Mirage Spring 2022

SPRING 2022

M A G A Z I N E THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO I ALUMNI ASSOCIATION

A League of Her Own Rachel Balkovec (’09 BS) makes baseball history

Contents 5

LETTERS

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ALBUM Keeping current with classmates

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MESSAGE

From UNM President Garnett S. Stokes

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CAMPUS CONNECTIONS What’s going on around campus

12 PICTURE PERFECT Engineering alum unlocked the key to Zoom and FaceTime

By Kimberly Delker

16 BIG LEAGUE

Jimmy Santiago Baca (’84 BA)

By Leslie Linthicum

24 PROFESSOR HILLERMAN New biography includes author Tony Hillerman’s chapter as a journalism teacher at UNM

28 LOOKING GOOD New buildings, remodels bring new life to campus

32 BRINGING THE WINS Coach Heather Dyche takes UNM soccer to new heights

By Glen Rosales

Photo: UNM

Former Lobo catcher climbs the MLB ladder

By Leslie Linthicum

20 FROM PRISON TO POET

A chat with

The new Physics & Astronomy and Interdisciplinary Sciences Building puts a modern interpretation on the portal.

On the cover: Rachel Balkovec (’09 BS) takes the manager reins for the Tampa Tarpons, a New York Yankees feeder team.

Photo: Courtesy New York Yankees

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MIRAGE MAGAZINE

Mirage was the title of the University of New Mexico yearbook until its final edition in 1978. The title was then adopted by the alumni magazine, which continues to publish vignettes about UNM graduates and news of the University.

M A G A Z I N E

34 SHELF LIFE

42 ALUMNI NETWORK

Spring 2022, Volume 42, Number 1

Books by UNM alumni

Did our cameras catch you at an alumni event?

The University of New Mexico

39 ALUMNI CALENDAR

41 FROM THE VEEP A message from Alumni Association’s Connie Beimer

43 IN MEMORIAM 47 MY ALUMNI STORY It’s Joshua Whitman

Garnett S. Stokes, President Connie Beimer, Vice President, Alumni Relations, Executive Director Alumni Association UNM Alumni Association Executive Committee Mike Silva (’95 BA) President Amy Miller (’85 BA, ’93 MPA) President-Elect Chad Cooper (’01 MBA) Past President Joe Ortiz (’14 BBA) Treasurer Connie Beimer (’76 BA, ’79 MPA) Secretary Appointed Members Kenneth Armijo (’05 BS, ’08 MS, ’11 PhD) Yasine Armstrong (’05 MA) Sandra Begay (’87 BS) Mark Herman (’91 BA, ’09 MBA) P. Michael Padilla (’03 BBA, ’07 MBA) Alexis Tappan (’99 BA, ’17 MA) Mirage Editorial Connie Beimer, Vice President Leslie Linthicum, Editor Wayne Scheiner & Company, Graphic Design

Photo: James McGrath Morris

Address correspondence to MirageEditor@unm.edu or The University of New Mexico Alumni Association, MSC 01-1160, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 87131-0001. You can also contact us at (505) 277-5808.

Web: UNMAlumni.com Facebook: Facebook.com/UNMAlumni Instagram: Instagram.com/UNMAlumni Flickr: Flickr.com/UNMAlumni Twitter: @UNMAlumni

Tony Hillerman at University of Oklahoma in 1946.

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Our UNM Legacy

“I have been given the opportunity here at the end of my life to invest in the future and to divest from the past: To invest in UNM’s Sustainability Studies Program, which will help new generations of students confront, understand and act given the coming serious consequences of climate change and to personally divest from my own complicities and excesses that have caused harm to our planet and future generations.”

- Laurence Cotter (MA ‘98)

Laurence made a generous endowed gift that will support the Sustainability Studies Program now and later - through a gift in his estate. The gift is in honor of his late wife Rosalind Womack. For information about creating a lasting legacy at UNM or to share that you have already done so, please contact Bonnie McLeskey at (505) 313-7610 or Bonnie.McLeskey@unmfund.org.

Look forward by giving back.

@UNMFund

UNMFoundation

@UNMFund

505-313-7600

Letters to the editor FROM THE EDITOR:

D

o you know the feeling when you run into a friend you haven’t seen in a while and think, Wow, you’re looking great!

Maybe you’ve had the same feeling returning to UNM after months and months of COVID coop-up.

The campus is looking fabulous, with some stunning new buildings, some spectacular renovated spaces and meticulously groomed grounds.

If you can’t come to campus, we hope you enjoy the photos in these pages of some of the recent additions and renovations and a discussion of how a campus with an architectural identity so steeped in Pueblo Revival style is making its way into the 21st century.

Also inside we catch up with alumna Rachel Balkovec, who played catcher on the Lobos softball team in the 2000s and has made her way up the ladder of Major League Baseball. Since signing on with the New York Yankees, Balkovec’s career has resembled a hard-hit homer. She already had a number of “first woman” accolades before the most recent Big League promotion: First female manager.

Balkovec has been determined, patient and relentlessly upbeat, and we couldn’t be more proud to call her a Lobo.

At least two astute readers of Mirage readers caught an error in my letter in the Fall 2021 issue. In introducing the Q&A with alumna Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, I pointed to the historic nature of her appointment. And while it’s true that she is the first Native American to serve in the post, she is the third, not the second, New Mexican to do so.

The late Manuel Lujan, Jr., a New Mexico native, served from 1989 to 1993.

But the secretary who slipped my mind was the quite unforgettable Albert B. Fall.

Since we’re correcting the record here, how about a nice history lesson?

Fall, born in Kentucky and raised in Tennessee, settled in Las Cruces and became a teacher and lawyer and eventually a U.S. senator representing New Mexico.

President Warren G. Harding putt Fall in charge of Interior in 1921 and just a year later Fall was charged with giving two of his friends valuable oil leases in land under his department’s control in exchange for bribes. The leases were in the Teapot Dome oil field in, Wyoming, which is why the scandal that drove Fall from government and into prison was called the Teapot Dome Scandal.

We’d very much like to hear your thoughts on the new website. You can email me at MirageEditor@unm.edu or alumni@unm.edu.

Stay safe and thanks for reading!

Leslie Linthicum MirageEditor@unm.edu

Look for a friend on every page!

Send your alumni news to Mirage Editor, The University of New Mexico Alumni Association, MSC 01-1160, 1 University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, 87131-0001.

Or better yet, email your news to Alumni@unm.edu. Please include your middle name or initial and tell us where you’re living now.

Deadlines: Spring deadline: January 1 Fall deadline: June 1 1950s James V. Neely (’51 BSME, ’57 MS), Denver, Colo., has published “Beauty is My God.” 1960s Charles M. Atkinson (’63 BFA), Würzburg, Germany, was conferred the degree of doctor honoris causa by the University of Würzburg for his research in the field of medieval music.

Michael J. Mullins (’69 BBA), Albuquerque, and his wife, Shirley Mullins, celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary on October 9.

Malcolm K. Shuman (’69 MA), Baton Rouge, La., along with his team of archaeologists, surveyed and uncovered a 600- to 800-year-old Native American mound, unearthing materials such as pottery, stone artifacts and tools for future study and preservation.

1970s Virginia Sue Cleveland (’70 BAED), Rio Rancho, N.M., was inducted into the New Mexico Coalition of Educational Leaders Hall of Fame.

Anne M. Hillerman (’72 BA), Santa Fe, N.M., won the 2021 Rounders award, which is presented by the New Mexico Department of Agriculture. Given in recognition of her writing, the Rounders award is presented to those who live, promote and articulate the Western way of life.

Carla Damler Ward (’72 BS), Sandia Park, N.M., has published “The Tinker of Tinkertown.”

Jeanette J. Williams (’72 MA), Dallas, Texas, featured her artwork of cats and dogs at the Gallery With a Cause, located at the New Mexico Cancer Center.

Stanley M. Hordes (’73 MA), Albuquerque, along with his wife Helen Hordes, celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary on June 20.

Veronica C. Garcia (’74 BAED, ’80MA, ’03 EDD), Albuquerque, retired as superintendent of Santa Fe Public Schools after serving 48 years in the New Mexico education system.

Martin J. Chavez (’75 BUS), Albuquerque, former mayor of Albuquerque, has been appointed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham as the state’s new infrastructure advisor.

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Good things happen when we work together.

We’re proud to partner with The University of New Mexico Alumni Association. To learn more libertymutual.com/nmalumni.

Coverage provided and underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company or its subsidiaries or affiliates, 175 Berkeley Street, Boston, MA 02116. Equal Housing Insurer. ©2019 Liberty Mutual Insurance 12564942

History and Heritage

T

here’s nothing quite as beautiful as UNM campuses in their Spring colors. Whether it’s the verdant, high mountain greens of Los Alamos and Taos, the stunning desert hues of Gallup and Valencia, or the vibrant grounds and gorgeous landscapes of Albuquerque, Lobos are truly lucky to stroll some of the most striking campuses anywhere.

Our grounds are made all the more stunning by the thought and design that has gone into the so many of our buildings and facilities. For over 130 years, The University of New Mexico has been a work in progress, with facilities added or improved regularly to reflect the growing needs of the Lobo community, as well as to contain the latest new technology or to make our buildings more energy efficient.

Across our campuses, we work to design and construct our facilities in a manner that makes them at home in their respective communities. At our oldest campus in Albuquerque, in fact, we still ask that our facilities be designed and constructed in a manner reflecting the Pueblo Revival style introduced on campus in the early 1900s by UNM President William G. Tight, and emphatically adopted by campus architect John Gaw Meem in the 1930s. As President, I have the privilege of living in University House, one of the finest examples of the Pueblo Revival style anywhere — so much so, in fact, that it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1987. It’s this embrace of the Pueblo Revival style that gives even our most modern buildings a unique look that reflects the culture of our region and gives UNM its unique charm.

Intrigued? I hope so; it’s all part of our shared history and heritage as Lobos. And in this issue of Mirage, you’ll learn more about some of our newest — and oldest! — buildings, with some stunning photos guaranteed to make you look at some familiar sights with new eyes. And if it’s been a while since you’ve visited campus, this issue may inspire you to come back, take a walk, and take a look around again at a place you as alumni always get to call home.

The best thing about our campuses, however, will always be our Lobo students, faculty, staff and alumni who continue to make every day better and memorable. As we continue to work through the pandemic and press forward into the future, remember that it is your support and enthusiasm that give The University of New Mexico its truly unique character.

Regards,

Garnett S. Stokes President, The University of New Mexico

Walter Nygard (’75 BA), Teaneck, N.J., studio manager for Frontline Paper, was one of the artists featured in “This is Not a War Story,” currently streaming on HBO Max. Joy Harjo (’76 BA), Tulsa, Okla., has become the second person in history to serve three terms as the United States Poet Laureate.

She has recently published “Poet Warrior: A Memoir.”

Richard J. Bando (’79 BSCIS), and Jeanne Bando, Venice, Fla., celebrated 50 years of marriage on July 31.

1980s Clyde F. Aragon (’80 BA), Albuquerque, has published “Behind the Electric Iron Curtain.”

Sandra Davis Ferris (’80 MS), Edgewood, N.M., celebrated her 60th wedding anniversary with husband Charles Ferris.

Richard G. Marlink (’80 DM), Princeton, N.J., is among the newest additions to the Scientific Advisory Board of First Wave BioPharma, Inc., specializing in clinical development of treatments for gastrointestinal diseases.

Darby L. Karchut (’82 BA), Colorado Springs, Colo., won the 2021 High Plains Award for her novel “On a Good Horse.”

John A. Garcia (’83 BBA), Albuquerque, is the new secretary of the New Mexico General Services Department.

Mike A. Hamman (’83 BSCE), Albuquerque, was appointed by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham as the state’s water advisor. In this role he will be working to ensure the state’s water infrastructure is prepared for the effects of climate change and ensure the state implements responsible water management practices.

Audie E. Hittle (’83 BSEE), Aldie, Va., chief architect and chief technology officer at ManTech, an IT solutions firm, was named one of Potomac Officers Club’s Five GovCon Chief Architects to Watch.

Susan Musgrave (’83 MBA), Albuquerque, was named senior vice president of DOE Mission Support Services for Westech International, Inc. Jesus M. Quinones (’83 MA), Albuquerque, retired after teaching Spanish for 25 years at Albuquerque Public Schools.

Mary-Margaret “Maggie” Brandt (’84 BS, ’90 MD), Oklahoma City, Okla., was named #VeteranOfTheDay by blogs.va.gov on December 16, 2021. During her military career, she received four commendation medals. Since retiring at the rank of colonel, she has served as professor and burn director at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center.

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Campus Connections

Camille Carey

NEW LAW DEAN

Camille Carey, the vice dean and associate dean for Academic Affairs at the UNM School of Law, was named the school’s new dean after a nationwide search and will assume the new role in July.

“The UNM School of Law has an incredible responsibility to the state of New Mexico,” Carey said. “As the state’s only law school, we are accountable to the people of this state.

We graduate most of New Mexico’s lawyers and many of the state’s policy makers and leaders. We also serve an important role in opening the doors of the law school so that our student body and our graduates reflect the diversity of our state.”

Carey began her teaching career at Yale Law School, where she established and taught in the Domestic Violence Clinic. She developed curriculum for and co-taught a weekly seminar on legal, social and policy issues involved in domestic violence law. She also supervised student representation in

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immigration, family law, public benefits, housing, tort and other civil areas.

