New Mexico In Depth

Yazzie/Martinez draft plan angers Indigenous education experts and advocates

Indigenous education experts and advocates are outraged over the state’s draft action plan for improving education, which ...
New Mexico In Depth

Gila: An unpredictable river, even in the best of times

Tucked away in the southwestern corner of New Mexico, the headwaters of the Gila River pour out of mountains remote and wild. At least five other times in the past century, officials thought about ...
New Mexico In Depth

Albuquerque’s vision for non-police first responders comes down to earth

Printed in white block letters, the question stretched across billboards around Albuquerque last summer. And it still haunts the mother of two, Elaine Maestas, who helped pay to put them up. “What if ...
New Mexico In Depth

Diverting the Rio Grande into a grown-over, decades-old canal could cut New Mexico’s water debt

Decades ago, Norm Gaume, a water advocate, paddler, and former director of the Interstate Stream Commission, hauled a canoe to central New Mexico, thinking he’d float down the Rio Grande through the ...
New Mexico In Depth

As water reaches eastern Navajo communities, it brings possibilities and homecomings

For a while, Chee Smith Jr. thought he was going to have to send his father to die among strangers. His family lives at Whitehorse Lake, a Navajo chapter where, until a few years ago, roughly 550 of ...
New Mexico In Depth

Poverty fell more than a third in New Mexico due to tax changes, but there’s more to do

The first cars arrived before dawn. By 9 a.m., vehicles snaked through the food distribution event at the state fairgrounds in Albuquerque. It was a week before Christmas, and thousands of families ...
New Mexico In Depth

Lawmakers tackled New Mexico’s crisis of rural health care workers. It wasn’t enough.

As the crow flies, the Pojoaque Primary Care Center is about 20 miles from New Mexico’s 400-plus-year-old capital, Santa Fe, with its art galleries, well-known opera and tourist destinations. But it’s ...
New Mexico In Depth

Native communities urge state to embrace language, culture in Yazzie/Martinez plan

Delilah Treas and her sister went to separate schools growing up, her younger sister receiving instruction on the Mescalero Apache reservation while she attended school in nearby Ruidoso. “She knows ...
New Mexico In Depth

Thousands of Native students attend Albuquerque schools. Most will never have a Native teacher.

Growing up in Albuquerque, high school junior Brook Chavez, who is Diné, never had a Native American teacher until last year, when she took a Navajo language and culture class. There, the 16 year old ...
New Mexico In Depth

Two New Mexico Hospitals Have Similar Infant Death Rates — Until You Look at Extremely Premature Babies

Note: This story contains a description of the death of an infant. This article is copublished with ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. New Mexico In Depth is a member ...
New Mexico In Depth

Accountability, transparency needed in education spending, Native survey respondents say

State officials and schools need to collaborate better with tribes and families in the education of Native students and disclose more information to the public while strengthening community oversight ...
New Mexico In Depth

Maxeon promises solar jobs. Reality is less certain.

On a vast shrubby mesa in Southeast Albuquerque, local politicians and developers for years have envisioned a master-planned urban community with more than 10,000 homes in close proximity to a jobs ...