Learning the Difference Between New Mexico and Arizona

If there is one thought you come away with after driving 1,100 miles across the southwest desert from Phoenix through Tucson, eastward to Alomogordo, NM, then northward to Santa Fe and Taos and back down to Albuquerque, as Gilda and I did last week, it is that pioneer men and women had grit uncommon to most humans. 

What took us just some 20 hours of driving in air-conditioned comfort over a week’s time probably took as much as 73 days in a covered wagon averaging 15 miles per day. If the pioneers arrived after late spring when temperatures hover for months between 85 and 106 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on the location, you had to wonder what made any of them want to stay in this natural convection oven. Forget that hooey about it being “dry heat.” A furnace blast of hot, 100 degree air is hot, hot, hot.

Yes, there are points of breathtaking beauty. But even now, with air conditioning universally available in your home, your car, your place of business unless it is outdoors, the heat is oppressive. Weighty. Energy sapping. What could have tempted the early settlers who did not have the benefit of air conditioning? Surely the local Native Americans did not weave a welcome mat for them.

Time out. Let’s take a step back. Most of you, no doubt. have a Western European orientation. And by Western European I mean Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and North Sea and Baltic Sea countries. When I wrote “early settlers” you probably thought of Americans and immigrants of European heritage heading west in wagon trains. 

Yet the reality is the southwest was colonized by the Spanish almost a hundred years before the first successful English settlement in Jamestown,VA. In elementary school my teachers barely taught the history of western America. For us, the history of the American Frontier began with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and Lewis and Clark. But that same frontier was largely a Spanish and then Mexican territory until the United States captured it in the Mexican-American War of 1848.

We didn’t covet all that we took. Sure, California had gold. But Arizona and New Mexico had lots of Catholic, Spanish speaking residents. Our white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Congress had no desire to extend citizenship to that type of resident. The U.S. Congress denied New Mexico’s repeated applications to be admitted to the Union from 1850 until 1912 when New Mexico and Arizona finally matriculated from territory to statehood.

Given the current debate on immigration and the antipathy of many toward Hispanic newcomers, it is enlightening to note New Mexico’s and Arizona’s respective attitudes toward their Spanish-speaking residents as embodied in their state constitutions.

New Mexico includes two specific sections I’ll reproduce here:

“Text of Section 8: 

“Teachers to Learn English and Spanish 

“The legislature shall provide for the training of teachers in the normal schools or otherwise so that they may become proficient in both the English and Spanish languages, to qualify them to teach Spanish-speaking pupils and students in the public schools and educational institutions of the state, and shall provide proper means and methods to facilitate the teaching of the English language and other branches of learning to such pupils and students.”

“Text of Section 10: 

“Educational Rights of Children of Spanish Descent 

“Children of Spanish descent in the state of New Mexico shall never be denied the right and privilege of admission and attendance in the public schools or other public educational institutions of the state, and they shall never be classed in separate schools, but shall forever enjoy perfect equality with other children in all public schools and educational institutions of the state, and the legislature shall provide penalties for the violation of this section. This section shall never be amended except upon a vote of the people of this state, in an election at which at least three-fourths of the electors voting in the whole state and at least two-thirds of those voting in each county in the state shall vote for such amendment.” 

Arizona’s constitution is silent on both areas.

A Little Education

Here’s how you know your decision to get out of the publishing business when you did was fortuitous if not prescient: an article in Monday’s NY Times on People StyleWatch’s success contained these two paragraphs:

“Still, readers spend an average of 93 minutes with the magazine, something of a feat, since it has few long sentences in it.

“The few times we’ve done longer pieces, something on trying a trend that went on for two pages, it just didn’t resonate,” Ms. (Susan) Kaufman, (editor,) said.” (For the full article, here’s the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/business/media/19stylewatch.html?scp=1&sq=stylewatch&st=cse.

Now, I never equated business to business journalism with fashion or teen magazine publishing. Clearly the two audiences share very little in reader demographics, especially the part about education. And for the record, the marching orders at trade magazines, including the ones I led, included advocacy of shorter articles. Tight copy was expected to meet the busy, time-constrained schedules of our readers. Articles longer than two pages were to be resisted.