Carey joined the UNM law faculty in 2009 and holds the Karelitz Chair in Evidence and Procedure. She has taught clinic, torts, advanced torts, civil procedure, immigrants’ rights and domestic violence law.

“This law school has a community unlike any other law school in the country,” she said. “It’s very special. We have a committed community of faculty, staff and students and a large network of devoted alumni. The law school also has special relationships with tribes, local governments, state government, legislators, alumni and judges. I am excited to create more opportunities to bring our community together.”

Carey replaces Professor Sergio Pareja, who served as dean for more than six years.

CANNABIS CASH

Researchers from UNM and California Polytechnic University have found increased employment, especially in manufacturing, following the opening of legal recreational cannabis dispensaries.

They found no evidence of declines in worker productivity, suggesting that any negative effects from cannabis legalization are outweighed by the job growth the new markets they create.

In a recent study, “The Effects of Recreational Cannabis Access on Labor Markets: Evidence from Colorado,” published in the IZA Journal of Labor Economics, authors Avinandan Chakraborty and Sarah Stith from UNM’s Department of Economics and Jacqueline Doremus from the Department of Economics at California Poly in San Luis Obispo found that unemployment fell in counties in which dispensaries opened, relative to counties where there were no dispensaries.

Employment increased, particularly in manufacturing, in response to dispensaries opening in a county. “In terms of jobs, it is clearly the counties with the recreational dispensaries that benefitted most after Colorado legalized adult-use cannabis,” Chakraborty said.

As New Mexico moves toward opening legal recreational cannabis dispensaries, “Our results suggest that, by preventing counties from banning dispensaries, New Mexico’s approach to legalizing cannabis will yield more widespread employment benefits than those experienced in Colorado.”

Recreational cannabis dispensaries opened in Colorado starting in 2014, with dispensaries operating in just 58 percent of counties by the end of 2018.

Such bans persist today, including in El Paso County, home to Colorado Springs. In their study, the authors looked at labor markets in counties before and after dispensaries entered and compared them with counties with

Casey A. DeRaad (’85 BSEE, ’92 MS), Albuquerque, was named one of Albuquerque Business First’s 2021 Women of Infuence for her efforts in establishing NewSpace New Mexico.

no dispensaries and found that dispensary entry triggered a decrease in the unemployment rate, driven by a 4.5 percent increase in employment.

With no increase in wages or labor force participation, new employment appears to be drawing from unemployed and self-employed workers, rather than pulling employees away from other industries.

“Aphasia is a devastating and debilitating diagnosis.,” said Richardson, who has worked with people with post-stroke aphasia, and other acquired cognitive or communication deficits, for more than 20 years. “Just imagine not being able to say what you want to say or understand what others are saying, or not being able to

Laura E. Valdez (’85 BA, ’95 MA), Albuquerque, was given the Pillars of Professionalism award by the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators.

Barbara Vigil (’85 JD), Santa Fe, N.M., retired as chief justice of the New Mexico Supreme Court after serving for more than 20 years on the bench and has stepped into her new role as secretary of the Children, Youth & Families Department.

Sandra K. Begay (’86 ASPE, ’87 BSCE), Albuquerque, was presented with the Women in Technology Award by the New Mexico Technology Council in recognition for her contributions to research, mentorship and community impact.

James C. Hoppe (’87 BA), Marblehead, Mass., vice president and dean for Campus Life at Emerson College, was given the Pillars of Professionalism award by the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators.

Kelly J. McBurnette-Andronicos (’87 BFA), Lafayette, Ind., marked the West Coast premiere of her play “The Hall of Final Ruin” at Ophelia’s Jump theatre in Upland, Calif.

Randall D. Roybal (’88 BA), has retired as executive director and general counsel of the New Mexico Judicial Standards Commission after 24 years of service.

JOGGING MEMORY

Jessica Richardson, an associate professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences at UNM, has been awarded a five-year, $2 million grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders to optimize treatment and interventions for those who acquire the language disorder known as aphasia as a result of suffering a stroke.

Aphasia affects speaking, understanding, reading and writing.

The most common cause of aphasia is stroke, and 30 to 50 percent of people who have had a stroke will live with aphasia for the rest of their lives.

read or write anymore. If you think about your everyday life, and what you do every day that involves any type of language, you can begin to understand how big of an impact this can have.”

One of the big gaps in current treatment that she seeks to address is not taking full advantage of the brain’s plasticity, or ability to change.

“We know our brain is plastic and very responsive to use or activity,” Richardson said. “You can change the way the brain works, and even the structure of the brain, with what you do.”

Anna C. Hansen (’89 BFA, ’92 MA), Santa Fe, N.M., serving District 2 on the Santa Fe County Commission, was elected to serve as president of the Northern Rio Grande National Heritage Area.

Tracey A. Milligan (’89 BA), White Plains, N.Y., director of Neurology at New York Medical College School of Medicine and chair of the New York Medical College Department of Neurology, has been named “Westchester County Neurologist to Watch”

by Westchester Magazine.

1990s Todd Glasenapp (’90, MA), Page, Ariz., worked in the Page schools as a counselor for 22 years and is now working in community mental health as he approaches full retirement.

Sarah Z. Sleeper (’90 BA), Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., has published “Gaijin.”

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Campus Connections Richardson said patients with aphasia and their recovery team can help the intact brain repair itself by taking advantage of this plasticity. She hopes to combine evidence-based aphasia treatment with a non-invasive brain intervention called transcranial direct current stimulation for even more optimized treatment.

“Depending on where we place the electrodes on the scalp, we can make neurons more ‘interested’ in a task, as the electrical current may increase the probability that they will send brain signals, or fire,” she said. “We can also tell certain neurons to be quiet if they are interfering in some way, using the electrical current to decrease the probability that they will fire. Over time, with repeated exposure to this, we can potentially change the way the brain functions when ‘doing’ language.”

Richardson has seen first-hand how particularly devastating aphasia can be, first as a high schooler after her grandfather suffered from aphasia, and more recently with her mother.

“It changes everything about one’s life — identity, autonomy, relationships, financial security ... everything,” Richardson said. “And it changes the lives of the loved ones of survivors as well.”

WHERE THERE’S SMOKE Woodsmoke from massive wildfires shrouded much of the West last summer, making it harder for people suffering from respiratory illnesses to breathe.

Those respiratory consequences can be dangerous — even life-threatening.

But Matthew Campen, PhD, a professor

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MIRAGE MAGAZINE

in UNM’s College of Pharmacy, sees another hazard hidden in the smoke.

Thanks to a five-year, $3.7 million grant from the National Institute on Aging and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a multidisciplinary team led by Campen will investigate how inhaled smoke particles travel from the lungs to erode the blood-brain barrier.

“We’ve had wildfires that are getting worse and worse,” Campen says.

“We’ve been concerned about the acute changes that affect the brain, like neuroinflammation and loss of the blood-brain barrier. What are the longterm impacts? Could it promote Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia?”

In research published online in the journal Toxicological Sciences, Campen and colleagues report that inhaled

risk for neurological problems ranging from premature aging and various forms of dementia to depression and even psychosis.

“These are fires that are coming through small towns and they’re burning up cars and houses,” Campen says. Microplastics and metallic particles of iron, aluminum and magnesium are lofted into the sky, sometimes traveling thousands of miles.

In the research study conducted in 2020 at Laguna Pueblo, 41 miles west

of Albuquerque and roughly 600 miles from the source of California fires, Campen and his team found that mice exposed to smoke-laden air for nearly three weeks under closely monitored conditions showed age-related changes in their brain tissue.

The findings highlight the hidden dangers of woodsmoke that might not be dense enough to trigger respiratory symptoms, Campen says.

Matthew Campen, PhD As smoke rises higher in the microscopic particles from woodsmoke atmosphere heavier particles fall out, work their way into the bloodstream and he says. “It’s only these really small reach the brain, and may put people at ultra-fine particles that travel a thousand

Sandra S. Fahrlender (’93 BBA), and Robert Fahrlender (’97 BS), Albuquerque, have founded Hole in the Heart, a nonprofit promoting awareness of congenital heart defects.

miles to where we are. They’re more dangerous because the small particles get deeper into your lung and your lung has a harder time removing them as a result.”

When the particles burrow into lung tissue, it triggers the release of inflammatory immune molecules into the bloodstream, which carries them into the brain, where they start to degrade the blood-brain barrier, Campen says. That causes the brain’s own immune protection to kick in.

“It looks like there’s a breakdown of the blood-brain barrier that’s mild, but it still triggers a response from the protective cells in the brain — astrocytes and microglia — to sheathe it off and protect the rest of the brain from the factors in the blood,” he says.

“Normally the microglia are supposed to be doing other things, like helping with learning and memory,” Campen adds.

The researchers found neurons showed metabolic changes suggesting that wildfire smoke exposure may add to the burden of aging-related impairments.

CRUEL CLASSROOMS

Black and immigrant girls of color often face indifference and even cruelty in the classroom, according to newly published research by Ranita Ray, associate professor of Sociology at UNM. Ray is currently working on a book and several articles based on four years of ethnography within a range of educational institutions in the Southwest. She spent two to three days a week for three years

in two predominantly economically marginalized and racially minoritized schools and found that while racially marginalized girls may have made academic gains, school is nevertheless a hostile institution for them. Black and immigrant girls of color experienced gendered racial harassment, erasure of intellect and estrangement within their communities. The girls’ experience included the verbal abuse by teachers, most of whom were white.

“For Black and recent immigrant girls of color the classroom is a psychologically traumatizing, alienating and emotionally violent place where they face genderedracial harassment from teachers, their intellectual contributions are erased, and they become estranged from their communities inside schools,” Ray said.

Ray believes that having more Black, Indigenous, brown and queer teachers “is the urgent resolution, but we also need to keep in mind the historical and contemporary role of schools as oppressive institutions.”

The article will be published in the journal Gender & Society. The book will be based on the larger study.

Alice M. Webb (’93 BFA, ’03 MA), Wauwatosa, Wis., was Magpie Jewelry & Metals Studio LLC’s featured artist for the months of October and November.

Robert A. Lombardi (’94 PhD), Middletown, Pa., executive director of the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association, has been named to the National Federation of State High School Associations board of directors.

Craig A. Herrera (’95 BA), Seattle, Wash., a five-time local Emmy award-winning meteorologist, has joined Fox News Media’s streaming weather service, which launched in October.

Heather A. Dumas (’96 BS, ’00 MBA), Littleton, Colo., joined Ardent Mills LLC as chief people officer. In this role she will be responsible for human resources, internal communications and people management.

Neil Flowers (’96 MA), Los Angeles, Calif., has published “Polyphonic Lyre.”

Lesha D. Harenberg (’96 BS), Albuquerque, teacher at El Dorado High School, received the Golden Apple Award. She has taught at El Dorado for more than 20 years and in 2011 founded a clothing bank at the school.

Matthew K. Montano (’96 BA), Bernalillo, N.M., began his term as Bernalillo Public School’s district superintendent on August 1.

Danielle A. Duran (’97 MBA), Los Alamos, N.M., is the new Intergovernmental Affairs manager for Los Alamos County.

Peter W. Gutowsky (’97 MCRP), Bend, Ore., has stepped into the role of Deschutes County Community Development director and will oversee the county’s land use, code compliance and watewater systems.

Dana M. Northcutt (’97 BA, ’02 MS), Indianapolis, Ind., long-time Commissioner of Officials for the New Mexico Activities Association, has begun her new role as director of Officiating Services for the National Federation of State High School Associations, based in Indianapolis.

David Herrera Urias (’97 BA, ’01 JD), Corrales, N.M., attorney at Freedman Boyd Hollander Goldberg Urias & Ward, has been nominated to serve on the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico.

Tyanna L. Lovato (’98 BS, ’14 PhD), Albuquerque, was named one of UNM Advance’s 2021 Women in STEM award winners. (continued on page 31)

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Picture Perfect

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MIRAGE MAGAZINE

Did you open a JPEG or jump on a Zoom today? You can thank an alumnus for creating the image technology that keeps us connected.

By Kimberly Delker

L

ove them or hate them, Zoom, FaceTime and similar videoconference technologies have allowed us to work, go to school, gather with family during holidays and even have happy hours with friends during the prolonged global coronavirus pandemic.

Although we may take the technology on our computers and phones for granted, it wouldn’t be possible without UNM Engineering alumnus and former College of Engineering dean Nasir Ahmed (’63 MS, ’66 PhD).

It was in the years between earning his Ph.D. at UNM and returning as a professor that Ahmed developed the algorithm — a set of instructions to a computer to sort data and solve a problem — called discrete cosine transform, or DCT. The algorithm allowed for digital image compression, which made possible such technology as JPEG images, as well as the MPEG technology that allows video conferencing.

Ahmed, a native of India, is professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering. He earned his master’s degree in 1963 and his doctorate in 1966.

He met his wife of 56 years, Esther Pariente-Ahmed (who earned a Ph.D. from UNM in 1994), while she was a student.

After graduation from UNM, Ahmed worked at Honeywell in Minneapolis for two years because he wanted some industrial experience before going into academia. He then joined the faculty of Kansas State University in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1968. It was there that he developed the DCT technology.

Ahmed said he had been working on related technology while at Honeywell and continued that work at Kansas State, but he did not have a lot of champions.

In 1972 he applied for a research grant from the National Science Foundation, but was turned down.

He didn’t give up, though, and enlisted one of his Ph.D. students, T. Natarajan, to help.

“We worked with no fanfare on huge IBM machines with punched cards to develop a working DCT algorithm,” Ahmed says. “Two guys from India coordinating the development of this mathematical function in the middle of Kansas!”

