New Mexico State University

The Peoples of New Mexico Film Series: These films aim to engage and shift the dominant narrative of NM and US history by uplifting previously omitted and/or sanitized histories of marginalizes peoples, communities, and realities. Each film focuses on an untold story of New Mexico’s history through the eyes of an elder or community member sharing their lived experience.

The BEST Research Center produces the films, creates curricula related to the themes, topics, and people in the films, and will make them available to wider audiences beyond the classroom.

Three films have been completed and one is in production.

FILM 1: Mining New Mexico (featuring Elisa Sanchez)

FILM 2: Integration in the Borderlands (featuring Bobbie Fuller Boyer)

FILM 3: Fruits of Labour/ Frutas de Labour (featuring jose Guadalupe Felix Perez and other campesinos)

Elisa Sanchez

Bobbie Fuller Boyer

José Guadalupe Félix Pérez

Teaching Resources: The BEST Research Center has produced kits as resources for teachers to implement meaningful lessons in the classroom. The rresources are aligned with the NMPED Social Studies standards and offer grade-level-appropriate activities and topics for critical discussion. These kits will be used in interdisciplinary ways to teach about New Mexico’s unique cultural identities, histories, languages, and traditions.

Think Inside the Box contains ready-to-use activities and posters in classrooms to spark creative inquiry about place-based learning. Students learn about the good, bad, and complicated histories of the Borderlands while cultivating critical thinking skills that foster deep conversations about social understanding.

Healing. Education. And. Learning (HEAL) NM: HEALNM is the Southern New Mexico Place-based Lesson Writing Collective. The collective brings together high school students and K-12 educators from across Southern New Mexico communities including: Gadsden, Mescalero, Las Cruces, and Silver City joined NMSU faculty to co-create new Units and Lessons to support the New Mexico Public Education Social Studies standards inclusion of its sixth strand: Ethnic and Cultural Identities. The website showcases the seven lessons the collective developed including curricula, resources, and links the lessons to the NMPED Social Studies standards. The lessons are thorough and grade-level adaptable.

K20 Curriculum Development: Curriculum experts in the College of Health, Education, and Social Transformation’s (HEST) Teacher Preparation and Administrative Leadership (TPAL) and the Borderland and Ethnic Studies (BEST) departmentt work together to create seven units/lessons that center the previously untold histories of marginalized peoples, communities, and realities. Each unit/lesson is tied to the New Mexico Public Education Department’s (NMPED) recently changed (2022) social studies standards. The seven units/lessons include critical questions, learning outcomes, and links to primary documents accessible to all teachers through the collaborative HEALNM website https://healborderlands.org. These units are adaptable for undergraduate and graduate studies.  

Cordova Sisters Archival Project: The aarchival pproject recognizes, validates, and preserves the efforts of the Cordova sisters, Nadine and Patsy, in their work to teach Chicano history in ways that affirm and foster pride and resilience in New Mexican communities. The Cordova sisters taught in rural Vaughn, NM in the 1990's. This project represents the struggle for inclusive and culturally responsive teaching underscores the importance of archiving material related to marginalized voices in education.  

Traveling Exhibit: The 12-installation bilingual art and cultural exhibit, Pasos Ajenos, aims to gather and engage diverse groups in one space, creating a conversation for a substantive narrative change on issues of power, race, gender, labor, (im)migration, border health, and poverty. From 2019 to present, Pasos Aos Ajenos has traveled to UTEP, UC Channel Islands, Albuquerque, Bernalillo, Branigan Cultural Center in Las Cruces,jenos has traveled to UTEP, UC Channel Islands, Albuquerque, Bernalillo, Branigan Cultural Center in Las Cruces and the BEST Department at New Mexico State University. Pasos Ajenos continues to be invited to show through the collaborations emerging from interdisciplinary relationships fostered in academia, museums, and schools.  

Mobile Museum: A plan is being developed to create mobile educational pod museums to travel between schools throughout New Mexico. Exhibits in the pod museums will be created and developed by local students highlighting the history of their areas. Once completed, the museums will go to other campuses to share histories between communities. A micro-version of an existing traveling exhibit, Pasos Ajenos, will be part of this traveling pod museum.

New Mexico/Borderlands Murals Project: The BEST Murals are the first in a series of murals set to be painted throughout the NMSU Las Cruces campus. The murals will place art in highly visible campus locations to re-represent Indigenous Peoples and their culture(s), and reflect Indigenous students longing to see themselves in campus spaces. 

The BEST Murals are designed by local artist Diego Medina and is an ode to the landscapes of southern New Mexico.

The Research Center will continue to develop projects that represent the vision, objectives and goals that support our communities and partners. The existing projects are in various phases, with Pasos Ajenos Traveling Exhibit and the Cordova Sisters Archival Project expected to transition to new phases in 2025.

Upcoming projects include: 

• English Language Arts and Chicana/o/x Studies Professional Learning Community (PLC): BEST faculty are working with local teachers to develop strands within the existing English Language Arts (ELA) K12 standards to include Chicana/o/x literature. The PLC will meet for an intensive summer professional development where teachers will co-develop reading lists, lessons, and student activities that meet New Mexico’s ELA standards through literature that is culturally and linguistically familiar to students throughout the state.

• HEAL NM: Heal NM is a website that will be a repository for Ethnic Studies related curricula that teachers will have access to when designing lessons and activities for their students. HEAL NM will provide teacher developed lessons, activities, and testimonios of how to best utilize the resources available on the website.  

• Oral Histories of Our Community Elders: The Research Center will develop rubrics for participants to follow that encourages students to develop interview skills while taking meeting with community elders to learn about their lived experiences in the Borderlands. 

• Shahadat/Testimonios of the Borderlands: This project will adapt the work of Dr. Manal Hamzeh to create curricula for testimonios taken from individuals living in the Borderlands. Students will learn how to interview participants, and turn their testimonios into art; visual, performance, or music.  

• Think Inside the Box: BEST is currently developing a mobile museum that will be the first of its kind in New Mexico that makes museum education accessible to teachers and students. The mobile museum will be stationed on the NMSU campus for the pilot project and will offer students and teachers opportunities to explore thematic content and place-based learning, interpretive planning, and exhibit design.