San
Ysidro images on exhibit
UNMs
Alfonso Ortiz Center for Intercultural Studies and the Maxwell
Museum of Anthropology will present the exhibition "Images
of San Ysidro" at the Maxwell Museum and the Hibben Center,
located south of the museum, through the month of April.
The work
of the santeros exhibited expresses innovation, complex use
of materials and a variety of ways to interpret one important
santo of New Mexico - San Ysidro the patron saint of farmers
and agriculture.
Processions
and fiestas devoted to San Ysidro celebrate the annual blessing
of the waters in communities using acequias, irrigation ditches
built during the colonial period throughout the middle and upper
Rio Grande Valley. It expresses how inhabitants of New Mexico
have endowed and continue to endow land and water as place
with significance.
Rituals
about place, are enacted in many locations and are
expressed and represented through songs and stories that narrate
feelings and memories. The San Ysidro ritual complex ties together
multiple communities into a cultural region, and has persisted
and reinvented itself in these places both by accommodating
changes as well as by conserving and expressing tradition.
Parking
is free and unrestricted on weekends.