University of New Mexico bands haven’t practiced in person since August but are set to resume face-to-face rehearsals after Labor Day with the assistance of new, custom-made masks and socially distanced protocols. Associate professor Chad Simons, who is the associate director of bands and director ...
As right-wing violence continues to escalate across the country, a Black Lives Matter counter-protest is organizing online. Black New Mexico Movement (BNMM), a group that formed over the summer, is planning to hold a demonstration on the eve of the late rapper Tupac Shakur’s 1996 murder “to call for the same changes Tupac called for many years ago,” the Facebook event page states. Shakur was outspoken about systemic racism and police brutality, having himself been a victim of such violence.
I had the privilege — after paying $30 on top of my Disney+ subscription — of watching the new live action version of Mulan over the Labor Day weekend. And, despite much vitriolic criticism and scathing reviews, I found it to be a gorgeous, uplifting brain break during a socially distanced pandemic that has been grinding on for far too long. Though the movie has garnered a number of angry, bitter commentaries about how the movie was “too politically correct” — for insisting on having an exclusively Chinese and Mongolian cast — and the dialog was” underwhelming,” I thought it was a gorgeous cinematic feat that had less cultural appropriation and more realism than the original animated version of the movie.
SANTA FE — Zozobra and the shredded gloom of 2020 stuffed inside him burned away for the 96th time on Friday, Sept. 4, this year in front of a nearly empty field due to the coronavirus pandemic. “If there ever was a year that deserved to burn, it's 2020,” Santa Fe Mayor Alan Webber said as he kicked off the Zozobra live broadcast. “Old Man Gloom” — a 50-foot marionette of gloom incarnate — burns every year at Fort Marcy Park in Santa Fe in a storm of fireworks and flames.
Childhood education and care never ceases, especially during a pandemic. On Aug. 10, the Early Childhood Education and Care Department (ECECD) launched Moments Together, a campaign intended to provide intellectual and developmental stimulus to children under five as well as support to their caregivers through free and easily accessible online resources. The campaign was adapted from the United Way of Central New Mexico and designed by the Early Literacy Strategy Group in collaboration with the University of New Mexico’s Family Development Program, MediaDesk and New Mexico PBS.
Sandia National Laboratories employee Casey Petersen sent out a lab-wide email on Aug. 25 that contained a self-made YouTube video titled “Pushing Back on the Narrative of Modern Systemic Racism & White Privilege.” In the two weeks since the racist video was sent out, Petersen has drawn support from conservative commentators while Sandia Labs leadership have yet to publicly condemn the video. In the hour-long diatribe, Petersen makes a series of claims that anti-racism training doesn’t belong in the workplace and that systemic racism isn’t a major problem in the modern-day United States, among others.
Update: UNMPD officer Eric Peer has been placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of the University’s investigation but no final decision has been made, according to University communications officer Cinnamon Blair. Meanwhile, a petition calling for Peer to be fired has gained more than 100 signatures since being created Friday morning. In a now-deleted TikTok video, University of New Mexico Police Department officer Eric Peer recorded a man tiling a floor with a voiceover of Cartman from South Park saying “scanning for Mexicans” edited in. The video circulated on Twitter Thursday night, with some students calling for Peer to be fired. “I think the cop absolutely needs to be fired. There’s no justification to keep him on whatsoever,” Associated Students of the University of New Mexico President Pro Tempore Suha Musa told the Daily Lobo.
Poetry and pressing conversations about social justice typically go hand-in-hand, and “Dare To Speak” confirms just this. Carlos Andrés Gómez and Katie Kramer spoke to University of New Mexico students on Sept. 1 about activism through poetry through the Student Activities Center. I recently found myself reminiscing about on-campus events that wouldn’t happen this semester, prompting me to click on UNM’s Aug. 31 newsletter, “This Week at UNM.” I scrolled until I saw an activist poetry event and, thrilled to see the efforts to spark meaningful conversations among students, I immediately signed up. Kramer and Gómez are collaborators who perform poetry together at various schools and companies in order to promote inclusivity in professional settings.
On Aug. 27, perhaps the most famous football player ever to wear the cherry and silver uniform of the University of New Mexico posted an incendiary screed on Instagram denigrating NBA players’ brief strike of playoff games in protest of police brutality and structural racism. The players’ boycott was in response to the police shooting of 29-year-old Jacob Blake, a Black man, in Kenosha, Wisconsin on Aug. 23. Blake is paralyzed from the waist down, according to his lawyer, and remains hospitalized as of the publication of this article. UNM’s Black Student Union (BSU) followed with a strongly worded statement, released on social media on Sept. 2, rebuking what they said was Urlacher’s “horrific” interpretation of the events leading up to the near-fatal police shooting of Blake.