But People StyleWatch seems to be taking taciturnity to the extreme, even beyond the standard enunciated by Jeff Goldblum in The Big Chill, who famously said that as a People reporter his articles were to be written short enough to be read in one sitting, if you get my cleaned up drift.

People StyleWatch’s readers are tomorrow’s leaders, and that includes their being mothers. How can we expect to forge the next intelligent generation when the raw material is so lacking?


Who Needs a Degree? On the other hand, if there was ever a reason to question the value of an education, here it is—37% of those who support the Tea Party movement hold a college or postgraduate degree, according to a NY Times/CBS News poll released last week (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/us/politics/15poll.html?scp=1&sq=tea%20party%20survey&st=cse). Unless those 37% majored in cafeteria, it does not reflect well on our halls of learning.

Wait. I majored in cafeteria. You can get a good education sitting around, schmoozing for eight hours a day. Those 37% probably ate too much while they were in the cafeteria. From the looks and sounds of too many of them, their brains must have morphed into the food they ate.

Please excuse my obvious distaste for people who just want to take without any desire to give back. They want their social security and Medicare, but demand less government. In other words, cut out programs that don’t line their pockets. They cry about wanting to preserve the Constitution, but were silent when Bush acted to deny basic rights not just to enemy combatants but also to U.S. citizens.

My father used to say he welcomed the idea of paying $100,000 in taxes. That would imply that he was making a helluva lot of money and he’d be ever so thankful for the opportunity this country provided him. The same NY Times/CBS News survey revealed that Tea Party supporters are better off than a majority of their fellow Americans, with 56% earning more than $50,000 a year. Only 6% are unemployed. Half are middle class.

It bares repeating—the measure of a country and nation is how it cares for the less fortunate. A society of Tea Partiers would be a sad, self-centered congregation.


Where It Began: Have you been to the Tenement Museum on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, at 97 Orchard Street?

About six years ago I attended a planning meeting there as part of my magazine’s co-sponsorship of a conference on the retail industry’s global labor responsibility. The Tenement Museum presents a fascinating perspective on the life of immigrants at the turn of the 20th century. Until recently, my interest in the museum was purely academic, as my parents arrived here in 1921 and 1939 and never lived in the squalid, cramped quarters of the walk-up apartments of the Lower East Side.

But twice in the last two weeks I was informed that my father’s first independent business transpired in the shadows of what is now the Tenement Museum. At 99 Orchard Street he ran a street level store, selling shirts and other clothing. I always wondered why he was so intimately familiar with all the shopkeepers on Orchard Street, one of the first discount meccas in the city. Now I know.


Speaking of Discounts: How would you like to travel back in time? It wouldn’t be too long a trip, just 30-40 years, back to a time when retail stores could not easily and extensively provide discounted brand name merchandise without the manufacturer’s explicit approval.

That in essence is the tip of the iceberg for what is at stake in a battle between Costco and Omega, the Swiss watchmaker. I’m not a lawyer, so I won’t burden you with an interpretation of copyright law which is at the heart of the legal wrangling (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2011649088_costco20.html).

But I can tell you, based on three decades of retail reporting, that retailers and manufacturers have been battling for more than half a century over the availability of brand name merchandise at discounted prices. E.J. Korvettes (no, the name does not stand for eight Korean War veterans) was among the first companies to circumvent restricted manufacturer distribution policies permitted under Fair Trade Laws. The rise of the discount store industry, from Kmart, Target and Wal-Mart, all of which began in 1962, to specialty stores like Toys “R” Us and Best Buy, depended on access to product and the ability to price it according to a retailer’s, not a supplier’s, needs. Most Fair Trade Laws were repealed by 1975.

We live today in a consumer society. Two-thirds of our economy is supported by the goods and services we buy. If Omega is successful, and other manufacturers seek similar restrictions on the distribution and pricing of their products, we may well undermine the foundation of a key part of our nation’s financial stability.