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Inez Russell Gomez made us all feel like we were “listening to a conversation at her kitchen table”, —Gloria Roybal.

“And her knowledge and somatic understanding of the history came through.” —Marissa Roybal

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Dr. Timothy E. Nelson joins

“Conversations Different” to discuss Blackdom, N.M., a settlement of Black pioneers that formed in southeast New Mexico in the early 1900s. Nelson, whose book “Blackdom, New Mexico: The Significance of the Afro-Frontier, 1900-1930” was published last summer, talks about the historical context in which the settlement existed and dispels the narrative that Blackdom was a failure. He also talks about what it’s been like to write about a history that many people were previously unaware of and what he’s noticed about how people respond when new information conflicts with popular understanding.

Spotify

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Santa Fe New Mexican Article: Join the conversation today Aug 23, 2023 Updated Feb 12, 2024

Andrew Lawrence Interviews Blackdom Historian Timothy E. Nelson, Ph.D. on January 16, 2020

Dr. Timothy E. Nelson’s multi-faceted work concerns racism, ambition, and the search for opportunity. These themes were revealed in his 2015 Ph.D. dissertation The Significance of the Afro-Frontier. Dr. Nelson was born in South Central LA, raised in Compton, during the early 1990s in the wake of race and class-based conflict with the LAPD. He earned his Ph.D. from (UTEP) the University of Texas at El Paso.

https://youtu.be/qgPt1PZlB6Y

Film Prize New Mexico 2023

BLACK IN NEW MEXICO

LOGLINE

A young Black New Mexican woman seeks to uncover “the black experience” for herself and others. Her hope is that by looking to the past and present, She might fully comprehend what it means to be “Black in New Mexico”.

FILMMAKER INTERVIEW

Tell us about the film you entered into the Film Prize Junior competition.

Black in New Mexico follows different stories of black New Mexicans to tell the story of what it’s like being black in New Mexico. We interviewed Dr. Timothy Nelson, and students from Amy Biehl High School.

LOGLINE

A young Black New Mexican woman seeks to uncover “the black experience” for herself and others. Her hope is that by looking to the past and present, She might fully comprehend what it means to be “Black in New Mexico”.

FILMMAKER INTERVIEW

Tell us about the film you entered into the Film Prize Junior competition.

Black in New Mexico follows different stories of black New Mexicans to tell the story of what it’s like being black in New Mexico. We interviewed Dr. Timothy Nelson, and students from Amy Biehl High School.

Tell us about a scene you had an absolute blast filming!

I think my favorite scene to film was probably the interview with Dr. Harold Bailey. He had a great wealth of information and it was so fun getting to interview and looking back on it in editing because he had great advice.

What is your goal in sharing this film with our festival?

I hope I can tell black stories you don’t always hear and that forces New Mexicans themselves to think about hard topics. This film directly challenges the narrative many New Mexicans are told and the black stories in our state matter.

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What obstacles challenged you and your crew the most when completing this film? What did you learn from making this short film?

I think what challenged us the most was probably people quitting the project before it was finished and a health scare from my mentor. For a little bit, I was kind of freaking out and had to calm myself down but we made it work.

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Why are opportunities like Film Prize Junior important to students today?

I think opportunities like this are important because it gives young filmmakers who are just starting out a chance to prove themselves. It is also a great springboard for experience that many don’t get when starting out.

What advice would you give to future participants in Film Prize Junior?

I think my advice would be to find a story you care about because that will give you motivation to see your project through. The second piece of advice I would give is to be organized and be prepared. You never know what can happen during filming, but you can try your best to put your work forward.

Golden Ax by Rio Cortez · Google Books Audiobook preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhX1dBh4W4k&t=8s

Much like the way Afrofuturism seeks to envision a future for Black people at the intersection of imagination and science fiction, a future that also seeks to remember the Black past, in many ways Golden Ax hopes to find its place and definition as a work of “Afropioneerism” or “Afrofrontierism”—terms that describe and inform my family ancestry and experience. This work is autobiographical, but it is also a work of imagined history. These terms approach my experience of girlhood in Utah, wondering how we came to be there, feeling singular in a place where I knew we had been for generations.

Continuing to ask myself, “How does a story begin?,” the question became an obsession. This is a question so many ask, whose histories are cut short by the design of transatlantic slavery. I no longer wondered to myself whether aliens possibly put me on Earth, smack-dab in the Wasatch Mountains, or other systems of sci-fi that I transposed onto myself as a child. Eventually, the question became an urge to mine the hidden history of the Black West, and to tell the story of how we came to settle that frontier, both physically and spiritually. The poems in Golden Ax reflect the outward and earthly landscapes of the Afrofrontier, and the inner, cosmic imagination of the Afropioneer.

NOTE: Rio Cortez, Penguin Books and LitHub have validated the word Afrofrontier to be one word without a hyphen; according to Dr. Nelson, it was discussed at length amongst his dissertation committee; it didn’t exist at the time so the hyphen was required.

Links to other articles:

https://www.globeslcc.com/2023/04/24/rio-cortez-golden-ax-poetry-reading-taylorsville-campus/

https://www.shondaland.com/inspire/books/a41002124/rio-cortez-golden-ax/

https://the1a.org/segments/poet-rio-cortez-on-afropioneerism-and-black-settlers-out-west/

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/reviews/158301/golden-ax

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Check out State Historian of New Mexico, Rob Martinez on his YouTube channel!

New Mexico State Historian Rob Martinez mentions Blackdom at 07:00:00 Published August 16, 2021

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KAYLA LAWRENCE
October 19, 2020

University of Northern Iowa's History Club Invites Alum Dr. Nelson to present his research of the Afro-Frontier in American history