The resulting landmark publication, “Discrete Cosine Transform,” in the January 1974 issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Computers, which has more than 5,500 citations to date, included his friend K.R Rao from the University of Texas at Arlington.

Although Ahmed knew that this technology was important, he said he could not have then imagined the way in which DCT would change the lives of millions of people, from sharing digital photographs to videoconferencing.

“Never at that time did I know the impact that it would have even today,” he says.

At that time, the discovery was the property of the journal, once it was published. “People always say that I must have made a lot of money from the idea, but in fact in those days, there was no money,” Ahmed says.

After Kansas, he returned to his alma mater of UNM in 1983, where he was a Presidential Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 1983 to

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1989, chair of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 1989 to 1994, dean of the School of Engineering from 1994 until 1996, and associate provost for research and dean of Graduate Studies from 1996 until his retirement in 2001. Ahmed also worked as a consultant for Sandia National Laboratories from 1976 to 1990 and other labs such as The Underwater Sound Lab in New London, Conn., Sandia Labs in

Livermore, Calif., and Boeing in Wichita, Kan. Retired now, Ahmed and his wife split their time between Esther’s native Argentina and La Jolla, Calif., where they enjoy walks on the beach.

They also like to watch “This is Us,” the popular NBC drama, now in its fifth season, that follows the lives of siblings Kevin, Kate and Randall. In the time of the pandemic, “This is Us” Season 5 finds the

siblings and their parents living all over the country as three babies are due. They use FaceTime to stay in touch and even witness births.

As they were developing the storyline, the show’s producers got curious and decided to do some research on who originally discovered the technology that allowed video chat. Some online searching led them to Ahmed and they emailed him.

“We worked with no fanfare on huge IBM machines with punched cards to develop a working DCT algorithm,” Nasir Ahmed

When he received an email from Jess Rosenthal, one of the producers, Ahmed thought it might be a scam and decided to consult his son, Michael Pariente, a top criminal defense attorney in Las Vegas who received “2020 Defender of the Year Award” from the Nevada Attorneys for Criminal Justice. Pariente is also an alumnus of UNM, where he received his bachelor of Business Administration degree in 1990, before receiving his master’s degree at the University of Texas in Austin, and his law degree from the Baylor University in 1998.

“Michael was concerned that, under the coronavirus situation, someone was going to try to scam us and said, ‘Mom and Dad, it’s not true. Don’t respond,’” Ahmed remembers.

But because the producers believed in this storyline, they were insistent and tried another method.

“When they didn’t get a response from us, they called Mike in Las Vegas,

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and he said, ‘You won’t believe it. This is for real!’”

After talking to Nasir and Esther — over Zoom, of course — they wrote them into the season The Feb. 16 episode (Season 5, Episode 8) of “This is Us” focused on storylines that allowed families to be connected during the pandemic, only due to these groundbreaking technologies.

Actors were hired to portray the younger Nasir and Esther, but before the credits rolled, viewers saw photos of the real-life Nasir and Esther and the producers summed up Ahmed’s importance to life in the 21st century: "You don't know his name, but Nasir and his team are responsible for keeping us connected today."

The “This is Us” episode led to stories in People and Good Housekeeping magazines and suddenly Nasir was basking in the recognition — 50 years later — of his remarkable achievement.

Ahmed said it was an unusual experience to see their lives portrayed in a popular television program, and he was very glad that UNM was mentioned in the storyline.

Ahmed said he feels grateful for the life he’s lived, including his education, career and family. His maternal grandfather, M. Ali Khan, was an electrical engineer in India who was sent to the United States from 1919 to 1922 to work for General Electric on improving the overall electrification of the province of Mysore.

After his retirement he returned to Bangalore in 1960, the largest city in the province. There, he met an engineering consultant from the U.S. who was hired by the government of Mysore. It turned out that this consultant was from Albuquerque and proudly spoke of the mixture of cultures and the state’s flagship university, UNM. Later, when Ahmed was looking at graduate schools in the U.S. to attend, he first set his sights on the University of Washington because one of his cousins was there working toward his Ph.D. in physics.

But his grandfather stepped in and said, “UNM is the place you have to go.”

“Albuquerque was wonderful, and I was lucky to get educated at UNM,” Ahmed says.

And, besides his education and teaching careers, UNM changed his life in one very important way. While a graduate student, Ahmed was in charge of an international student group that arrived at UNM in September 1962. It turned out that one

of the members of this group was Esther, who was from Argentina, on an international scholarship as an English major. Their meeting on campus was portrayed in the “This is Us” episode with one inaccuracy.

“The actors, creator, director and all the ‘This is Us’ staff did a fantastic job portraying us, except my wife never smoked!”

Ahmed says. ❂

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Photos: Courtesy of New York Yankees

Big League

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Former Lobo catcher climbs the MLB ladder

By Leslie Linthicum

O

n Jan. 10, former New York Yankees All-Star pitcher CC Sabathia tweeted a photo of UNM alumna Rachel Balkovec fitted out in Yankees pinstripes with the message: “Keep breaking barriers, Rachel. Salute!”

It was a big day for Balkovec (’09 BS), a history-making day in a sports career that has seen its share of firsts.

At 28, Balkovec was the first woman to be named a conditioning coach for a Major League Baseball team when she took over as the Latin America strength and conditioning coordinator for the Houston Astros, based in the Dominican Republic.

At 32, she became the first woman hired as a full-time hitting coach in the majors when the Yankees signed her on as the team’s minor-league hitting coach.

Now 34, the former Lobo catcher is packing up the moving van again, this time headed for Tampa Bay, Fla., and another spot in history. She takes over as manager of the Tampa Tarpons, the Yankees’ Class A affiliate team, becoming the first woman to be called ‘skipper.’

“The first word that comes to mind is gratitude,” Balkovec said in her debut press conference with the Yankees — which was crowded with 112 media participants on Zoom.

Balkovec noted the Yankees’ long history of progressive hiring. (In March 1998, Kim Ng, another former college softball player, was the Yankees’ assistant general manager.

Ng went on to be the first female general manager in baseball.) And she tipped her hat to her parents, “who raised me to be a competitive athlete, not a woman or a man, but just to be competitive and capable and aggressive.”

Asked about the sexist blowback to her hiring, Balkovec noted her resiliency.

“Three years ago, I was sleeping on a mattress that I had pulled out of a dumpster

in Amsterdam. If you know yourself and you know where you came from, it doesn’t really matter.”

She calls her story “the American dream” and is adjusting to a new level of attention, including some shoutouts from some heroes.

“I can die now,” Balkovec joked. “Billie Jean King congratulated me.”

Balkovec came to UNM from Creighton University, recruited to play catcher for the Lobos. By the time she graduated in 2009, she had changed her major from psychology to exercise science and then to kinesiology, with an eye to a career helping athletes perfect their performances.

Among her mentors were former UNM instructor Chris Frankel and Len Kravitz, associate professor of exercise science at UNM, who taught her that coaching is motivating others to learn.

She had graduated from UNM and was working on her master’s degree in kinesiology at Louisiana State University in 2012, when the St. Louis Cardinals called looking for a student to work as a Minor League strength and conditioning coach at their baseball training camp near Baton Rouge. The Cardinals took a leap of faith and hired Balkovec, who was working as a graduate assistant strength and conditioning coach at the school.

When the internship ended and she had her degree, Balkovec had an enviable resume for a 26-year-old: A master’s degree in sports administration, experience working with athletes on strength and conditioning at two universities and experience with the Cardinals.

She moved to Arizona, one of the hubs of baseball spring training, applied for every job listed in Major League Baseball and waited hopefully.

“I got crickets,” Balkovec said.

The one baseball representative who showed interest in hiring her later called her to let her know that it was her gender, not her qualifications, that scuttled her chances. And he said he had called around to other teams and heard the same story.

She appreciated his candor.

“I finally understood,” she said.

With the doors of Major League Baseball closed tight, Balkovec took a job waitressing in Phoenix, volunteered at Arizona State University and entered what she calls “the dark times.”

Some colleges approached Balkovec about openings in strength and conditioning, but always for women’s sports. Even though she had respect for women’s sports, it bothered her that those were the only doors open to her. She dug in.

One of her sisters suggested she apply for jobs as “Rae Balkovec.” She immediately got email responses, but the conversations ended when they reached her on the phone.

Balkovec quickly dropped Rae and went back to Rachel.

Finally, the call came from the Chicago White Sox, who hired her as a strength and conditioning coach.

The White Sox job led to a job back with the Cardinals as the Minor League strength and conditioning coordinator. In November 2015, the Astros brought her on as the Latin American strength and conditioning coordinator.

Balkovec spent a lot of time in the Dominican Republic, taught herself Spanish and some salsa moves and got valuable experience in understanding the Major League Baseball system and learning how to interact with young male players.

In between those temporary stints, Balkovec moved to Amsterdam (the place she scored the free mattress)

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in 2019 to pursue a second master’s degree in biomechanics and work as the apprentice hitting coach for the Netherlands National baseball and softball team.

When she returned to the United States, she was back to the dark days. With two master’s degrees in human movement science and a list of MLB credits on her resume, she took an internship with a technology firm that uses eye tracking to aid hitters and started knocking on MLB’s door again.

When the Yankees hired her as the league’s first full-time female coach, she was 32 and had lived in 15 cities in 12 years.

“When I actually got that job, I had $14 in my bank account,” Balkovec said.

“I was broke as a joke.”

She called her parents to tell them she had made history. And to ask them if they could lend her some money to cover her move.

Balkovec nods to her parents for setting the stage for her ground-breaking career.

“My father and mother, they deserve an award,” Balkovec said. “They literally raised three girls to be absolute hellions.”

The Balkovec girls didn’t grow up with gender barriers that told them that certain goals weren’t possible. So Balkovec naively thought she could get any job based on her skills and was brought up short when she learned otherwise.

“This is a little counterintuitive,” Balkovec said, “but I’m glad I was discriminated against. By the time I was full time, I had done multiple internships. I was super prepared.

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I’m glad my path was difficult and it still serves me to this day.”

Kevin Reese, Yankees vice president of player development, approached Balkovec about the manager job in mid-December.

Reese says there was no agonizing or even much discussion when Balkovec’s name came up as a possibility to fill the Tarpon’s manager slot.

“It’s a no-brainer,” he said. “The feedback was always positive on Rachel.

Everybody was on board. This is about her qualifications and her ability to lead.”

What can the Tarpons players expect from their new manager?

“It’s going to be high standards and clear standards. It’s going back to honesty and being direct,” Balkovec said. “Getting every day to matter and every practice to matter, that’s what I’m really passionate about.”

And it should be fun.

“They can definitely expect some loud music in the clubhouse,” she says.

Since getting the skipper job, Balkovec has been working 14-hour days, immersing herself in all aspects of a baseball team.

While her experience has been in strength and conditioning and hitting, Balkovec is getting up to speed on fielding and pitching as well as all the aspects of running an organization and team travel.

One aspect of the job has always come easily for Balkovec — developing camaraderie and cohesion among players.

“My goal is really to know the names of the girlfriends, the dogs, the families of all the players,” she said. “My goal is to develop them as young men and young people who

have an immense amount of pressure on them. My goal is to support the coaches that are on the staff.”

In Class A, she will have the youngest and least experienced players to work with.

“We're going to be talking more nuts and bolts of pitching and hitting with them, and defense,” Balkovec said. “It’s really just to be a supporter, and to facilitate an environment where they can be successful.”

Even though she’s a trailblazer, Balkovec has experienced very little sexism on the field or in the clubhouse.

“In 10 years, so little that it’s not even worth mentioning,” she said. Players have a certain level of curiosity when they’re meeting the first female coach they’ve ever known, which Balkovec understands as completely normal.

“I just know within five minutes — my presence in the room, I speak confidently, I’m bilingual — it all just goes away. The players I’ve worked with, I do feel — whether they like me or they don’t like me, they like what I’m saying or they don’t like what I’m saying — they respect me. They do know I’m passionate and hard-working and I know what I’m talking about.”

Balkovec notes that there are now 11 women in uniform in baseball today, so the tide is turning slowly.

“There were many times in my career where I felt extremely lonely and I literally didn’t have anyone to call who had been going through the same experiences,” she said.

Balkovec is active on social media, which she says isn’t about feeding her brand, but inspiring others.

From Here To There After Balkovec graduated from UNM in 2009, she followed a path of perseverance that led ­— 11 years later — to a position as minor league hitting coach with the New York Yankees, which led to her current position as manager of the Tampa Tarpons, in the Yankees’ minor league system.

These were moves she made to get there: 2009: Strength and Conditioning Intern: API (Now EXOS) 2010: Strength and Conditioning Graduate Assistant: LSU 2012: Strength and Conditioning Intern: St. Louis Cardinals Major League Baseball 2012: Front Office Internship: Los Tigres Del Licey (La Republica Dominicana) 2013: Strength and Conditioning Internship: Arizona State University 2013: Strength and Conditioning Internship: Chicago White Sox “I want to be a visible idea for young women. I want to be a visible idea for dads that have daughters,” she said. “I want to be out there. It’s something I’m very passionate about.”

Brian Cashman, the Yankees general manager who recruited Ng more than 25 years ago and put the first crack in baseball’s glass ceiling, calls Balkovec “a really impactful, smart person.

What’s she’s bringing to the table is her knowledge and her strength and her perseverance and her thoughtfulness and her empathy. She’s as tough as they come.”

Balkovec’s ultimate goal is to be a general manager.

