Annotations for People: Begel-deborah

Thirteen-year-old Miguel Atencio of Chama, New Mexico, beats his father in chess almost every game. He began playing when he was nine. Two years later, he joined the high-school chess team. That's when someone from Celebrate Youth, a six-year-old mentorship program in New Mexico, spotted the talented youngster and invited him to work more seriously on his game. This year, Miguel won the state middle-school chess championship.

Miguel Atencio is both highly motivated and very talented. These are the characteristics Celebrate Youth director, Paquita Hernández, looks for in students. She also pursues teenagers who are equally talented but living in what Hernández describes as economic and social poverty.

The adult mentor meets with the student once a week for six months. Each student develops a project, perhaps a dance, a piece of sculpture, a science or math project, an essay or poem, or a piece of music.

Ninth grader Alyssa Montoya works with Mary Agnes Anderson of Española as her mentor. Anderson has mentored three students so far.

Other mentors have seen more impressive changes as a result of the program. Paquita Hernández tells the story of one talented teenager who is likely to follow two older brothers into drugs and depression. After delving into a science research project for two years in the Celebrate Youth program, he entered college and now plans to become a doctor. Success stories like these, Hernández says, are less likely to happen within the current school system.

Those involved in Celebrate Youth say the goal is to promote excellence over mediocrity. Achievement is measured against one's own abilities rather than in competition with others. This is the attitude Miguel Atencio takes.

These days, Miguel is sharpening his chess skills to prepare for the annual Celebrate Youth Festival in June. Nearly 400 students, including 30 chess players like Miguel, will gather for three days at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, which co-sponsors the program. There, they'll perform their dances, hang their paintings, and display their research projects that demonstrate the skills they've worked so hard to develop.

For Latino USA, this is Debra Beagle in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico.

Seated on a turquoise wooden bench on the front porch of the old Adobe Mercantile Building in Los Ojos, New Mexico. Joanna Terrazas waves at passing friends.

A few paces down the street. Retired Marine Elipio Mercure is standing outside Pastores feed and general store.

Loyola Archuleta, the manager of the store, explains that most Chama Valley locals practice three waves, a kind of scale of friendliness.

All the history of a family, a community, a friendship are revealed in a wave.

John Nichols, author of the Milagro Bean Field War, describes his return to Taos after a long trip in his book, If Mountains Die. "When I raised my hand in greeting to a car driven by a stranger", he writes "and received a salutation in return, I knew I had a arrived to a place worth trying to call home". Pedro Archuleta of Tierra Amarillo, or TA as the locals call it, couldn't agree more.

For Latino USA. This is Deborah Begel.

[Highlight--natural sound--fire] Della Roy Ball was up at four making dough and stoking pinon fires, preparing for the Harvest Festival here at El Rancho de las Golondrinas.

About 3000 people will walk the dirt roads and trails among the 70 buildings, corrals and fields to get a glimpse of this old New Mexican Spanish settlement, a living museum. Blacksmith Larry Miller is one of 75, so-called demonstrators at El Rancho de las Golondrinas. People like him show visitors how to repair a wheel, cure a cold, or wash clothes.

[Background--natural sounds--museum ambience] The museum hosts about a half dozen living weekends every year. Portraying what life was like in New Mexico from the 1600s to 1900. At the old Spanish mill, the present has yet another link to the past.

For more than 200 years, El Rancho de las Golondrinas was a stopping place for carriages coming north from Mexico on the Santa Fe Trail. The ranch was bought by a Finnish couple in 1932. They turned it into a museum four decades later. Their son, George Paloheimo, now the director, says interest in local Native American history is so great that little attention has been paid to the state's Spanish heritage.

[Highlight--natural sounds--marching] Don Shoemaker of Albuquerque wields a 12 pound 69 caliber flintlock musket. In colonial times, he may have fought with Comanche, Navajo, Ute, Apache, and other indigenous warriors in hotly contested battles over the land in northern New Mexico.

[Highlight--Natural sounds--Indigenous spiritual singing] By the mid-1800s, clashes with the natives and problems with the Mexican government drove out many of the Spanish priests who had come to New Mexico, lacking formal religious leadership, small adobe houses of worship, called Morales, sprang up throughout the mountains. Here at las Golondrinas, the small Morale is an exact replica of one in Abiquiu. And is hosted by Dexter Trujillo.

[Background--music--folk] Of the more than 40,000 people who visit El Rancho de las Golondrinas every year, about 12,000 are children like Melanie Carr and Terry Nelson. They're here on a field trip from their grade school in Albuquerque.

If Melanie Carr had lived here with her grandmother at the Old Mountain Village, she might have heard this old time fiddle and guitar music on a Sunday afternoon. Just as visitors to El Rancho de las Golondrinas do today. [Highlight--music--folk] For Latino USA, this is Deborah Beagle in La Cienega, New Mexico.