Santa Fe, New Mexico — On a recent field trip to see historical landmarks in Santa Fe, the state capital of New Mexico, seventh-grader Ravi Baglayan observed the range of professions and contributions the school has made. slim appeared on them.
Paglayan’s favorite was Katherine Stinson Otero, a sky writer who was one of the first women to earn a pilot’s license in the United States. After Stinson Otero contracted tuberculosis while driving ambulances in World War I, she moved to New Mexico and began a second career as a celebrated architect.
“It looks very cool,” Paglayan said with a smile.
Introducing New Mexicans to women from the state’s history is the goal of a decades-long program that has placed nearly 100 roadside markers highlighting the significant contributions of women from or associated with New Mexico. Now the New Mexico Historical Marker Program is branching out to create a curriculum for schools based on its research.
“It’s so important that all students, not just female students, but every student have the ability to recognize and see the importance of the people who did a lot of work to create what we have,” said Lisa Nordstrom, director of education and middle school teacher who took Baglian and her classmates on the field trip.
Efforts to identify the route began decades ago. Pat French, a founding member of the International Women’s Forum-New Mexico, a leadership and networking group, noted in the 1980s that almost no women were mentioned on any of the state’s roadside historical markers. In 2006, the group received government funding to work with the New Mexico Department of Transportation to change that.
Over the years, the group visited individual counties and Native American communities, requesting stories of important women in their history. The research collected the CVs of dozens of women Pre-colonial times through Spanish and Mexican territories periodsAt the time New Mexico became a state.
Those women’s stories are now featured on 6-foot banners across the state and in an online database. While some honor well-known historical figures such as American modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe and New Mexico’s first female secretary of state Soledad Chavez de Chacón, many others depict local women whose stories have not been widely told.
For example, Evelyn Vigil and Juanita Toledo are remembered for reviving the Pecos Pueblo style of pottery in the 1870s, after the indigenous Pecos Pueblo population had been decimated by years of disease and war by the 1890s, and pottery techniques were lost.
“There’s a sense of justice in this,” program director Chris Petersen said. “These women have put in all this effort and made all these contributions, and they are not being recognized, which is completely wrong.”
There are other marks dedicated to groups of women, such as healers and military warriors of the state. The group points out that it is not possible to tell the history of the state without acknowledging the conflict that came with colonialism and the wars that took place in the region.
“However, they are not the first women to take up arms and defend their homes and community in our region,” the veterans’ online blurb notes. “New Mexico is a state with culturally diverse people who have protected themselves over many centuries.”
For now, the group has paused creating new tags, choosing to maintain existing tags and focus on the educational mission.
More than 10 years ago, Nordstrom had a similar finding at French: There was a shortage of women in the state’s standard history curriculum. She found biographies online from the Marks program and began teaching their stories to seventh graders.
In 2022, the New Mexico Historical Women’s Program received state funding to hire Nordstrom to develop a K-12 curriculum of women’s biographies.
“We have women who can’t be mentioned in any textbook,” Nordstrom said.
Funding was renewed in 2024 with bipartisan support. One of the legislation’s sponsors, Republican state Rep. Gail Armstrong, believes it is important for New Mexico residents, young and old, to understand how the world they live in has been shaped.
“History should not be changed, whether it is good or bad. We should remember it so that we do not make the same mistakes again and so that we can celebrate the good things that happened,” she said.
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Vollmert reported from Lansing, Michigan.