Nora Holzinger

  Everywhere I turn I am confronted by my own rootlessness. I lack a connectedness to any place. There is no place I can say that I am from. No “homeland”, that is important to my antecedents. No single constant through the changing seas of time and generations come and gone.  I currently live in New Mexico - a place that in some senses hasn’t changed much in the last 100 years. Outside the cities, the economy and way of life is still agrarian, with some people working the same piece of land since the 1500s. Folks here identify strongly with the land and don’t typically leave if they can help it.  As an obviously Anglo person, the (correct) assumption is that I’m not from New Mexico. Nuevomexicanos often guess where I am from (always California or Texas) and each time, I have to make a choice about where I want to say I am from, because the answer is really “no where”.  I come from a specific kind of nomadic Americans - the ones that travel city to city, state to sta...

I had read about it in books before I had ever seen the Sangre de Cristo mountains. I had dreams about it before I knew where it was. It captured my imagination in a way I can’t describe. It seemed like a Wild West fairytale.  Nestled between the peaks of the Sangre De Cristo mountains snakes the Santa Cruz river. Along the banks of that river is a small Catholic church, el Santuario de Chimayó, that every year hosts thousands of pilgrims who are seeking the blessed earth, la tierra bendita , that can cure whatever ails them.  I knew I needed to visit it, to touch la tierra bendita . Not because I believe, but because I wanted to believe. There was some small voice in my heart that suggested that la tierra bendita of Chimayó might even cure me.  --- The lands which the Santuario de Chimayó now occupies are central to the creation myth of the Tewa-speaking Pueblo Indians. They called the area Tsimajopokwi . This area, like much of northern New Mexico, has volcanic mineral ...

I won't bury the lede - building community is at odds with modern life. I don’t mean in the sense that many of us are working multiple jobs, with long commutes, for little pay, raising children without much support, without even the prospect of retirement to comfort us - all of that matters too. I mean in the sense that our beliefs about how we and others should be in and move through this world are not conducive to building community.  Community is how humans survived the past 300,000 years and how we have come to inhabit nearly every corner of the earth.  Yet it’s only taken 75 years for Americans to lose it.  Many of us know little about the people who live next door to us. We don’t attend church, belong to civic groups nor social organizations, nor do we volunteer.  As Marc Dunkleman notes in his book “The Vanishing Neighbor”, Americans today mainly keep in touch with their closest friends and family members, and have very little interaction or relationship with ...

 Through the Looking Glass I remember the day I found out I was unvaccinated.  I was struggling through the digital forms that would allow me to live on campus my freshman year of college, and I had to provide documentation that I was vaccinated appropriately.  I yelled downstairs to ask my mom if she had the documents.  “No” she shouted back.  “What? Where is it? What do you mean” I peppered her, finally leaving my room to come downstairs to the living room. “It doesn’t exist,” she said.  I was stunned.  She walked down the narrow basement stairs to rummage in the filing cabinet that held all my documents, and she returned from the depths of the storage room with a folded yellow card with my name and date of birth on it in her handwriting. Inside, the card was blank except for two lines – a polio vaccination and a tetanus shot at age two.  Living in a state with quite strict rules about vaccine exemptions, I had no choice – I had to get vaccinate...

“Ding dong - Doors opening. Step back and allow customers to exit…”  As I stand at the opening Metro train car doors, I sense another passenger behind me.  “They’re just letting men wear dresses these days, huh.”  It’s 10:30 at night and I’m coming home from work. I get a pit in my stomach and reassure myself there’s no way he’s talking to me. I’m a woman, and always have been.  However, we are the only ones in this train car, and I am wearing a dress.  --- I am over six feet tall, with a build better described as “statuesque” rather than “model-esque” – broad shoulders, flat chest, without the soft curves that would mark me as belonging to the ranks of the fairer sex.  This fact has been thrown in my face as long as I can remember – the fact that I am larger than most men and always will be.  Judith Butler, misunderstood feminist theorist, writes that gender is a performance. You are a woman because you perform the stereotypical social role of “woman”...