V.B. Price

The world as we’ve known it, based on cheap water and cheap oil, is coming to a close. Peak oil is just around the corner, and with it comes the opportunity to decentralize our energy sources with locally produced alternative fuels such as wind, solar, biomass and algae.

We can do the same with our culture that we can with our energy.

Decentralization is, in fact, the hallmark of our future. It includes a long-overdue exodus from globalized cultural elites, culture capitals, and the general denigration of local and regional culture from critics and scholars who work in bastions of global provincialism like New York, Paris and London.

Local cultural institutions – such as the National Hispanic Culture Center, The New Mexico Historical Review, UNM Press, and the Museum of Albuquerque – become ever more vital to cultural continuity in an age of financial chaos and social transition such as ours.

New Mexicans have a long tradition of honoring the arts, architecture, crafts, literature and music of our state. Because of the current economic and energy crises, we should be focusing our appreciation on local talent more than ever.

Right now, for instance, four major cultural achievements are available to us all. The National Hispanic Cultural Center has just published a wonderful book, “Barelas a Través de Los Años: A Pictorial History,” with an enlightening foreword by Carlos Vasquez, the NHCC’s director of history and literary arts. This is a fascinating history of one of the most enduring and important areas of our city. For Albuquerqueans who want to know about the place they live, this book is a must.

Photographs and sidebars arranged and written by Mo Palmer span the heydays of railroading in Barelas, where the Santa Fe Railroad was a major employer. Schools, roadways, boxers, church history, political leadership and commerce are all documented in this splendid work.

The New Mexico Historical Review has been a mainstay of local history for decades, and anyone interested in New Mexico should subscribe. The 2010 winter edition has book reviews on subjects ranging from “Continuity and Change in Navajo Women’s Lives” to “The Power of the Zoot: Youth Culture and Resistance during World War II.” One fascinating essay discusses the Bosque Farms as a “federal resettlement project” in the mid-1930s, and another tells the story of Clyde and Carrie Tingley and the creation of the Tingley hospital for “crippled children.”

The Albuquerque Museum of Art & History recently opened its second major art exhibition called “Albuquerque Now,” a gorgeous and elegantly curated collection by local artists in a wide range of media. It puts the lie to the idea that only “global culture centers” have world-class artists producing world-class work.

And finally, this month UNM Press is publishing another collection of poems by the beloved poet of the Rio Puerco Valley, Nasario Garcia, called “Bolitas de Oro” (“My Marble Playing Days”). Garcia’s poems capture the rural life in the farming town of Guadalupe, near Cabizon, in the l940s and ’50s. Full of warmth, humor and insight, these poems should be in every New Mexican’s personal library.

By honoring and supporting local talent, New Mexicans have long been in the forefront of helping to dismantle  the monopoly of global cultural elites.