On The Edge of the Edge – The U.S. – Mexico Border
Tony Roma’s, Hatch, NM (SVNM/Small Village New Mexico Project),
March 2022 by Bruce Berman
Text and photography by Bruce Berman
The SVNM Project is a group documentary project done by the students (and professor) of the photojournalism program in the Journalism and Media Studies Department at the New Mexico State University (NMSU). The project is an ongoing project done over the past ten years.
It is a document of the Rio Grande river valley of southern New Mexico.
Amor for the irrigation ditch, Mesilla Valley, October 2020
Amor is where you find it.
The Mesilla Valley is known for its high quality cotton production, its incomparable Chile and, increasingly, its huge pecan orchards with a winery thrown in here and there.
The valley straddles the path of Camino Real, the Royal Road of the Spaniards, as they marched to the north, conquering (and being defeated, notably by the fierce and excellent cavalry of the Comanches of the Empire of the Comancheria).
CORRECTION:
Just got a very welcome announcement from a Border Blog viewer. He pointed out that the above image is a representation of a pistachio not a pecan.
Correct!
We don’t have much of a defense, but really, when this was posted on April 24, your Border Blog photographer, Bruce Berman, wasn’t much Bruce Berman either. That’s what happens when one “does what one has got to do as opposed to doing what you do.”
We at Border Blog are pleased to announce that the real Bruce Berman is back, on the border, three blocks from the bridge, in his decaying ruin, tape -metaphorically- over his mouth, no longer talking about photography but living his life, and making images that, hopefully, will do, as we wrote almost a decade ago, stating our intention to (see the “About” tab above), “…cover the news, opinions and culture of the 2000 mile border of Mexico and the United States, concentrating on the epicenter of El Paso and Juarez. The Border Blog is not meant to be a news source as much as it is meant to be a news ‘feel’.”
Thank you MB and thank you Bruce (but tsk tsk on your caption!).
-The Editors
Las Cruces –Anything else? There’s still space.
Las Cruces New Mexico on New Year’s Eve 2009.
Turtle, 17, born and raised in this southern New Mexico town.
Apache.
Defiant and alive.
It was as good as Times Square.
Better.
2010 Resolutions?
Nah.
Just keep looking.
Juke boxes.
They’re a “warm fuzzy,” no matter how you cut it.
No?
I just wanna dance. It’s the holidays.
Time to dance. And stare at the wall (and the Web) and have luxurious long lunches (and personally enriching) with good friends, now, in the rush of my life, long overlooked.
I’m in New Mexico and there’s a lot of land here, still. Lots of space to dance, and write and spin and dream…in New Mexico, lots of space to scream at the sky and to yell, “No mas el mundo, basta!”
He has been raising these birds since he was a teenager. Fighters are they, he and his birds.
Now, cockfighting is illegal in New Mexico. Outlawed. “Civility,” has come to the funklands. God help us. Now come the thiefs with pens. They been fighting this since Billy the kid.
The rooster man keeps raising his birds. Doesn’t know what else to do.
He speaks of the “Old Man,” and “Ralph,” “Juan Pedro,”and the others. Each has a name. There are hundreds.
When he speaks, he says their names softly, a Lover’s murmur whispering his loves’ names.
Wary eyes.
Everyone’s wary, in El Paso/Juarez, these days. The border is at war, with itself, with it’s two yin/yang sides, with the Interiors of each of the two sides.
Everyone’s wondering where it’ll end, where they will fall on the have and have not scale, what’ll be left of this little rough Shangri La (not a Shangri La of paradise but a refuge for those who have fallen from paradise. Sort of a suburb of Shangri La).
