La Coalición de Taos

La Coalición de Taos facilitates educational experiences to inspire informed community action that benefits the land and water, people, and historical cultures of the Taos, New Mexico area.

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Check back with us this Fall (of 2023)!

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Watch the Film Far West - The Hidden History

2021, 55-minute documentary film

Co-directed by Mathilde Damoisel and Tomas van Houtryve
Based on the book Lines and Lineage by Tomas van Houtryve

Photographer Tomas van Houtryve confronts America’s collective amnesia and reveals the hidden legacy of the Far West. At a time when the US has reinforced a wall that isolates it from Latin America, the photographer retraces another border, the one that existed before 1848, when the US military invaded and occupied the northern Mexican territories that are known today as the states of Texas, California, Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. He meets and photographs the descendants of families that have lived in these lands since long before the American conquest: indigenous, black and mestizo families that never crossed the border – the border crossed them. Rendered strangers in their own land, they push back on the founding myths of the American Frontier and contribute their own overlooked stories to our common history.

Note: click the expander icon next to the “V” in the lower right corner of the video when you roll over it. This will show the video fullscreen.

We Norteños here in northern New Mexico have a wonderful word: querencia, the place where we are at our best. A place from where we draw strength. A place where we know exactly who we are. For a lot of us it means home in the deepest sense of the word.

Daniel Herrera Wisdom Council, TiLT (Taos Initiative for Life Together)

Because my family has been here for so many hundreds of years, the querencia I feel for the Taos Valley is intense. What’s happening in Taos now, left me with a sense of urgency to form La Coalición. I wanted to bring together like-minded newcomers, generational families, and native Taoseños to work together to preserve what’s here and to protect it.

Anita Otilia Rodriguez Artist, Poet, Activist