“Right now, I’m a manager,” she said. “I don’t really have a timeline for when I would leave, but I just know in the future, that leadership and the front office is definitely present in my mind.”

I understand that’s a very long-term goal,” she said.

When asked whether she has the skills to go higher in coaching or management, Cashman said, “The sky’s the limit.

She’s determined. She’s strong. She’s got perseverance. I would not put any limitations on what her future would entail. She’s willing to go to the ends of the earth to accomplish her goals.

This is someone who will not be denied.” ❂

2014: Minor League Strength & Conditioning Coord: St. Louis Cardinals 2016: Latin American Strength and Conditioning Coordinator: Houston Astros 2018: Minor League Strength and Conditioning Coach: AA Affiliate: Houston Astros 2019: Returned to School for MS in Biomechanics in Amsterdam 2019: Apprentice Hitting Coach: Netherlands National Baseball & Softball programs 2019: Research & Development Intern: Driveline Baseball: Eye Tracking for Hitters.

2019: Hired by New York Yankees as an Major League Baseball hitting coach

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From Prison to Poet Alumnus Jimmy Santiago Baca (’84 BA) found peace in the written word

By Leslie Linthicum

hen Jimmy Santiago Baca stands in front of a classroom — maybe it’s a high school in East L.A., or a jail in New Mexico or a seminar at Berkeley or Yale — he’ll challenge aspiring writers to tap into their trauma and find their truth. And he’ll tell them they already have the tools they need: “You have imagination and you have experience,” he’ll say. “That’s where writing comes from.”

And he will likely share his own truth: that books saved his life.

Baca (’84 BA, ’03 HOND), one of the nation’s most prolific and decorated writers, has had 31 books published in 26 languages, and at 70 he still adheres to his morning practice of settling in at the keyboard at 5:30 a.m.

Known primarily as a poet, he also has written novels, short stories and screenplays and is at work on a trilogy while teaching and touring the country reading and lecturing.

It is a charmed life, complete with financial security and a warm family.

No one is as surprised and delighted by that as Baca, the former orphan, drinker, drugger and badass criminal.

“A lot of times, no matter how bad things are, I always see myself as being very fortunate,” he says. “There’s not a morning that goes by that I don’t tell the Lord thank you, thank you, thank you.”

His biography has the outlines of a movie and indeed it has been told in a memoir, “A Place to Stand,” published in 2007, and a documentary film in 2014. Born in Santa Fe to a father who drank and was largely absent and a mother who abandoned him and his brother and sister when they were small, he was taken in by his grandparents, then delivered to a Catholic orphanage at age 7,

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Photos: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)

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where he lived until he ran away at 13 and was placed in youth detention. At 15, he ran away from there and lived a handto-mouth existence, drinking, fighting, getting high, crashing in abandoned homes. Arrested at 17 for a crime he didn’t commit, he spent some time in the county jail before being released. He headed West and was running a lucrative marijuana distribution business in Yuma, Ariz., when he was visiting a heroin dealer’s home as it was raided by federal agents.

An agent was shot and Baca was sentenced to five years behind bars for drug possession.

‘I can’t describe how words electrified me.’

He was 20 when he walked into a maximum-security prison in Florence, Ariz., the place where he would teach himself to read and write alone in a cell and begin corresponding with a Good Samaritan who sent him books and paper.

He describes his awakening in “A Place to Stand.”

“I would set my dictionary next to me, prop my paper on my knees, sharpen my pencil with my teeth, and begin my reply.

I would try to write the thoughts going through my mind, but they didn’t come out right. They lacked reality. A stream of ideas flowed through me, but they lost their strength as soon as I put them down. I erased so often and so hard I made holes in the paper. After hours of plodding word by word to write a clear sentence, I would read it and it didn’t even come close to what I’d meant to say. After a day of looking up words and writing, I’d be exhausted, as if I had run ten miles. I can’t describe how words electrified me. I could smell and taste and see their images vividly. I found myself waking up at 4 a.m. to reread a word or copy a definition.”

As Baca’s thirst for words grew, he began borrowing books from other inmates.

“Thoreau, Emerson, Dickinson, all the great ones,” he says on a warm morning on the patio of his home in Albuquerque.

“Death Row was on the other side of where they kept us, and I was a porter, so I used to be able to go over there and they’d

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give me their books. They always read the coolest books. Hemingway, Faulkner and a lot of Russian writers. ‘War and Peace’ — come on, that was like my religion.”

Language opened up something in him and what could have been a soul-crushing experience — fights, stabbings, years spent in dark solitary confinement cells because he refused to work — became a rebirth. He fell in love with collections of poems by Shelley, Byron, Neruda and Lorca. He began to review his life through a different lens.

“It was me deciding what I wanted to do with my life,” Baca says. “Me deciding that I probably wouldn’t have made a great criminal but I was really attracted to reading, so I read.”

Sitting alone in the dark for days on end, trying not to go crazy, helped hone writerly skills.

“It was absolutely an opportunity,” Baca says. “You practice your imagination.

You practice disembodiment. You practice your memory.”

Baca had plenty of opportunity to practice writing and to dig into the insights and emotions that are the backbone of the poem.

“It was really fortunate to live in a place where death and life met each other every day,” Baca says, “rather than live this passive life where the biggest obstacle is paying the bills and the IRS.” In exchange for cigarettes or coffee, he wrote poems for other inmates to commemorate events in their lives and to give to their mothers or children or girlfriends. Often, he had to read them aloud to inmates because they couldn’t read.

‘How can you kill and still be a poet?’

When another inmate disrespected Baca and a prison elder advised him he had to fight or be seen as vulnerable as he served out the rest of his time, he came to the realization that his life was changed.

As he recounts in his memoir, he was in the clutch of the fight with the other inmate lying on his back.

“He was partially unconscious, stunned, bleeding from a cracked cheekbone. He took out a shank he’d hidden beneath his sock and I grabbed it. I was standing over him, my feet planted on each side of his shoulders. In that moment, all I could see was his face, the blood pouring out from a wound in his cheek where a bone was exposed. In that moment, everything seemed so calm and quiet. I gripped the shank to stab him. For a second, every horrible thing that had happened to me in my life exploded to the surface as if had been building up to this moment. The blade in my hand, my legs spread over his chest, I loomed over him, staring into his eyes and then at his heart. While the desire to murder him was strong, so were the voices of Neruda and Lorca that passed through my mind, praising life as sacred and challenging me: How can you kill and still be a poet? How can you ever write another poem if you disrespect life in this manner? Do you know you will be forever changed by this act? It will haunt you to your dying breath.”

He chose to become a poet. By the time he was released with $20 and the clothes he entered prison in, Baca had sold some poems to Mother Jones magazine and had contacts with other writers and editors. He went to North Carolina and got his GED and took some community college classes.

Then he returned to New Mexico and had his first collection of poems, “Immigrants in Our Own Land,” published in 1979 and began to make a life as a writer. By the early 1980s, Baca had married, had a baby and bought a fixerupper. How to pay a mortgage as a poet?

Baca enrolled in UNM. “I needed some money to pay the mortgage and they were offering these Pell grants,” Baca explains. “I had no interest in going to school, but when I got there, I loved it.”

He studied literature, of course, and a new way of looking at books opened up for him.

“I loved the environment of being around so many books. And I really loved the professors,” Baca says. “They had so much to offer. It was like talking to convicts on the yard about writing, but these guys knew all about literature.”

He graduated in 1984 and broke out several years later with the publication of “Martin & Meditations in the South Valley” in 1987, which won the American Book Award and the Pushcart Prize.

He won the Taos Poetry Circus — the mother of slam poetry contests — in

1992 and 1993. In 1995 he was invited by PBS journalist Bill Moyers to be part of a televised series on poetry.

Ben Daitz, M.D., a family medicine physician at UNM and a writer himself, met Baca in the poetry slam days and they have remained friends for 40 years.

“His history is pretty dramatic and I think it took him awhile to settle down,” says Daitz, now professor emeritus at the UNM School of Medicine and a documentary filmmaker. “But he did. I think he’s mellowed. He’s more comfortable in his own skin. Part of that is getting older and growing out of his rebellion. And he’s got a great family that is very important to him.”

Baca divorced, married a second time and has four children, one still at home.

He has held endowed chairs at Colorado College, Yale and University of California, Berkeley, among other colleges and universities. While he has traveled the world reading, speaking and teaching, he spends more time now in New Mexico, riding his bike, running in the bosque, volunteering as a writing teacher in schools and putting on an annual writer’s retreat. Teaching, as much as writing, has been a foundation of Baca’s life.

“It’s just the service that I think I’m obligated to undertake,” he says. “I was given a great gift. I don’t just want to get rich and famous. I want to spread it around.” ❂

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Photos: James McGrath Morris

Professor Hillerman Tony Hillerman (’66 MA), who died in 2008, was a distinguished alumnus with an international reputation for his page-turning mystery series set in the Indian County of the Southwest. He was also a popular professor at UNM who taught a generation of students how to write. In a new biography, “Tony Hillerman: A Life,” James McGrath Morris devotes a chapter to Hillerman’s years at UNM and the publisher, University of Oklahoma Press, allowed us to reprint it here.

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T

he thermometer read ten degrees the morning Tony Hillerman drove to campus for the first day of the spring semester, January 5, 1970. He steered his dark-metallic-green 1970 Ford Maverick — the first new car he had ever owned — down Louisiana Boulevard to Interstate 40. When the smog above Albuquerque abated, the place offered Hillerman an expansive view westward. “It is exactly at this spot and at this moment that Mount Taylor comes into view,” he said. “It is my favorite mountain, and the gateway to my favorite places.”

To most commuters, the panoramic vista was just one more in a state filled with geographic splendor. But to Hillerman the view of the mountain now took on a meaning shaped by four years of studying Navajo culture. Tsoodził, as the Navajos called it, was one of the four sacred peaks delineating the boundaries of Dinétah, the Navajo homeland. To the north and west of Tsoodził lay the land that had served as the setting for the novel waiting to go to press in New York. “My map tells me the Turquoise Mountain is 62.7 miles from this noisy intersection,” said Hillerman. “In another sense the distance is infinite.”

The day would afford little opportunity to think about that distant land or his book. Students were streaming back onto the campus. Enrollment in the Journalism Department had grown by 20 percent during the last year. Hillerman had to prepare for three courses: Advanced Reporting, Newspaper Practice, and Media as a Social Force.

In addition, he was planning for a new course in editorial writing in the fall and had tedious administrative responsibilities as department chair.

His office was on the southern edge of the campus in one of the university’s ubiquitous adobe buildings that had once served as a residence for women students.

Hillerman usually arrived on campus in an ebullient mood. “Have you seen the clouds today?” he would ask Mary Dudley, who worked briefly in the office.

“If I didn’t give a convincing yes,” she recalled, “he would insist that we go out and we’d stand on the lawn of the Journalism Building and look at the clouds come over the Sandia Mountains.”

Ever since he was a child growing up in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl.

Hillerman had been a cloud watcher.

James McGrath Morris

When Hillerman had first begun teaching at UNM four years earlier, he had inherited the basic journalism classes such as News Writing. Instructing future journalists harkened him back to his days as a student at the University of Oklahoma after the war. “It was a wonderful time to be teaching,” said Hillerman. The students struck him as eager to learn and they took to his folksy pedagogy. The avuncular professor wore the narrow ties that were fashionable then, but loose with an open collar, with jackets and pants carelessly matched. “There’s none of the professorial moss about Tony,” noted a reporter who stopped by the campus that spring. “There is a disarmingly casual air about him.”

In class, students were treated to tales from the trenches of daily journalism.

“He was always warm, humorous, generous, droll, with an anecdotal style of teaching, using lots of illuminating examples, many from his own experience,” according to former student Sharon Niederman, who became an author and journalist. Hillerman’s recollections were his tools of teaching, journalistic parables that also served to inspire. “We wanted to get out in the world and turn experience into prose,” said another former student, George Johnson.

Like the much-admired Professor H. H. Herbert at the University of Oklahoma, Hillerman wanted his students to understand the power and the accompanying responsibilities that came with being a reporter. “From him, the students learned about real-life examples of proper journalism ethics,” recalled one student. Hillerman was not averse to using his own experiences to show the consequences, often unforeseen, of the news business. The topic was also on his mind in the 1970 spring semester. In his typewriter at home was the beginnings of a new novel in which journalistic ethics would play an important role.

Inspired by William Strunk Jr and E. B. White’s The Elements of Style, Hillerman offered a set of writing rules to guide the willing students. At home, he was putting them into practice in his fiction. “Writing is writing,” Hillerman told his students.

“Whether fiction or non-fiction, poetry or prose, most of the same rules apply, most of the same devices are effective, most of the same flaws will kill you.”

Concision was paramount: “As sentences get shorter, they generally get stronger,” he said, paraphrasing the famous guide to writing. Active voice should be a habit: “It makes for forceful

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writing.” Concrete and specific nouns and verbs were preferable: A welder rather than a laborer, a begonia instead of a flower. Echoing the instructions to remove “cornstarch words” that Professor Grace Ray had given when he was in college, Hillerman offered his students a lesson in wordectomy. The sentence “The animals’ faces expressed pleasure as they consumed their food” became concise, concrete, specific, and active when written as “The hippos grinned as they chewed their carrots.” For Hillerman, writers were verbose because they lacked a command of the vocabulary. Conciseness does not demand short sentences, he said, “It requires simply that every word tell.”

