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RENDERING BY FLATOW MOORE SHAFFER McCABE
ARCHITECTS
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An artist's rendering of the 22-acre National Hispanic Cultural Center of New Mexico in Albuquerque, which opened Oct. 21.


Hispanic Cultural Center
International venue a sanctuary for arts, culture


Take care with the wild-eyed horses of Arabia. Watch that they don't trample the cartographers and their astrolabes. Bring the learning of words, the first grammar book, as well as the flowing of skirts and the conducting of water across high and low places. Hear the pounding of corn, the soft step of Matachines dancers and, faraway, the curses of Visigoth warriors. Do not forget the wanderers from across the Bering Strait.

Let them ride as comfortably as possible in the creaky wooden carreta (cart) and hold your ears as it all comes to a screeching halt beneath the cottonwoods at an old crossing along the Río Grande. You pull in at Barelas, a small community, one point on the famed Camino Real, the Royal road. But it is also camino de herradura (horseshoe road), camino de rueda (wheel road), and footpath.

Here on this ancient byway you meet with Chicano, Mexicana, Hispano, Hispanic, Latina, converso, captivo, mulatto, mestizo and Spaniard. These are the people merged of the Roman and the Greek, the Moor, the Maya and the Toltec. All stand witness at the site of the newly opened National Hispanic Cultural Center of New Mexico (NHCCNM), an international cross-cultural and virtual crossroads.

Operated by the state of New Mexico, yet national and international in scope, the 22-acre cultural center is the culmination of the rise of 3,000 years of Hispanic arts and culture and the blossoming of the 17-year-old dream of community leaders. An early precursor to this dream is found in early New Mexico records. In 1926, Camilo Padilla, one of New Mexico's earliest pioneers in print, gave notice in his Revista Ilustrada of the creation of El Centro de Cultura at Loretto Academy in Santa Fe. he envisioned  a sanctuary for the language of the antepasados (ancestors) and hoped to preserve Spanish literature, create reading rooms, a library and conferences, and host musical and literary evenings.

The first steps toward a contemporary cultural center, however, began in 1983 with the conception of the Hispanic Culture Foundation (HCF) by Edward Romero, U.S. ambassador to Spain, and Arturo Ortega, an Albuquerque community leader, now deceased. its mission was to "identify, preserve and enhance arts and humanities rooted in New Mexico's 400-year-old heritage." Education and development of Hispanic artists and cultural organizations have flourished under the HCF.

Then in 1993, the vision and seed of the NHCCNM took on new life with an appropriation from the state of New Mexico. "A group of scholars, artists and architects got together to brainstorm what might be possible for a Hispanic culture center. Many programs shifted and people came and went," according to Carlos Vásquez, who is in charge of the Research and Literary Arts Program at the center.

please see page 31

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By Micaela Seidel

28 NEW MEXICO/JANUARY 2001