The movie theater industry has been slammed by the coronavirus pandemic on both national and local levels and has seen its enterprise on movie releases shrink. Theaters that financially survive the pandemic are considered the lucky ones. In Albuquerque, permanent closures include both Movies 8 and Movies West theaters of the Cinemark chain, leaving the city without any “one dollar theaters.” While major theater chains struggle, local theaters face similar, if not more dire, financial consequences. Keif Henly, owner of the Guild Cinema in Nob Hill, said revenue is extremely down due to COVID-19 but the online streaming service the cinema has used has helped with lost revenues.
Methods of learning and practice have changed radically for University of New Mexico fine arts students because of distancing procedures amid the coronavirus pandemic in the fall 2020 semester. As a plethora of courses are now being held primarily or solely online, students in hands-on art studies have voiced a number of concerns with the quality and value of their current education. Photography major Elizabeth Wilkinson said distanced learning affects not only the production of her art, but the nature of her creativity. "When I'm around other people, I get most of my inspiration and most of my motivation, so not having those people around has been a huge burden on my work," Wilkinson said.
Editor’s note: This article contains discussion of suicide. If you’re feeling suicidal, you are not alone. Please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or UNM’s Student Health and Counseling at 505-277-3136. On Aug. 25, famed attorney Ben Crump announced a wrongful death lawsuit regarding the November 2019 death of former University of New Mexico football player Nahje Flowers. The suit alleges that Flowers suffered from untreated and/or undiagnosed chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) — a neurological disorder common in athletes who participate in contact sports such as boxing or football — due to repeated head trauma during the course of play in his capacity as a defensive lineman for the Lobos.
DOWNTOWN — As the coronavirus pandemic continues to rage across the nation, the United States is staring down the barrel of another crisis: a wave of evictions and foreclosures. Almost half of New Mexicans have experienced a loss of employment income since the pandemic began, according to Census Bureau ...
Student Health and Counseling (SHAC) at the University of New Mexico recently released “HonesTea with SHAC HP,” a new podcast that reassures students that they are not alone in their struggles and anxieties when facing this most unusual school year amidst a pandemic. In the “Welcome Back Lobos” episode, SHAC student-employees Tiffany Martinez, Chris Naranjo and Leah Adent host the podcast (available on Spotify, Apple Music or Amazon) and discuss their thoughts and worries about the fall semester in a casual and relatable format. Martinez poses several questions to her fellow hosts about their feelings on returning to a campus absent of the educational and social opportunities many students have relied on to get through the stress that comes with school and work.
Editor’s note: This book review contains graphic depictions of violence. New Mexicans are perhaps more acutely aware of U.S. nuclear capabilities and the bomb, “Little Boy,” dropped on Hiroshima, since its predecessors were developed and tested in our own backyard. However, most people alive today will not remember the immediate aftereffects of the outsized attack on Japanese citizens that capped off the second world war. Modern awareness of the atomic bomb and the events of WWII are mostly relegated to fictionalized accounts contained in films such as “Pearl Harbor” and “Schindler’s List.” The events surrounding WWII have long since become a cultural legend, and first-person memories of these events no longer exist. We’ve simply forgotten the horrors of global war — until now.
The Black Student Alliance (BSA) at the University of New Mexico is focused more than ever on the necessity of diversity at UNM. The organization has already gotten to work alongside the start of a largely online fall semester amid the coronavirus pandemic. The BSA is open to all Black students but mainly consists of leadership from other African American student organizations on campus. Its mission is to tackle oppressive issues that affect all of UNM, according to member Ricardo Hill. This semester, the BSA is focusing on what ASUNM can do for the student body to implement inclusive legislation before they move on to working at a larger scale, like taking issues directly to the University. They are also focused on emphasizing the importance of showcasing diversity at UNM by hiring more Black faculty, and restructuring the way UNM markets to new students to include diversity in recruitment.
Life goes on as students and faculty adjust to the University of New Mexico’s hybrid semester, performing small group discussions in Zoom breakout rooms and submitting assignments from the comfort of their own bedrooms. While technological issues and network timeouts may plague students’ academic experience, on the other end of the screen, professors are also having their fair share of remote learning-based woes. Professors were given a few weeks to tailor curriculum to a virtual format last March, when the University officially shut down in response to COVID-19 cases reaching New Mexico. Instructors utilized the following summer months as an opportunity to finesse online instruction for the upcoming semester.
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