The placement of words and clauses should be deliberate: “Use the phrase, or word, you wish to emphasize, at the end of the sentence or paragraph.” Also, a word or clause gains attention if used at the beginning of a sentence when it is not the expected subject. For instance, “Bad manners, she could never tolerate” or “Reckless drivers, these Armenians.”

Writing with nouns and verbs achieved economy: the elderly man walked slowly by

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is made better by using the word plodded.

“When you use adjectives choose them carefully,” he admonished. “If you pick the right noun or verb you probably won’t need them.”

Hillerman pushed his students to make their writing reveal rather than tell and to weave their material together. In his class on persuasive writing, aspiring journalist Susan Walton struggled at first with shedding the linear way she had been taught to write. “I wasn’t synthesizing well. I was really regurgitating,” she said.

“And he wasn’t interested in that. He wanted to see a process of consideration and thought, coming out.” He pushed the students to use observations to develop a point of view. Drawing on his experience writing editorials at the Santa Fe New Mexican, Hillerman demonstrated his method. If, for instance, city maintenance was failing, Hillerman figuratively walked the reader down the street to the fence lined with trash, by the drain with cockroaches, and past the unfilled pothole. Now that he was a professor, he instructed his students to leave campus to hone their observation skills.

Compare the crowds at the airport and bus terminal, he told them. “If you think they represent different socioeconomic classes, let me see enough to lead me to the same conclusion.” Visit bars frequented by homosexuals and a bar playing country-western music. “What do you see that identifies them?” Attend a trial and look for a bored member of the jury. “Show me what you saw that caused you to think that.” Hillerman argued observation and detail were the keys to a good journalistic story, according to one student. “Hone in on every detail so that you could set a stage around a story.”

If the stories the students brought back were good enough, Hillerman offered them to the Albuquerque Journal, which occasionally published some.

Papers assigned are papers in need of a grade. When it came to the many essays and articles submitted by his students, Hillerman applied an idiosyncratic approach. He evaluated the students’ work on a ten-point scale and was not hesitant to provide an opinionated reaction, though gentle in his criticism and invariably encouraging. One of his talented students, George Johnson, broke up with this girlfriend just before the final assignment of the semester was due. “I was up late drinking beer and spewing out pages of typewritten angst, which I submitted the next morning.” Hillerman returned the work with an A+. “You write better drunk than most students do sober,” he wrote on the top of the paper. “That was all the encouragement I needed,” said Johnson, who went on to become a New York Times editor, science reporter, and author.

On major assignments students received lengthy typed evaluations. For instance, Hillerman wrote a one-page, single-spaced commentary praising and encouraging a young woman who had submitted chapters of a novel in a creative writing class he taught. “None of this has anything to do with the grade,” he wrote. He explained that she came to the class with a lot of talent and some bad habits and left with a lot of talent and

some progress. “I rate that as Satisfactory Performance which earns you a C,” he concluded. “Had I been a better teacher for you it could have been a B at least.” To another student named Felipe, he wrote, “I think I will give you a B, which reflects a grade but not my judgment of your talent, which is remarkable.”

His dedication to his students prompted him to spend time selecting paragraphs from their work, typing them up on a stencil, and running them off on the office mimeograph machine. The blue-inked sheets were then distributed in class for group discussion. Typically, Hillerman Socratically pushed the students to apply his writing rules. “You say ‘obviously drunk,’” he might say, “What made it obvious?” Along with samples of their own work, Hillerman typed up more stencils with brief excerpts from the works of Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Gary Wills, Barbara Goldsmith, Ken Kesey, and Gay Talese, among others.

Hillerman was certain he could teach most of his students to write. “There are some who can’t be taught to write,” he admitted, “just as I can’t be taught to whistle thru my teeth.” He disliked many of the bromides about the craft. It was, for instance, “sheer nonsense” that writers write for themselves. “You have to write for someone otherwise you’re like a man at a telegraph key talking into a vacuum.

It’s totally sterile and self-defeating,” said Hillerman. The point is to send and receive, “translating,” in his words, “the image inside your skull into symbols and launching it at a target.”

Teaching nonfiction while exploring the writing of fiction after-hours caused Hillerman to reflect considerably on the differences between the two. “The differences between fiction and nonfiction are more apparent than real,” he wrote. Nonfiction, which he had been trained to write and now taught, was less pliable than fiction and more craft-like.

Fiction demanded more creativity resting on material either made up or from one’s memory. “The facts are crafted in your imagination,” Hillerman said. “They are

glossy, persuasive, rich in symbolism, redolent of universal meaning, glittery, sordid, perfect, polished facts — the stuff of art.”

the English Department will hurt their ability to do journalism. “I disagree,” replied Hillerman. “Good writing is good writing.” Redman went on to become a reporter and book author.

Hillerman, however, believed Despite the demands of being journalism was the best training ground. department chair and the late-evening Carmella Padilla, a Santa Fe native, was hours consumed by his own writing, uncertain what career she might want to Hillerman always made time for students. pursue when Hillerman asked her about He wanted to provide instruction on her goals. “I was thinking I wanted to be how to write but give encouragement as a physical therapist,” she recalled telling well, as Professor Morris Freedman had him, “but I don’t know, maybe I want to done for him. “He himself was an author, major in English.” which impressed me,” said Hillerman, “Yeah, but what do you want to do?” “and he saw promise in my work — which persisted Hillerman. impressed me even more.”

“I want to write, I think.”

Jim Belshaw was one of many aspiring “Or do you want to teach?” journalists who experienced Hillerman’s “Well, I think writing is more becoming devotion to students. After being to me than teaching.” discharged from the Air Force, Belshaw If that were the case, Hillerman registered for classes at UNM in September advised her to stay clear of the English 1970. The clerk handed him a small slip Department. He continued, according to of paper with the name of his adviser.

Padilla, to say something to the effect: “If “I looked at the name and thought, well, you really want to learn how to write, and I don’t know who Tony Hillerman is, but learn the discipline of writing, which is I know how to report.” When he reached what it’s all about, you’d be better off in Hillerman’s office, the professor looked the Journalism Department.” over Belshaw’s test scores, particularly “That really sunk in. I won’t be so bold the ones for math. “Journalism, right?” as to say that Tony Hillerman directed asked Hillerman. me to be a journalist, but he certainly Hillerman guided Belshaw to an opened my eyes to that as an option. After undergraduate degree in journalism and completing the journalism program, on to a career as a reporter and columnist. Carmella Padilla became one of New While working at one of his first jobs on Mexico’s most distinguished authors and a Las Cruces newspaper, Belshaw sent an editor of work devoted to the Hispanic his former professor the manuscript art, culture, and history of the state. of a book that had been rejected by a The dedication Hillerman showed publisher. “The reason you sent it to me is his students, his willingness to guide because you lack confidence,” Hillerman them, and his irrepressible and engaging wrote back. “Go to the library and pick classroom storytelling made him an any novel (not the great classics) and read immensely popular professor. One it. You will find that you write as well as student, however, ran up against a most, and better than some.” unique problem taking one of his classes.

Once Judy Redman stopped by his His daughter, Anne, made the mistake of office. Hillerman was her adviser and enrolling in her father’s early-morning she wanted to show him a creative class. Her eyelids grew heavy and she writing paper on which she had earned dozed off to the sound of the voice that an A. Another professor overheard the had once put her to sleep reading conversation and stuck his head in the bedtime stories. ❂ door. He jocularly told Hillerman that students studying creative writing in

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Form & function

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“UNM’s sense of place is unmistakable.”

V.B. Price (’62 BA) Author

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“It takes more than the profile or outward appearance of its buildings to make a university, but if aesthetics mean anything in the intellectual development of students, and I feel certain that it does, then The University of New Mexico has an asset which gives it a unique position among the institutions of the nation.”

Thomas L. Popejoy UNM president, 1948 - 1968

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U

nique and unmistakable, indeed. Among college campuses, which traditionally feature brick, stone and ivy, The University of New Mexico has always been distinctly of New Mexico. A visitor walking onto campus for the first time would never mistake her location for Seattle or Savannah, New Haven or Nebraska.

It wasn’t always so. In 1892, UNM was one building — a three-story red brick structure with a pitched gabled roof that would have looked at home anywhere back East. It was University President William G. Tight, who, as luck would have it, was a scholar of ancient Pueblo culture and a visionary, who began to build the campus that we know today. In 1908, he oversaw a remodel of what is now known as Hodgin Hall, adding beams, corbels and rounded stuccoed forms that are the unmistakable look and feel of adobe pueblos.

As Main Campus grew, each additional building adopted the same style — Spanish-Pueblo Revival — often at the hand of noted architect John Gaw Meem, who served as the campus architect from 1934 to 1956. In 1959, with the adoption of the Long-Range Campus Development Plan, the UNM Board of Regents agreed to preserve Pueblo Revival architectural style. The policy as it stands today reads: “It is the policy of the University that all buildings constructed on the central campus continue to be designed in the Pueblo Revival style and that buildings on the north and south campuses reflect the general character of this style to the extent possible given the special needs for facilities in these areas. “

But form naturally follows function. And as the University has grown and education has become more technical, with laboratories, energy-saving and safety goals and many more students, staff and faculty, campus architecture has modernized.

The goal is to preserve the original feel, not make new buildings larger cookie-cutter impersonations of the old.

“It’s a balance,” says Douglas Brown, chair of the Board of Regents. As he looks around Main Campus today, he is pleased to see new buildings in harmony with the old — not mimics but kinsfolk.

George Pearl Hall, the home of the College of Architecture & Planning along Central Avenue, is a striking example of ushering Pueblo Revival into the 21st century. The newest additions or major renovations on Main Campus pictured in these pages — Farris Engineering Center, which opened in late 2017; McKinnon Center for Management, which was completed in 2018; the Physics & Astronomy and Interdisciplinary Science building, or PAÍS, which was completed late last year; and Johnson Center, which opened this year — ­ are undeniably modern but maintain common ancestry with the Meem style: flat roofs, low profiles, color-conforming stucco.

“I think it’s never looked better,” Brown says.

Adaptation to the times even had the endorsement of Meem. “I get quite a bit of exhilaration when I visit the campus,” he said later in his life. “Sure, yes, they have all departed from the Pueblo Style, but people have to experiment a little bit. They have to have a little freedom to keep the campus alive. When you forbid these things, it starts dying.” ❂

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“This Game Has Given Me Everything” Heather Dyche takes UNM soccer to new heights and is grateful for every moment

By Glen Rosales

P

erhaps a telling measure of Heather Dyche’s regard within the soccer community came last summer when she was hired by New Mexico United as a technical staff special advisor for the men’s professional team that plays in the USL Championship League.

This was somewhat groundbreaking for the league, as she became only the second woman to join a team’s technical staff. But for Dyche, accomplishing the unusual was nothing unusual.

Dyche, who has been The University of New Mexico’s soccer coach since 2015 and guided the Lobos to consecutive NCAA tournament appearances for the first time in program history, has made a habit of busting gender-based constraints through her sheer ability to achieve results.

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“The opportunities the sport gives you are so unique. And when you’re the facilitator of that and you get to create that for your athletes, that’s pretty cool,” she said. “I just fell in love with that. I love coaching. I still do.”

Dyche, 42, was a two-sport, four-year star in both soccer and basketball at Eldorado High School in Albuquerque, playing hoops under soon-to-be UNM women’s basketball coach Don Flanagan.

She accepted a soccer scholarship at Nebraska but wanted out after one year and toyed with the idea of returning home to play again under Flanagan for the Lobos.

“It came down to Florida State soccer or UNM basketball,” Dyche said. “That was my final two choices. And actually, Coach Flanagan told me to go play soccer. He said, ‘You can come here if you want. I know

you’ll play. There’s a scholarship for you.

But you’re a soccer player, I know you are.’

And he was right.”

After three successful years playing for the Seminoles, Dyche was ready to join the Atlanta Beat of the professional Women’s United Soccer Association. But the league folded before she got the chance.

A couple of her FSU teammates were headed back home to Norway to play and invited Dyche along.

“Which, obviously, is the coolest thing ever,” she said with a grin. “It was the time of my life. We had done a little bit of coaching during the latter part of it just to pay bills — running youth clinics and doing some of that stuff for the club. Then we took a coaching license there, actually because if you have the license, you got paid more. We were really broke.”

And that is where she got her first nibble of the coaching donut and was hooked.

“I really just thought it was fascinating,” Dyche said. “I had never really thought about the structure of coaching. When you’re an athlete, you just show up and it’s all set up for you. You don’t really think about everything that goes into it.

I was fascinated by that. I didn’t coach for a living, but that definitely ignited an interest.”

When Dyche later returned to Albuquerque, the fiercely proud native New Mexican began coaching for a couple of local youth clubs for which she had played growing up and began earning increasingly higher coaching licenses.

When she finished her B license, her instructor, a former national program director for U.S. Soccer’s coaching program, encouraged her to dig deeper into the pursuit.

“He was the one that wanted me to get more into education,” Dyche said. She was working for the New Mexico Youth Soccer Association, teaching courses, which led to teaching on bigger stages ­— U.S. Soccer, CONCACAF, the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football, and FIFA, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association.

Dyche and former Washington Huskies women’s soccer coach Leslie Gallimore remain the only two women who regularly teach for U.S. Soccer.

“It was typically all men, so I was one of very few female instructors, as was she,” Gallimore said. “She didn’t seem to bat an eye at the environment. She was very confident in her ability to instruct.”

That confidence and ability to focus on instruction is something Dyche said she constantly seeks.

