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Sister Rosetta
The Border Blog highly recommends that our readers go to this You Tube link:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xzr_GBa8qk&mode=related&search=
This has nothing whatsoever to do with the border. She’s hot, cool and happening! Groove, Take a break. Chill. La Lucha begins anew soon. In the meantime Sister Rosetta wails and is good for our heads.
New Day Viene: Fresh Paint and New Ambitions
Day 2 / Christmas Eve eve
Day 44 / Finished
by Nathan Zarate
photograph by Jaime Ojo
Artist Francisco Delgado, his brother Oswaldo, his friend, artist Mauricio Olaque and a large helping hand from Bowie High School students and neighborhood residents began the Sagrado Corazon Mural on the night of Christmas Eve eve, 2006.
The mural, with support from Sagrado Corazon, local businessmen, concerned residents and ex-residents of the Segundo Barrio,
Documentary Photography Sites
http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/Photos/online.htm
This is a good place to see some documentary photography collections.There are a lot of sites on Native Americans. That’s good. But, I find a scarcity of sites relating to Latinos, Mexican Americans or the Border. Do you have to be eliminated to get documented.
While I’m at it, here are a few more documentary sites:
http://www.maryellenmark.com
http://chnm.gmu.edu/fsa/
http://www.soros.org/initiatives/photography/focus_areas/mw/10
http://www.edelmangallery.com/misrach.htm
Not a Drop to Drink
The Border(PBS) | About the Show
Not a Drop to Drink
Produced by Matthew Sneddon, KNME-TV, Albuquerque, New Mexico 
The economies of Juarez, Mexico and its sister city, El Paso, Texas are driven by a system of assembly plants known as maquiladoras. There are more than 600 maquiladoras in Juarez, two-thirds of them owned by U.S. companies. Since the first maquiladora was built in Juarez in 1976, the population of the city has increased nearly five-fold to more than 1.25 million, making it the largest Mexican city on the border. The Rio Grande fuels Juarez and El Paso’s water supply.
However, the more than 10 million people who live in these desert communities have begun to exhaust the Rio Grande’s capacity to support them.
This segment focuses on one Rancho Anapra family faced with the realities of living in a desert community with no running water. It examines the factors that contributed to growth of this particular border region: the Rio Grande, the maquiladoras and the promise of a better life.
What We Need Now Is Chicano Art
From Cheech Marin’s Chicano Visions: American Painters On The Verge touring exhibit.
Next Stop: de Young Museum
San Francisco
July 22-October 22
(From the staff, management and hangers on of the Border-Blog: Gracias Cheech for just being cool)
Was Christ Anti American (A Real Pinko)?
The Mexican Election: More Collateral Basura
I ran into a friend at the gym of the local university. He is from Mexico’s interior ( but the north). Smart guy, a brother. The university sits smack dab on the border and looks across to Juarez from El Paso. The university has many Mexican nationals mostly from Juarez but with a significant number of citizens from the interior, a majority of Mexican Americans and a smattering of Anglos. Like many things on the Border, it is physically the United States and pragmatically in Mexico (language, culture, food).
I ask him if he voted in the recent election.
Mexico Sorts It Out: Obrador Gets The Boot
Boot/Shoe, El Paso, Texas, Highway 60/182 (Alameda Street), 2006
Text and Photography by Bruce Berman
Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has called for a ballot-by-ballot review of Sunday’s presidential vote. He says the stability of the country is at stake. Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute Wednesday began reviewing the totals from polling stations to determine whether Obrador’s rival, Felipe Calderon, really won the election Sunday. A preliminary count showed him ahead by only one percentage point. Both candidates declared victory Sunday night.
REMEMBERING LUIS
Luis Jimenez, Hondo, New Mexico, 2001
Born: July 30, 1940, El Paso, TX / Died: June 13, 2006, Hondo, NM
The first time I met Luis, back in the seventies, he came into my apartment and seemed to fill the room. It was like no room was big enough for him.
He was that big of a g
Not physically, although he was that powerful.
Not spiritually, although he did have that aura of somebody who really sees the bigger picture.
He was just big. All of it. Life. Love. Art. Humor. Seriousness. Ambition. Regular guyness.
When I first met him, and I suspect this is what most people felt upon first encounter, I felt like my life was just a lot more complete than it had been a moment before.
If you wanted to be good at something, in my case it was to be a photographer- you knew he’d be encouraging for your dream.
He was a brother. A big brother. And like a lot of big brothers, he was larger than anyone could possibly be.
And, man, was he smart.
He said what mattered. He lived He cut the crap.
He made impossibly complex Art and made it look like you could buy it from a south side El Paso Body Shop. And the Art mattered. It was about something. It was about him and our culture and his culture and the idiocy of our system and about the flora and the fauna and intuition and magic and love and joy.
Dust Surrender in El Segundo, April 20215
The Dust Storms of 2025 in West Texas (El Paso), New Mexico and Chihuahua will not soon be forgotten.
