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Drive east on I-40 for about two hours, and there’s a tiny town that chair of the UNM Spanish department Enrique Lamadrid does not want to be left in the dust: Santa Rosa.
Lamadrid helped lead “Virtual History: Community in the Digital Age,” a graduate certificate program that took place in June, which documents and preserves many of New Mexico’s smaller towns and communities.
UNM students spent four days in Santa Rosa, taking photos and interviewing local citizens about the town’s history. Lamadrid said the program’s effort to preserve New Mexico’s history is needed.
“We have a really bad habit here in America of tearing our history down,” Lamadrid said. “You can’t just let things fall down anymore. We’re going to hang on to what we got.”
Santa Rosa is a small railroad town, originally built to connect trains that traveled from El Paso, Texas to Chicago, and later thrived as a Route 66 tourist town. While the popularity of Route 66 has come and gone, Lamadrid said the town’s beauty never left.
“One of the great things for me was just waking up at a totally silent place — where the birds, they get going at about five in the morning — there with all of the animalitas,” he said. “It was just a really fun place to camp and get out of the urban setting, just by feeling the spirit of that place.”
Interdisciplinary Film and Digital Media director Miguel Gandert said the program helps architecture and history students learn and contribute to their respective career fields.
“What’s exciting to me is that students are going out, they’re generating new information in their field, and then they’re able to share that with the rest of the world,” Gandert said. “It brings the University and the community together.”
Gandert has helped the group document its work through online media, such as blogs and Google Earth. Anyone can search for Santa Rosa on Google Earth and find photos of the town, as well as read written interviews with the locals. Gandert said this push toward digital historical preservation promotes awareness of the group’s effort.
“When we put things in archives and libraries, it’s kind of like a ‘so what?’ mentality,” he said. “Whereas when we make it available to the community, it helps the community.”
Student Samuel Sisneros said the program not only helped him develop as a historian, but also helped him uncover the history of his family. Sisneros’ family ties run deep into the history of Santa Rosa. His great grandparents migrated there, following the Pecos River. Ten miles outside of Santa Rosa they built a ranch, where they were sheep herders.
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“They sustained themselves up there, farming and sheep herding and just using the resources they had as far as gathering water and irrigation without the help of rain,” Sisneros said.
He said his great grandparents’ migration to Santa Rosa is just one of many migration stories in the Santa Rosa community.
“It’s just kind of wonderful that I see my family in a lot of these resources. I see their names; I run across my own family, my ancestors’ names in document,” Sisneros said.
Sisneros said he has had a difficult time learning the technology used by the program, but he said the final product will help him and other students reach a larger audience.
“The learning curve to that has been really high for me, but I’m learning,” he said. “I think that’s going to help me tell the story I’m going to tell, between my personal story and the story of Santa Rosa.”
Students in the program will turn in their final projects on Aug. 25.