“To me, it is knowledge-based, not gender-based,” she said. “If you put the time and energy into educating yourself, and hopefully you have if you get to wear the (U.S. Soccer) crest, then it has nothing to do with your gender, it has to do with

your preparation. I don’t walk into a room and say, ‘Oh, it’s all guys or all girls, or it’s men and women.’ I see it as everyone coming together to work on soccer.”

It was that quality that attracted the attention of New Mexico United officials.

“Every time I’ve stepped away from a conversation with Heather, I felt like I’ve come away with a different perspective on myself as a leader, how I wanted to coach, or how I wanted to communicate and establish relationships with our players,” former United coach and technical director Troy Lesesne said at the time of her hire. “The reason for this hire isn’t to make a splash. The reason is we’re getting an extremely talented coach — someone that is one of the best coaches in New Mexico, and one of the best coaches in our country. Heather is somebody that is going to open up more doors for women to be involved in the men’s game.”

Dyche says she really doesn’t see herself as a leadership trailblazer.

“Leadership is always something you strive to be better at,” she said. “You have to role model that excitement and passion.

I think if you don’t have that, you shouldn’t be coaching. Because I love soccer so much and I love the environment so much, I think that’s probably perceived as leadership, because I love what I do.”

Dyche, the coach, can’t see herself doing anything else.

“I wake up every day and I feel really grateful that I get paid to do this job. It’s just amazing to me,” Dyche said. “And I think everybody has a little bit of an imposter syndrome where you say, ‘You’re going to get found out.’ But I feel that way mostly because I don’t ever want to lose it. It’s not lost on me that I’ve never done anything else in my life other than soccer. It’s paid for my school; it’s paid my travel; it’s paid for my livelihood.

This game has given me everything and I think you show gratitude for that with humility and hard work and you put it back into it. Those things have always paid off for me.” ❂

Howard L. Kaibel III (’99 BUS, ’02 MFA), Albquerque, has joined M’tucci’s Restaurants as brand manager and minister of culture.

Marsha D. Kuhnley (’99 BA, ’03 MBA), Albuquerque, has published “Assault on the Afterlife.”

Mina Le Liebert (’99 BSHE, ’00 MS), Colorado Springs, Colo., was named one of 2021’s Women of Influence by the Colorado Springs Business Journal for her work in the public health field.

2000s Bidtah N. Becker (’00 JD), Fort Defiance, Ariz., was appointed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom as deputy secretary for Environmental Justice, Tribal Affairs and Border Relations at California’s Environmental Protection Agency.

A member of the Navajo Nation, Becker has become known as one of the nation’s leading tribal environmental justice practitioners.

Freddie J. Bitsoie (’00 AALA), Gallup, N.M., has published the cookbook, “New Native Kitchen: Celebrating Modern Recipes of the American Indian.”

Joshua Brown (’00 BA), Albuquerque, a graduate of the Albuquerque Police Department’s 82nd cadet class, has been promoted to deputy chief and will serve as commander of the Valley Area Command.

Alfredo V. Moreno ('00 BA), Beaverton, Ore., was elected to the board of directors for the Tualatin Hills Park & Recreation District, the largest special park district in Oregon.

Virginia Urias-Sandoval (’00 BA, ’16 MA), Albuquerque, is chief of staff for the executive vice president for UNM Health Sciences.

She was previously executive director of the Executive and Professional Education Center at the UNM Anderson School of Mangagement.

Briana H. Zamora (’00 JD), Albquerque, former New Mexico Court of Appeals judge, has been named to the New Mexico Supreme Court.

Christopher D. Arndt (’02 MD), Albuquerque, was named chair the Department of Anesthesiology & Critical Care Medicine in the UNM School of Medicine.

Patricia Dominguez (’02 BS), Bernalillo, N.M., has been appointed the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development director for New Mexico.

Chad Ray (’02 BS), Dallas, Texas, has been named partner at the law firm of Carrington, Coleman, Sloman & Blumenthal, LLP.

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Chad Ray

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Shelf Life

Books by UNM Alumni

For anyone who loves to watch movies and TV shows filmed in New Mexico — hitting “pause” and saying, “Wait, was that the Rio Grande Gorge?” ­— Jason Strykowski (’07 MA, ’15 PhD) has written your new Bible. Strykowski, a script supervisor and assistant on major film and TV sets, has put together an encyclopedia of 50 well-used filming locations throughout New Mexico. A Guide to New Mexico Film Locations (University of New Mexico Press, 2021) takes an interesting tack: describing the location and its history, including a filmography of productions that have used the location and adding travelogue features that include driving directions and where to stay and eat if you decide to visit. Here’s a fun fact: The first film made in New Mexico, “Indian Day School,” circa 1898, was shot at Isleta Pueblo. It used the new kinetograph visual recording technology and was shown at kinetoscope parlors, the precursor to cinemas. The book is filled with photos, both current and vintage — Kirk Douglas on the set of “Lonely Are The Brave” in Albuquerque, Dennis Hopper at Taos Pueblo for “Easy Rider” and Jimmy Stewart looking tough at Tesuque Pueblo in “The Man From Laramie.”

Hakim Bellamy (’14 MA) was named the inaugural poet laureate for the City of Albuquerque in 2012. The job comes with a two-year term and just a few requirements: implement a community project and respond to occasional requests for poems to commemorate certain events.

Commissions y Corridos (University of New Mexico Press, 2021), one of a series of collections of the poems of Albuquerque’s poets laureate, collects many of Bellamy’s commissions along with other poems he wrote during his tenure. Not every poem is about Albuquerque, but as Bellamy explains in his preface, Albuquerque is his love and his muse.

The collected poems range from short and sweet, as in “New Mexico Department of Tourism (A Haiku)” and “Albuquerque. Where/the desert doesn’t get in/the way of your view” to long and searching, as in “Law Enforcement Oath of Honor,” in which Bellamy writes his ideal of an officer’s sworn oath. Some lines: “I solemnly swear to be as obsessed with building community as I am with broken laws. I will act justly and impartially and with propriety toward my fellow officers. So long as they are just, impartial and proper toward my fellow citizens.”

The subtitle of Vaccines & Bayonets (Wheatmark, 2021) by Bee Bloeser (’67 MA) is “Fighting Smallpox in Africa Amid Tribalism, Terror and the Cold War.” That’s a sweeping brief for an author to undertake, by for Bloeser it’s the story of one chapter in her life. With two young children, she and her husband, a U.S. Public Health Service nurse, moved to Nigeria to join the United States-led smallpox vaccine campaign in West Africa. That’s the “vaccine” part of Bloeser’s title. The “bayonets” relate to the region’s raging civil war that the family stepped into. With vaccines on everyone’s minds, it is fascinating to read about an all-out push in a foreign nation to vaccinate in order to eradicate a disfiguring and deadly preventable disease. Bloeser’s memoir is breezy and warm and continues through other postings in West Africa as well as in Equatorial Guinea.

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Mary A. Johnson (’89 MA, ‘94 PhD) spent her career as a clinical counselor and developed an expertise in counseling people having trouble in their relationships. In her professional capacity, she learned a lot about Asperberger’s syndrome. Johnson, a widow, met her second husband, Jim, late in life and moved to Oregon where he lives. Love and Asperger’s: Jim and Mary’s Excellent Adventure (Atmosphere Press, 2021) follows the steps of their courtship and marriage with episodes followed by insights, in italics, that reflect her realization in hindsight that Jim was exhibiting classic signs of someone with Aspberger’s. On early dates, Jim opted for a narrow menu of chain restaurants, which she wrote off as quirky. In retrospect she recognized a common trait of people with Aspberger’s. Later, after they married, Jim’s seemingly abrupt or rude comments and criticisms hurt her feelings. She saw them in hindsight as examples of a person with Aspberger’s not recognizing other people’s emotions and having trouble empathizing. One day over lunch, she decides to tell her husband she thinks he has Aspberger’s.

He stirs his coffee for a long time and says, “I always wondered why I felt different.”

William E. Foote (’69 BA, ’75 MA) has been a forensic psychologist in Albuquerque for more than 40 years and has taught in UNM’s departments of Psychology and Psychiatry and at the School of Law. So he brings a lifetime of experience to Understanding Sexual Harassment (American Psychological Association, 2021), which he wrote with Jane Goodman-Delahunty. While the book is geared toward forensic clinicians practicing in the area and preparing forensic reports and testimony in court cases, it’s an interesting read for anyone interested in one of the social issues of our times. The book walks through the history of sexual harassment law (did you know that even though the protection against being harassed due to gender is embodied in the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the term “sexual harassment” wasn’t coined until 1970?) It explores who are the most common perpetrators — a range of (mostly) men who can be misogynistic, clueless, rate low in honestly and humility and high in authoritarianism. Anyone can become a victim of workplace harassment, but Foote and Goodman-Delahunty go to the research to show that predators look for certain victims — namely those who have been the victims of previous trauma.

Google is tracking your online browsing. Alexa knows your grocery list. And that Ring doorknob is scanning the front yard. In 1993, Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. (’67 BA) used the phrase “panoptic sort” to describe a sociotechnical system that sorts people on the basis of their estimated value or worth. Panoptic (complete, comprehensive, sweeping) sorting has now entered the age of Big Data and Gandy, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, comes with a second edition of The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information (Oxford University Press, 2021) to explore how surveillance capitalism influences how we are sold

Kee J. E. Straits (’02 MA), Albuquerque, founder and CEO of Tinkuy Life Community Transformations, has been hired by Bosque School as director of equity, community and culture.

everything from shampoo to political candidates. For Gandy, this is cause for concern. He calls for transparency and accountability and collective resistance to the primacy of algorithms.

Middle Eastern Americans are often distrusted, attacked and assailed for their names, religions and dress, spiking in severity after any domestic incident involving terrorism. “It is from this crucible that Middle Eastern American theatre is forged,” writes Michael Malek Najjar (’93 BA) in Middle Eastern American Theatre: Communities, Cultures, and Artists (Methuen Drama, 2021). Creatives in the community explore in their communities and in person conflicts and struggles in theater. Najjar looks at how writers, actors, directors and other performers of Middle Eastern heritage have created a vibrant theater scene. It is a diverse group — Arabs, Jews, Iranians, Armenians and Turks.

“It’s OK. It happens. Please don’t beat yourself up.” So begins a provocatively titled little volume by strategic communications consultant Mandi Kane (’06 BA). In So, You F*cked Up: A Peptalk for When You’ve Made a Mistake (Ardia Books, 2021) Kane gives readers a literal pep talk to get them through personal or professional foul-ups so relationships and reputations aren’t permanently damaged. Lesson No. 1: “You’re not alone.” Lesson No. 2: Regardless of what feelings you’re spinning through — embarrassment, disappointment, frustration, anger — put them aside and get to the task of moving forward. Kane, who in her media relations business helps people and corporations navigate through mistakes, offers strategies for making things right. “Apologize if you need to and be sincere. Saying you’re sorry isn’t a weakness, it’s a strength,” she writes. And she offers warm advice: “You are not defined by your mistakes, no matter how public.”

Cattle rustling. Treasure hunting. Bootlegging. Family drama. New Mexico scenery ranging from Quemado ranches to Gallup dance halls to the spooky Malpais. Death on a Desolate Piece of Ground (Abbott Press, 2021) by Ray Windsor (’71 BAED) takes readers through a mystery set in New Mexico during the Depression. Jesse Woods, one of three sons of a violent and whiskeydrinking Catron County rancher, survives a childhood of beatings, runs away and, barely 16, finds himself taking the rap for his cattle-rustling friends and in prison for a year. Hardened when he gets out, he joins a rustling syndicate and becomes a man who never walks away from a fight. The bullied becomes the bully, culminating in unspeakable violence.

Another richly told New Mexico mystery, Taos Gothic (White Bird Publications, 2021), comes from author James C. Wilson (’82 PhD). This is set in present-day Taos and begins with the disappearance of Kate Isaacs, a Santa Fe historian doing research at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House in Taos. Investigating Isaacs’ disappearance is Fernando Lopez, a retired Santa Fe police detective now hanging out his shingle as a private investigator. Isaacs, a podcaster and UNM lecturer with a past that includes drinking and drugging, is reported missing by her wife in Santa Fe. Last known sighting? At a party at the home of a former lover. If you like Taos, the D.H. Lawrence Ranch and Taos women writers — Willa Cather in particular — this is a page-turner for you.

ATTENTION PUBLISHED ALUMNI AUTHORS: We would like to add your book to the alumni library in Hodgin Hall and consider it for a review in Shelf Life. Please send an autographed copy to: Shelf Life, UNM Alumni Relations 1 UNM, MSC01-1160, Albuquerque, NM 87131

Andres K. Calderon (’03 MBA), Lubbock, Texas, has retired after 20 years of federal government service, including positions as a Foreign Service officer for the Department of State, program analyst for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Inspector General and Peace Corps volunteer in Kenya.

Wade L. Jackson (’03 JD), a lawyer with Sutin, Thayer & Browne, was voted the Best Corporate Attorney in the Albuquerque Journal 2021 Readers’ Choice selection. He currently serves as chair of Sutin’s Commercial Practice Group.

Megan E. McCoyVialpando (’03 BSN), Rio Rancho, N.M., has joined the Prebyterian Medical Group’s team of certified nurse practitioners.

Wade L. Jackson

Lisa M. Mercado (’03 BS), Albuquerque, certified physician assistant, was hired by Lovelace Medical Group in the Emergency General Surgery department.

Candace A. Sall (’03 MA), Columbia, Mo., is the new director of the Museum of Anthropology and American Archaeology Division at the University of Missouri.