In fact I made sure of it for me by producing a book about them and about THE Dust Bowl for good measure.
The book is informative and fun and honor’s a great woman –my mom– who lived through it am shared her stories.
Check it out at Amazon: https://shorturl.at/KXIHu
THE QUEEN OF LAS CRUCES NEW MEXICO
The Royal Host, Las Cruces, New Mexico, January 2026 by Bruce Berman (Preservation Trail)
Ain’t much left.
I’m gonna save whatever is left.
You can have the rest.
NEW BOOK: HISTORY OF DUST
The HISTORY OF DUST book is out. Available on Amazon as of now.
The book explores two different major dust seasons, both record-setting: The 1930’s Dust Bowl and the 2025 tri-state Great Dust Storm, that enveloped New Mexico, West Texas and Chihuahua.
The book features the photography of Bruce Berman (2025) and the 1930’s FSA (Farm Security Administration) photographers of the Dust Bowl, including Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Jack Delano and others. With quotes and narrative the book show the similarity of the storms but points out the differences as well.
SNOW IN THE DESERT
20s car in La Mesa, New Mexico, Photograph by Bruce Berman
1st OF THE 3rd
Southside El Paso, February 27, 2024
Text and Photograph by Bruce Berman
Dodged the bullet again. Well, this time there is no ‘explainin’ it so it’s fair to say, a hand deflected the fatal bullet.
Another chance.
Haven’t been doing photography much–for myself–in recent years. Been teaching. 34 semesters and most days in between spent on working at it. Caught up with me. Every word that went out came out of somewhere, somewhere where ghosts dance, that place deep inside where who we are actually lives. I built that up for years. Can one afford to let it go, driveled out in a million repetitions? And, for what? On February 12 a bomb exploded in my chest during my first class of the day. I taught my way through the whole class while The Reaper toyed with me, as God stood by and watched me gamble. Idiot! Why would I think God would intervene for a fool?
It wasn’t my time it turns out. Not now. Not yet. Why? All the right pieces fell together on the timeline, miraculous people showed up, the traffic parted ways for Mary’s defacto EMS Hyundai, and colleague Darren, always quiet, protecting his genius, appeared. Navy man. He all but carried me to the car then went into the building and with the precision of a true leader, with his cellphone, assembled the “troops,” at the nearby hospital, the cardiac team. Mary battled noon traffic. I was in and out, almost gone. We got there and Dr. Miracle, Abdul, his Rock ‘n Roll med team, waiting, like a great band about to play the once in a lifetime anthem; Lights Out.
OKLAHOMA
3rd Street, OKC, 1974
Text and photograph by Bruce Berman
Good ole days… when every inch wasn’t being developed.
Period.
POLISH GYM SHOES 1971
July 11, 2023 No Comments
Smoking Man, diner at State and Ohio Streets, Chicago, 1971
Photograph and Text by Bruce Berman
This was the very beginning of my career, when I first realized what I wanted to be … a photographer. Not much has changed since then. This is exactly the kind of photograph I like to make, the kind of experience I like to have. Me on the prowl, encountering a person on the fringe, direct eye contact. The only thing I do now that I did not do then is to get more info about a person, really get to know them. At that time, and for many many years afterwards, I was just satisfied with getting the photograph. As time has gone on I now realize that that is incomplete. It’s the photograph and the text that matter, so that the person photographed is honored, not just used. Maybe that reflects aging, learning the world is not all about me but about me being in the world, about respect for others, maybe just about being a real documentary photographer.
So, here I am, 42 years later and I don’t know who he is, where he was from, what the name of the diner was, what he did for a living, exactly when the date was, etc., i.e., the 5Ws that any journalist knows are essential.
A detail I never noticed before, is his shoes. Believe it or not they are meaningful to me. In my old south side neighborhood, these are the kind of shoes we’d buy every few years. They were our main shoes (except for dress shoes). These were the “better ones,” because they have finished leather. Ours were the exact same 10 lace model but a cheaper brand, and the leather on those was called “rough out.”
Why am I talking about shoes?
GHOST
Ghost, Exit Zero, Anthony, Texas, May 18, 2023
Text and Photograph by Bruce Berman
This is the first photograph I’ve taken in a long time that actually means anything to me.
I’ve been a photographer for fifty-five years. So that’s kind of a sad statement, eh?
I’ve been teaching photography at New Mexico State University for the past seventeen years. It takes its toll.
All the energy I ever put into my own work and the work of the work that allowed me to live off of it gradually but inevitably goes into inspiring others to do what I used to do.
Anyone that teaches can tell you there are some great students that make it all worth it. They’ll probably also tell you there are a plethora of others that didn’t treasure the gift you gave. It’s part of “the biz.” You roll with it.
