¡Feliz Año! Happy New Year

This year has been something. 

The pandemic has rolled through our lives, upending almost everything we assumed we knew about the Southwest and confirming how human connections have helped us manage the great isolation that has accompanied the anxiety and the threat of being in community with the people we love and the places that sustain us. 

If you are reading this note, we are so thankful that you are still with us and – like us – are both hopeful and sanguine about what surprises and joys 2022 will bring us all.  

If you are reading this note, you will have known far too many people who will not be sharing holiday cheer with you, who have been taken from you through COVID or other means.  We ask that you cherish their memories and carry them with you on the paths you are taking.  2021 has been difficult, and we can hope for a little less challenge in 2022. 

The same generosity of spirit and flexibility of effort that emerged during the retooling of school and work in the midst of the pandemic has also transformed our public programming this year.  Through the magic of the internet, video cameras and the unmute button, more people have logged in to participate in our programming this year than in previous eras.  This has enabled some unanticipated moments, with people chiming in from Berlin, London and Mexico City to celebrate Ana Martinez’ Performance in the Zócalo, Jones Professor Geneva Gano’s Washington-state based family surprising her at the book party for The Little Art Colony and US Modernism, and people checking in from Singapore, Seguin and Italy with Amy Sullivan and her oral history work with harm reduction activists along the I-35 corridor.  The mission of the Center is “to promote broad humanistic inquiry into the physical and cultural ecology of the different peoples of the Southwest,” and this year exposed how many people across the world are invested in or interested in or affected by process afoot in the Southwest.

The photograph is of two installations. The first is a snap-shot of the process of a migration stories workshop.  Facilitated by Mark Menjivar and installed by Jason Reed and Mark Menjivar, the Migration Studies Workshop installation is part of an extended meditation on place and migration, on narrative, nation and timeline. The exhibit is in process in Brazos Hall, and you are all invited to take it in.  

The second is our holiday tree, which is part of our recurring invitation to have you all come on down and visit with us.  The tree is part of the many traditions that have taken residence here in Brazos and across the Southwest, from the sage and ocote that maintain us to the cedars that regularly and painfully remind us of changing seasons in Texas, to the winter break that will allow us all to refresh and reconnect.

We still miss you all and wish you all the safest, warmest 2022.

¡Feliz Año! Happy New Year.