Katie V. Williams (’04 BA), Albuquerque, associate director of the UNM Alumni Relations Office, was recognized with the Gerald W. May Outstanding Staff Award for her significant contributions to UNM. Ryan M. Lacen (’05 BUS), Albuquerque, wrote and directed “All the World is Sleeping.” The film explores the struggles of a New Mexican mother struggling with addiction.

Erica T. Lujan (’05 BSED), Los Lunas, N.M., joined Lovelace Medical Group’s Westside Hospital Sleep Center.

Angelica M. Bruhnke (’06 BBA), Rio Rancho, N.M., was named one of Albuquerque Business First’s 2021 Women of Influence for her work as president of RS21 Health Lab. Jai McBride Calloway (’07 BS), has joined consulting firm Exude, Inc., as a director of diversity, equity and inclusion with a focus on strategy, policy and training.

Jai McBride Calloway

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Hello Fellow Lobos Photo: Roberto E. Rosales (’96 BFA, ’14 MA)

L

ast fall, I was certainly getting excited at the possibility of seeing you in person for many great events on campus and at our regional gatherings, but alas COVID has evolved, but

so have we. I will continue to be optimistic about gathering again, but I am so proud of the work we have done remotely. Online basketball watch parties, committee meetings and virtual fundraisers have kept us connected, supporting student scholarships, and quite importantly, shaping the future of Alumni Relations with thoughtful career support programs and an exciting new mentoring approach I call Whistle Stop Tours.

Like the old days, when political campaigns traveled from city to city via train for a brief but meaningful visit, we are now traveling to different departments and colleges on campus for a brief but meaningful visit with students. We aren’t talking politics; we are talking about careers and education paths. Our guests on the proverbial train are mentors — alums in career fields related to the schools. We are meeting one-on-one, having panel discussions and creating what we hope are lasting relationships. Many of us owe our careers and successes to the

Mike Silva

guidance of mentors. If you are interested in joining us for a lunchtime stop, please reach out.

Your story and experience will no doubt help a student who will soon be a fellow Lobo alum.

We are stronger as a community, and these newly redesigned programs are meant to bring us together in an efficient and meaningful way.

I hope you have enjoyed the many interesting stories in this virtual issue of Mirage. I continue to be inspired by the groundbreaking work of our fellow alums and absolutely enjoyed reading about, and seeing for myself, the changing architecture and landscape at UNM. My mother became a Lobo when I was just 10 years old. I was very familiar with the campus as a young boy and as a student — spending so much time in Johnson Gym and Popejoy Hall. The campus was as beautiful then, as it is now. The campus growth over the past decade had been the greatest in the University’s history. There are many buildings you can still reminisce in — I saw some of that light green tile left over in a few spots in renovated Johnson Center — but there are so many new, inspiring spaces. I hope you get to see them in person.

I am sure you’ll also be in awe of the newly built spaces on campus, as well as appreciate the historical spaces so meticulously cared for. Our current and future Lobos are in for a treat.

Be well, and be massive in your service, Lobos!

Mike Silva

Alumni Association President

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Connect! Communicate!

Meet up with old friends and make new Ones!

Judy A. Liesveld (’07 PhD), Edwardsville, Ill., has been appointed dean of the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville School of Nursing after years of service at the UNM College of Nursing.

APRIL APRIL 20

ALUMNI AWARDS DINNER

APRIL 28 LOBO LIVING ROOM – PAIS BUILDING TOUR APRIL 30

ALUMNI SCHOLARSHIP DEADLINE

MAY LOS ANGELES CHAPTER — HOLLYWOOD BOWL SLC CHAPTER — BREWS AND BASEBALL YOUNG ALUMS AND BASEBALL @ ISOTOPES MAY 13 - 14

ALUMNI EMERITI EVENTS

MAY 14

COMMENCEMENT

JUNE LOBO LIVING ROOM JUNE 10

“THANK U” RECEPTION

JUNE 16

DAILY LOBO ANNIVERSARY GATHERING

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER REGIONAL CHAPTER GREEN CHILE ROASTS — VISIT UNMALUMNI.COM FOR DATES SEPTEMBER SEPTEMBER 24

Amanda C. Chavez (’07 BSED), Santa Fe, N.M, was named Santa Fe Public School district’s new special education director.

AWAY TAILGATE @LSU

OCTOBER HOMECOMING 2022

Elaine P. Lujan (’07 JD), Albuquerque, previously with the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office, has been appointed judge in the Second Judical District Court.

Jennifer M. Gill (’08 BBA, ’14 DM), Albuquerque, board certified obstetrician and gynecologist, has been hired by Prebyterian Medical Group.

Jesse D. Hale (’08 BA, ’13 JD), a lawyer at Sutin, Thayer & Browne, has been appointed to serve as co-chair of the American Bar Association Health Law Section’s Membership Committee. He most recently served two consecutive terms as one of the ABA committee’s vice chairs.

Jesse D. Hale

Shannon E. Kunkel (’08 BA), Albuquerque, is the new executive director for the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government, a nonprofit organization that seeks to defend transparency and open record laws in the state.

Melissa Nunez (’08 BBA), Albuquerque, advisor at CLA Wealth Advisors LLC, was named one of Albuquerque Business First’s 2021 Women of Infuence.

Aaron B. Zimmerman (’08 BS), Austin, Tex., assistant professor with the University of Texas at Austin, was honored with the Teaching Excellence Award in the College of Natural Sciences.

Rachel A. Balkovec (’09 BS), Tampa, Fla., was named manager of the New York Yankees’ affiliate Tampa Tarpons.

Sarah Sayles (’09 MA), Safford, Ariz., has begun her position as executive director of the Gila Watershed Partnership of Arizona, a nonprofit organization seeking to improving the water and ecological condition of the surrounding region.

Deborah R. Stambaugh (’09 JD), Alexandria, Va., joined the litigation department at Wisler Pearlstine, LLP.

Find more information about UNM Alumni Programming and Events at UNMAlumni.com.

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CONGRATULATIONS TO THE

2022 BLACK ALUMNI CHAPTER AWARD RECIPIENTS

Kenny Thomas, ‘19 BA Living Legend Award

Harold J. Pope, ‘02 BS Trailblazer Award

The University of New Mexico Black Alumni Chapter

PLACE AN AD IN MIRAGE The UNM Alumni Association is the foremost connection between UNM and its alumni and friends.

The Alumni Association would love to feature your business in a distribution that is mailed annually to just over

147,000 alums delivered electronically, bi-annually, to more than

130,000 alums and in New Mexico alone over

120,000 alums UNMALUMNI.COM/MIRAGE

From the Veep

S

pring is a perfect time to celebrate accomplishments and growth and push forward into the next chapter. Often when we look into the future, we reflect on the past and for us that includes our beloved Hodgin Hall.

2010s Christie L. Abeyta (’10 BAED), Española, N.M., is the new superintendent for the Santa Fe Indian School.

Cameron M. Decker (’10 BAFA), Arlee, Mont., is educator and outreach coordinator at the Missoula Art Museum, responsible for developing art education programs and implementing statewide distance learning sessions.

Diana V. Martinez (’10 BA, ’17 MPH), Albuquerque, was recognized with the Gerald W. May Outstanding Staff Award for campus in 1889 and, suitably, is now the home of UNM alumni. It originally looked like a Midwestern her significant contributions to UNM during her time with the Health Sciences Learning schoolhouse, with red brick and a pitched roof.

Environment Office.

In 1908, it was remodeled to the Pueblo-style you Jodi E. Shadoff (’10 BA), Orlando, Fla., competed in the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics see today, which set the example for our campus respresenting Great Britain in women’s golf. architecture. As an alum you are a member of our Connie Beimer Sean P. Ward (’10 BA), Albuquerque, is Lobo Pack for life and Hodgin is your home. We’re executive director of the Democratic Party now preparing to welcome new alums to our Pack this May. Activities at the Hodgin U will of New Mexico. bring graduating students to what we hope will be their alumni home.

Matthew J. Armijo (’12 BA), Santa Fe, N.M., has joined the Montgomery and Andrews law Last fall the Alumni Relations Office staff worked hard with board members, chapters, firm in Santa Fe, specializing in environmental law, commercial disputes, products defects, constituent groups, committees and individual alums to create programming reflective of the constant changing pandemic and needs of alumni. We’ve continued to weave the digital world construction defects, oil and gas litigation and personal injury. into our everyday life. For Homecoming — or as we called it HomeLeaving — we “unmuted” Justin L. Greene and gathered to collectively share our experiences as Lobos both virtually and in person. From (’12 BBA), has joined Sutin, Thayer & Browne Green Chile Roasts to our hybrid Lobo Living Rooms, from celebrating the arts at Dîner en as an associate attorney.

Rouge to Happy Hour at Hodgin, from legislative outreach to virtual basketball watch parties, As a member of the we got the opportunity to connect with alumni across the country. firm’s Litigation Group, he practices primarily The Association continues to explore new opportunities and partnerships to connect our alums in the areas of employment law and to UNM and to each other. You have shown us that our Pack is innovative, adaptable and commercial litigation. energetic. As we continue to navigate the COVID landscape, we expect the unexpected and Justin L. Greene Jessica R. Martin move forward with enthusiasm and optimism. We are concentrating on awarding scholarships, (’12 JD), has joined Sutin, Thayer & Browne as recognizing outstanding alums, “getting back together” at events this spring and summer, an associate attorney in the firm’s Litigation Group, focusing on commercial litigation. honoring our Alumni Emeriti from the past three years and welcoming graduating Lobos to She is fluent in Spanish, providing written the Alumni Association. and oral communication in Spanish and English for clients.

The historic Hodgin Hall was the first building on

Connie Beimer Vice President for Alumni Relations, UNM Executive Director, UNM Alunni Association

Claudia Sanchez (’12 MA), Albuquerque, has been promoted to director of marketing and policyholder services by New Mexico State Mutual.

Emily B. Allen (’14 MBA, ’14 MEMBA), Corrales, N.M., chief financial officer of Dekker/Perich/Sabatini, was named one of Albuquerque Business First’s 2021 Women of Infuence.

Grant A. Burrier (’14 PhD), Stow, Ohio, is visiting associate professor in the Department of Integrative and Global Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institutute.

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Alumni Network Snapshots from Alumni events

Chad Cooper (’01 MBA), Past President; Katie Williams (‘04 BA), Associate Director; Connie Beimer (’77 BA, ’78 MPA), VP of Alumni Relations; and Michael Silva (’95 BA), President, supporting Lobo Football at Texas A&M.

LA Chapter Green Chile Roast with Chapter President Gary Bednorz (’87 BA) and Alumni Association President Elect Amy Miller ('85 BA, '93 MPA).

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Alumni Board Treasurer Joe Ortiz (’14 BBA) and Tamara Ortega at Board of Directors holiday gathering.

The Fall 2021 Alumni Award honorees with Alumni President Michael Silva (’95 BA) and UNM President Garnett Stokes. (Details on award winners.)

Black Alumni Chapter members and friends at the Alumni Awards Dinner.

Aaron Currence (‘15 MA), Young Alumni President, and Adam Biederwolf (’20 BBA) at the inaugural Young Alumni Green Chile Roast at Bombs Away Beer Company.

Washington D.C. Roast with (L to R) Dean Christos Christodoulo, Dean Arash Mafi, VP of Alumni Relations Connie Beimer (’77 BA, ’78 MPA), Alumni Association Past President Chad Cooper (’01 MBA), Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland (BA ‘94, JD ’06), Chapter President Andrew Aragon (‘14 BA), Dean Harris Smith, and Alumni Association President Michael Silva (’95 BA).

Black Alumni Chapter Board members Helen Hamilton (BSN ‘70), Kenny Thomas (BA ‘18), Chapter President Diedre Gordon (BA ’98), Treasurer Patrick Barett (‘14 BA), Vice President D’Nienne ”Dee Dee“ Hatch Sanders (’93 BA) at the Chapter Homecoming Cookout.

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In Memoriam We remember alumni who recently passed away.

Last fall, we changed software systems for gathering information which includes the listings for alums who have died this past year. If the name of a loved one who died between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2021 is not included in these pages, please accept our condolences and know we want to honor your family member or friend in our alumni magazine. Please let us know their name via email at alumni@unm.edu. We will include the name in the In Memoriam section of our Fall 2022 print issue.