I do think there comes a time, a rubicon, where your own creative desires become endangered. It’s not just the endless repetition about the mechanics, and the history and the nuances of doing photography, it’s also the endless drivel of academia, the business of being in a university, the committees that mean nothing to me personally, seemingly a bubble of detachment from reality, the occasional obscenity of human behavior, acting so massively vicious because, the stakes are so low. Politics are vicious and low. The feeling of irrelevance can be very high.
REPEAT
Dude with a smoke,El Paso, 2022 
Vaquero with a Cigarette, Juárez, 1980
FIX FLATS
Fix Flats, Alameda Street (U.S. 80), El Paso, Texas, 2007
HATCH
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.
Isabel Gilmore: Woman of the Empty Lands
Isabel Gilmore, Salt Flat Cafe, Salt Flat, Texas, 1988
Story and photograph by Bruce Berman
There were people who grew up along two lane highways who had, at most, radios to connect them to the outer world. They lived in quietude. A car would occasionally pass on U.S. 62/180. Some would stop.
I stopped.
She put down her local paper (from Van Horn, I think it was). She made eggs, fried some hash browns and made toast. Everything she was and did was from a past time. These were moments of grace.
She was far from being a receding type, had lots of questions, and I think her main form of being informed was interviewing anyone who stopped at her cafe. She had been doing this for a long time and I think her parents did it before her.
OLD JUÁREZ/GOOD JUÁREZ
Fotografó, Sunday morning, Calle Juárez, 1981 by Bruce Berman
CONFIDENT GUY
Confident guy, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, 1974
by ©Bruce Berman
Vintage. Yeah that’s me now. Vintage.
I’ve spent the last six months digging out photos from “back when,” and designing, editing and assembling a book. It’s the second book we’re producing and is being published by. Border Blog Press.
Its called BACKLAND, a collection of photos and a few stories about my ramblings and image-making from 1975-2000.
I was gonna call it a “book about nothing,” but, as in all books, it started to have a life of its own and its become a book about something. Can’t wait for you -the world- to see it. Todd, above, is in there and a whole lot of other people and places.
It’s coming. I’ll be tooting my horn when it’s up and running.
JUAREZ LOVE
Juárez, Tarahumara mama and kids, 2012
In the middle of the Cartel War, the Tarahumaras from the Sierra Mountains of northwest Chihuahua, México, still work the streets of Juárez, selling goods, doing services, and attempting to not blend into the fabric of the 3rd largest city in México, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.
The Tarahumara Indians (self-named Rarámuri), are a tribe that inhabit the northwest of the State of Chihuahua in México.
Economic conditions through the late 20th century and early 21st, have forced a large part of the tribe to seek economic stability in the nearest major city, Juárez, México.
The Rarámuri try to retain their cultural identity in dress and custom, an uphill task in the sprawling northern city of Juárez.
For more on the Rarámuri see https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tarahumara
DOORWAY TO NOWHERE
Beautiful ruin, Tornillo, Texas, 2021
Photograph/Text by Bruce Berman
The difference between the ruins of 80 years ago and the ruins 80 years from now, is there won’t be any ruins 80 years from now. Nothing built now will endure and nowhere that it’s built will be left fallow.
Can you imagine a photographer, in 2101, stopping, putting up his/her tripod, waiting for the perfect light, on a 7 Eleven or a Carino’s or a McDonald’s that was built in 2021 or 2007 or even 1999?
It was bad to begin with! Flat. Textureless. Corporately linear and featureless. Purposeful mirthlessness.
Maybe on Mars.
NIGHT
Gas: $1.81. July 2020.
Gas: $2.97. May 2021.
What happened?
Duh.
UPDATE: March 10, 2022
Gas: $4.20.
What happened?
Same thing that happened from 2008-2016. You figure it out.
Duh.
UNCANCELLATION
Cancellation #93, Mom’s Kodak film, Chicago, 1950s
I once did an entire series of photographs called “Cancellations.”
It started because one day I was looking at a stack of shipping boxes of my photographs that I had sent to various galleries and museums (pre Internet) that had been summarily rejected. Thanks. No thanks, return to sender. There were a lot of stamps on those heavy boxes. The post office cancellations were ruthless, slashing, colorful. It’s like the post office knew I was unworthy, as well. I half jokingly wondered if the galleries hadn’t done it themselves.
I got lucky here and there, exhibited them for awhile. Dallas. Houston. Cologne, Germany. The art world thought they had found a new star. I knew I was a fraud.
ANOTHER DAY OTRO PESO
End of a semester. End of an era. My smiling mask of self confidence, of confidence-projecting, of being reassuring has wound down to a needle tip. Sat at this desk for 14 months, rising to the occasion of teaching remotely. Three semesters of little grey rectangles talking with me and me with them.
They rose to the challenge and so have I.
And I’m fried!
IRRIGATION AMOR
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).
SELFA
Dr. Selfa Chew Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor,
Department of History
at University of Texas-El Paso (UTEP)
Russell Lee
photography by Russell Lee, 1949