhibition to host the project. Teaching them how to conduct oral history projects in their own communities to explore what fences mean would come first...