My Town: A Memoir of Albuquerque, New Mexico in Poems, Prose and Photographs
by Margaret Randall
978-0-916727-73-4 || Cost: $16.00
Paperback , 112 pages
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My Town is a collection of poems, first-person narratives, and photographs that describe growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, during the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. The United States was immersed in the Cold War, and Albuquerque was a center of military activity and espionage: the first atomic bomb was built just to the north (Los Alamos) and tested just to the south (Alamogordo). Native Americans and Mexican Americans made up much of the population. Randall, a young middle-class white girl from the east and a natural radical, casts a keen eye on the evolution of race relations and gender expectations, and on the impact of modernity on the New Mexico landscape.
Margaret Randall reading from her book Stones Witness at the Nogales Wall, Nogales, Arizona, on March 17, 2010:
Critical Praise for My Town: A Memoir of Albuquerque, New Mexico in Poems, Prose and Photographs
- In the tradition of Meridel Le Seuer, Randall takes on Cold War politics, McCarthyism, racism and misogyny that affected a generation of American women growing up in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. This memoir haunts me in the way that all fine and true writing does. My Town is a celebration of a courageous life, one not to be missed.
— Pamela Uschuk, author of Crazy Love (2010 American Book Award)
- Margaret Randall has always matched her political courage with an open heart. In My Town, she tenderly and fearlessly gives readers an insider's understanding of one of America's most fascinating and paradoxical cities. A hub of America's nuclear arsenal and a first strike military target in the Cold War, Albuquerque through Randall's eyes sits in a landscape of enormous beauty and hardship, a homey place of dark contradictions that both nurtures talent and spits out lives.
— V.B. Price, author of Albuquerque: City at the End of the World
- A rebel returns to her roots to ponder with subtle ambivalence the pangs of memory, aging, personal triumphs and failures. My Town will resonate with anyone who has lived in New Mexico, anyone who came up in the 1950s, and many who did neither.
Lucy R. Lippard, author of The Lure of the Local
— Lucy R. Lippard, author of The Lure of the Local
- Randall opens her time capsule and beckons us to an Albuquerque where natives, when asked where they were from, would name a barrio, village, or pueblo as if Albuquerque was only one stop on a round trip back home. Her poetry captures una solita exploring space, shapes, light, and people translated into the brail of a place unconscious of its cultural power and full of hypocrisy, hospitality, racism, and generosity.
— María Varela, Community activist, MacArthur "genius" Fellow
Reviews
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A special place in both heart, soul
Albuquerque JournalSept. 19, 2010
Review by David Steinberg
My Town is Margaret Randall's potpourri of candid, insightful and wide-ranging remembrances of growing up in Albuquerque. Poems dominate in this memoir by Randall, a famous feminist and activist who lives in Albuquerque less than a dozen blocks from the family home where she was raised.
Some of the poems are colored by hindsight. For example, in the poem "Nothing Was What It Pretended," Randall takes aim at two conquistadors. She writes, "... names like Oñate, Cabeza de Vaca, / or Juan Tabó,/ shepherds and assassins enshrined on street corners / unquestioned and mispronounced."
The poem "I Was Alone That Night" begins with her sociological view of two high schools and ends with a back-seat-of-the-car encounter that twists into what she would years later call rape. Here are its opening lines: "When I was a child the desert bloomed / right down to Highland High / our white kids' school / on the eastern edge of town."
Further in, Randall offers, "Albuquerque High for the tough kids: New Mexican, Mexican American, Black sons and daughters of the Atchison Topeka & Santa Fe or off-reservation Indians come to town in search of work."
Black-and-white photographs, most of which she recently took, complement the writing. They help the reader see many of the references in the book as they are today or, with the help of several vintage images, as they were then.
Randall gives the reader peeks into Albuquerque as a small town — her neighbors, her personal failures (not at learning a musical instrument), her family (mother's cancer, father's metronome), her school friends, Albuquerque as home to weapons of destruction, and commentaries on the women who were tested at Lovelace Hospital in 1961 for possible acceptance as astronauts, only to be rejected out of hand. Their names, Randall declares, "today sound a litany of betrayal."
Some of Randall's equally vivid prose is mixed in throughout the book, but two extended entries are especially revealing. In one, "Sam," she writes of her sad, short-lived, adventure-filled marriage — she was 18 — to a young man of a wealthy family from Cincinnati. The other, more significant entry, "Elaine," is about painter Elaine de Kooning, the free-spirit, free-thinking wife of painter Willem de Kooning. Elaine, one could say, was Randall's muse.
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Copyright 2010 by the Albuquerque Journal.David Steinberg is book editor for the Albuquerque Journal and an arts writer.
About This Author
Read more about Margaret Randall HERE.