1920 - 1929 Julia M. Ford ’24 1940 - 1949 Marion T. Sebastian ’42 Lois P. Curfman ’47 Carolyn Bernice Bowra ’48 Sarah E. Mount ’48 Henry Joseph Sanchez ’48 Gloria H. Cheek ’49 William C. Overmier ’49 1950 - 1959 James Russell Fitch ’50 Paul W. Franko ’50 Harry Gould Mozian ’50 Bob K. Arundale ’51 Willie Gomez ’51 Richard C. Stockton ’51 Dan L. Wheeler ’51 Alice Jackson ’52 Duane L. Aldous ’53, ’61 Mary Anne Long ’53 Alfred H. Zeltmann ’53, ’61 William Robert Collier ’54 Lorraine L. Hislop ’54 Tristan E. Krogius ’54 Jane Reynolds Ash ’55 Robert S. Marquez ’55 Richard G. Camacho ’56 Harvey R. Engel ’56 Donald P. Hollis ’56 Ralph W. Lewis ’56 Frank R. Murillo ’56 Ben D. Cohen ’57 David L. Paffett ’57

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Carol Anne Tidyman ’57 Katherine V. Bennett ’58 Mary Cella Erkkila ’58, ’62 Robert Levi Gallegos ’58, ’65, ’74 Arthur E. Lindberg ’58 Donald F. Mead ’58, ’59 Donald J. Ortiz ’58 Teddy Jackson Rhodes ’58 Sostenes F. Suazo ’58 Lindsey J. Green ’59 Joe F. Middleton ’59 Hugh Gary Sloan ’59 Philip S. Taulbee ’59 1960 - 1969 George Steve Bosiljevac ’60, ’66 Larry D. Johnson ’60 John M. Patten ’60 Betty Rae Still ’60 Bruce Albert Wickesberg ’60 Mary West Otero ’61, ’76 William E. Putman ’61, ’64 Marie J. Roybal ’61, ’67 Bonnie M. Drake ’62 Gustav Kwasi Ntiforo ’62, ’69, ’70, ’80 Gerald Peter Rodriguez ’62 Siegfried Thunborg ’62 Beverly J. Winters ’62 William H. Carpenter ’63, ’66 Louida Dare Murray ’63 Michael P. Watkins ’63 Joe B. Burwinkle ’64, ’69 Elmont E. Hollingsworth ’64 Roosevelt Martin ’64 Joseph Franklyn Taggard ’64 Carl A. Calvert ’65, ’77 Sally J. Evans ’65 Curtis F. Lunsford ’65 Walter O. Scholl ’65 James Fredric Desler ’66 Don A. Krueger ’66 Michael H. Palter ’66 Nancy Jo Archer ’67 Hubert A. Dickson ’67 Patrick C. M. Gorman ’67, ’68 Jon Robert Meadows ’67 L. Herbert Pitts ’67 Dennis Stanford ’67, ’73 Jeffrey N. Wilkes ’67 Carl A. Barhorst ’68

William L. Dixon ’68 John Wayne Higgins ’68 Jose E. Martinez ’68, ’70 Shirley A. Sager ’68 Gerald G. Simpson ’68 Dolores C. Waller ’68 Gary M. Beal ’69 Leif G. Gonnsen ’69 Sharon A. Kologie ’69 Ruth Shore Mondlick ’69, ’76, ’82 Ben L. Pilcher ’69 James L. Skogen ’69, ’70 1970 - 1979 Angelika Kanzian Bryant ’70 Fernando C. Gomez ’70 Patrick E. Montano ’70 J. Richard Ogilvie ’70 Frank A. Stasi ’70 Charles Leroy Williams ’70 Martin Louis Bregman ’71 John Wirt Fisk ’71, ’74 Lawrence Lee Huxel ’71, ’73 Robert J. Maguire ’71 Donna Roberts ’71 Eufelio Octaviano Vasquez ’71 Michael Louis Danoff ’72 Richard Duane Howell 72, ’73, ’83 Jim Maddox ’72 Donna Lee Pecastaing ’72 Nancy Overton Covalt ’73 James Willard Hammons ’73 Mary Ann Linsey White ’73 Tonya Garcia MacKinnon ’73 April Lovella Price ’73, ’94 Kevin James Shanahan ’73 Kenneth Wayne Shields ’73 Darby J. Strong ’73 Stanley John Bowman ’74 Debra Sharleen Johns ’74, ’83 Michael Davis Lindsey ’74 Kurt M. Sager ’74, ’16 Clifton Mark Snider ’74 Joe Damacio Vigil ’74 Ellis Bontrager ’75 Donna E. Quasthoff ’75 Mary Lou Del Balso ’76 Karl Anthony Martinez ’76 Laura Ruth Nelson ’76 Carol Beth Parpart ’76

In Memoriam Thelma Saxby ’76 Bobby Luis Trujillo ’76, ’80 Michael Stephen Baca ’77 Mary Ann Beck ’77 John Kenneth Silver ’77 Deborah Anne Young ’77 Shelly Ann Green ’78, ’93 Margaret Donnelly Hino ’78 Gene E. Runkle ’78 Susan Martz Wayland ’78 Gordon Beardsley ’79 Peter Gregory Gooden ’79 Cecil Augustus Lynn ’79 Leisa A. Sedall ’79 1980 - 1989 Michael Edward Casillas ’80 Douglas Eldon Mitchell ’80 Hurley Benally ’81 Maurine Goehring ’81 Hildegarde Brewster Bird ’82 Margaret Alley Seymour ’82 Debra Sharleen Johns ’83 John Franklynn Mares ’83, ’88 Ruth Moller Monteverdi ’83, ’84 Emilio Jose Otero ’83 Mary D. Poole ’83 Julia Anne Kelly ’84 Steve A. Tomasi ’84 Edison Richard Wato ’84 Jeannette Cochran ’85, ’93 Carlos Espinoza ’85 Joan Gilberry Coke ’85 Mark Lawrence Kendrick ’86 Elizabeth Ortiz Palmer ’87 Jerome Anthony Maes ’88 Robert John Roe ’88, ’96 Jane Marie Curtis ’89 1990 - 1999 Anselmo F. Arellano ’90 Jeff Thomas Horan ’90 Anne Elizabeth Kelso ’91 David Brian Dehoff ’92, ’94 Sandra A. Sedillo ’92 John Paul LeDoux ’93, ’95 O. Jerome Bustos ’94 Elizabeth Jordanayne Knecht ’94 Loren Tommy Dils ’95 Alison Therese Kleven ’95

Gigi Desser Bayley ’96, ’97 Herman James Chee ’96 Anna K. Mesiti ’98 Molly Ellen Froats ’99 Jane Margaret Pollard ’99 2000 - 2009 Elizabeth Kathryn Ruiz ’00 Chris Carl Platero ’01, ’03 Steven Bryan Young ’01 William Nelson Talley ’02, ’07 Rosa Honoria Belanger ’03 Leason Alan Cherry ’04 Judith Murphy ’04 Kristina Michiko Rohman ’04 Yanga Kalambay Dijiba ’05 Brian James Rupp ’06 Sergio A. De Haro ’09 2010 - 2019 John T. Babineaux ’11 Catlyn M. Davis ’12 Jerry L. Surveyor ’13 Ruth Fay Cain ’14 Chau M. Nguyen ’15 Audrey Lena Tom ’15, ’17 Neal A. Apodaca-Joffe ’18 FACULTY AND STAFF Leason Cherry Kenneth F. Crumley Michael Dougher Rolf J. Kolden Jimmie L. Reed Deborah Rifenbary Eric Andrew Rombach-Kendall Scott Wilkinson OTHER ALUMNI Beau J. Becenti Otis F. Bryan Leslie R. Ferguson Maxine Gleasner Barbara Sue Leyendecker Anna Kathleen McCormick Nelson A. Naro Larry A. Verdugo

Manon K. De Roey (’14 BA), Albuquerque, competed in the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics respresenting Belgium in women’s golf.

Rhiannon L. Samuel (’14 BA), Albuquerque, executive director of Viante New Mexico, was named one of Albuquerque Business First’s 2021 Women of Influence.

Samuel D. Saunders (’14 BBA), Albuquerque, won the L&J Golf Championship, hosted by Jenning Mill Country Club in Watksinville, Ga. Chanel R. Wiese (’14 BBA, ’18 MBA), Albuquerque, was named one of Albuquerque Business First’s 2021 Women of Infuence in recognition of her leadership in launching the Somos Unidos Foundation.

Noe Astorga-Corral (’15 BA, ’19 JD), a lawyer with Sutin, Thayer & Browne, has become licensed to practice in the Navajo Nation.

Astorga also heads Sutin’s Committee on Equality, which works to tangibly empower marginalized Noe Astorga-Corral communities in New Mexico. He is fluent in Spanish.

Django Lovette (’15 BA), represented Canada in the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics in the high jump and finished in 8th place.

Julie A. Morrison (’15 BA), Albuquerque, was recognized with the Gerald W. May Outstanding Staff Award for her significant contributions to UNM in the Physics and Astronomy Department.

Xochitl Torres Small (’15 JD), Las Cruces, N.M., was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve as U.S. Department of Agriculture undersecretary for rural development.

Ryan Inzenga (’16 MBA), Zachary, La., has joined Luba Workers’ Comp as vice president and underwriting manager.

Aaron P. Rivera (’16 BA), Corrales, N.M., ProView Networks sports announcer, is the new play-by-play announcer at Fort Marcy Ballpark, calling home games for the Santa Fe Fuego.

Amalia Sanchez-Parra (’16 BS, ’21 PhD), Albuquerque, was named one of UNM Advance’s 2021 Women in STEM award winners.

Troy S. Lawton (’18 BA, ’21 JD), Rio Rancho, N.M., has joined the Montgomery and Andrews law firm in Santa Fe, specializing in federal taxation law, buisness law and legal writing.

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MIRAGE MAGAZINE

Pack Your Bags The UNM Alumni Association gives Lobos with wanderlust the opportunity to continue their education by traveling the world through the Alumni Travel Program. Travel is still challenging, but with a number of unique trip opportunities in 2022 — from Singapore to Spain — the Alumni Travel Program sets you up for success by handling all the travel plans and arrangements for you while offering amazing discounts too.

To view Alumni Travel Program options and book, visit www.unmalumni.com/travel.

Spain: Andalucia in a Parador May 26 – June 3, 2022 Majestic Switzerland: Interlaken and Vevey June 22 – July 1, 2022 Cruise: The Rhine and Mosel Rivers July 20 – 28, 2022 Alaskan Heritage and Wildlife August 7 – 14, 2022 Portugal: Romance of the Douro River September 26 – October 7, 2022 Singapore, Thailand and Angkor Wat October 18 – 31, 2022

Adriana E. Oñate (’18 MARCH), El Paso, Tex., was recognized as one of Mile High CRE’s “Movers and Shakers,” in honor of her achievements in architecture and design.

Christopher J. Pommier (’18 JD), Santa Fe, N.M., has joined the Montgomery and Andrews law firm in Santa Fe. Brooke B. Sheldon (’18 BS), Albuquerque, received the Fulbright Research Award for the 2021-2022 academic year and will pursue research of the Portuguese dialects and their influence on the Lusophone world.

Alex G. Elborn (’19 JD), has joined Sutin, Thayer & Browne as an associate attorney in the firm’s Litigation Group. His practice focuses on commercial litigation, employment law and probate matters. He speaks and writes in Spanish.

Mingjie L. Hoemmen (’19 JD), has joined Sutin, Thayer & Browne as an associate attorney.

She joins the firm’s Litigation Group, where she practices primarily in the areas of employment law and civil rights, collections, bankruptcy and creditors’ rights. She Mingjie L. Hoemmen is fluent in Mandarin Chinese.

Thatcher A. Rogers (’19 MS), Albuquerque, received the Friends of Coronado Historic Site scholarship and a grant from the University of Missouri Research Reactor Archaeometry Laboratory.

2020s Justin D. Armbruester (’21 BBA), Sammamish, Wash., was called up in Round 12 of the Major League Baseball draft by the Baltimore Orioles.

Kristen Burby (’21 JD), White Rock, N.M., has joined the Montgomery and Andrews law firm in Santa Fe, specializing in natural resource and environmental law.

Ava Cohen (’21 BBA), Albuquerque, represented Israel in the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics in the 300-meter steeplechase.

Amanda E. Cvinar (’21 JD), has joined Sutin, Thayer & Browne as an associate attorney.

A member of the firm’s Commercial Group, she practices primarily in the areas of corporate law, intellectual property, public finance, estate planning and renewable energy development.

Amanda E. Cvinar

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Have a Good Howl Our monthly email newsletter, The Howler, keeps Lobos up-to-date with Alumni Association news and events, as well as additional alumni profiles not published in Mirage. You can read it online at UNMAlumni.com/howler or subscribe to the email version by sending a request to alumni@unm.edu.

CELEBRATE YOUR TIME AT UNM Jostens offers multiple custom choices to highlight your alma mater, degree and more.

UNMALUMNI.COM/JOSTENS

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MIRAGE MAGAZINE

My

ALUMNI STORY

I was born and raised in Gallup, N.M., just a two-hour drive west of Albuquerque. I spent most of my childhood learning about art through history and elective classes in public school. I took a gap year after high school to help out my paternal grandmother, who lives in a rural area of the Navajo Nation. I decided to further my education at UNM-Gallup in 2012. Working toward an associate of arts degree in Studio Art, I learned more about the great artists and was on a path to become a professional artisan.

®

When I decided to attend UNM in Albuquerque to receive a bachelor of arts in Studio Art, I applied to live on campus because I wanted to become involved in student life and make new friends. I felt connected with student life on campus and made memories with friends that I stay in contact with today.

Currently, I work at the Octavia Fellin Public Library in Gallup as the experiential learning coordinator. I plan programs and events ranging from visiting guest speakers, STEM activities for teens, gardening workshops, art classes and more! During the COVID-19 pandemic we did a quick switch to provide curbside services and virtual events without skipping a beat and never closed. I also volunteer my time working with McKinley Mutual Aid, the New Mexico Social Justice & Equity Institute and Northwest New Mexico VaccinEquity.

I try my best to make art on the side and have participated in multiple art shows and juried exhibitions. Most recently, I donated two photographs and a watercolor painting to an auction benefitting the New Mexico Library Foundation.

Since leaving UNM, I have stayed in touch by volunteering with the UNM Young Alumni, a great way to connect with other professionals.

I’m a Lobo for life!

Joshua Whitman (’18 BFA)

Stay in touch with your Alumni Association at UNMAlumni.com. Click on “Connect.”

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M A G A Z I N E

The University of New Mexico Alumni Association MSC 01-1160 1 University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001

HOME COMING October 22, 2022

www.unmalumni.com/homecoming