From roadways to classrooms, this New Mexico program is bringing women's history out of the shadows

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SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — On a recent field trip to view historical markers in New Mexico’s capital city of Santa Fe, seventh grader Raffi Paglayan noted the range of careers and contributions made by the women featured on them.

Paglayan’s favorite was Katherine Stinson Otero, a skywriter who was one of the first women to obtain a pilot’s license in the U.S. After Stinson Otero contracted tuberculosis while driving ambulances in World War I, she moved to New Mexico and started a second career as a renowned architect.

“She seems pretty cool,” Paglayan said with a smile.

Introducing New Mexicans to women from the state's history is the goal of a decades-long program that has put up nearly 100 roadside markers featuring the significant contributions of women from or with ties to New Mexico. Now the New Mexico Historic Women Marker Program is branching out to create a curriculum for schools based on its research.

“It’s just so essential that all students, not just female students, but every student has the ability to recognize and see the significance of the people that have done so much work to create what we have,” said Lisa Nordstrum, the education director and middle school teacher who took Paglayan and her classmates on the field trip.

The road marker efforts started decades ago. Pat French, a founding member of the International Women's Forum - New Mexico, a leadership and networking group, noticed in the 1980s that there were hardly any women mentioned in any of the state's historic roadside markers. In 2006, the group secured state funding to work with the New Mexico Department of Transportation to change that.

Over the years, the group visited individual counties and Native American communities, asking for stories about important women in their history. The research compiled biographies of dozens of women from precolonial times through the Spanish and Mexican territory periods, and into the time when New Mexico became a state.

Now those women's stories are displayed on 6-foot signs across the state and in an online database. While some honor well-known historical figures such as American modernist painter Georgia O’Keeffe and New Mexico's first female Secretary of State Soledad Chávez de Chacón, many others feature local women whose stories have not been widely told.

For example, Evelyn Vigil and Juanita Toledo are remembered for reviving the Pecos Pueblo style of pottery in the 1970s, after the indigenous Pecos Pueblo population was decimated by years of disease and war by the 1890s, and the pottery techniques were lost.

“There is just a sense of justice about it,” said program director Kris Pettersen. “These women put all this effort in and made all these contributions, and they were unrecognized, and that’s just wrong.”

Other markers are dedicated to groups of women, such as healers and the state's female military veterans. The collection notes that the history of the state cannot be told without recognizing the conflict that came with colonialization and the wars fought over the territory.

“They are not, however, the first women to take up arms and defend their homes and society in our region,” the veterans' online blurb notes. “New Mexico is a state of culturally diverse people who have protected themselves over many centuries.”

For now, the group has paused creating new markers, opting to maintain the current ones and focus on the educational mission.

Over 10 years ago, Nordstrum had a revelation similar to French's: There was a lack of women in the standard state history curriculum. She stumbled upon online biographies from the marker program and started teaching their stories to her seventh graders.

In 2022, the New Mexico Historic Women Marker Program secured state funding to hire Nordstrum to develop a K-12 curriculum from women’s biographies.

“We have women that wouldn’t be in any textbook,” Nordstrum said.

The funding was renewed in 2024 with bipartisan support. One of the legislation’s co-sponsors, Republican state Rep. Gail Armstrong, believes it’s important for New Mexico residents, young and old, to understand how the world they live in was formed.

“History, good or bad, should not be changed. It needs to be remembered so that we don’t make the same mistakes again and so that we can celebrate the good things that have happened,” she said.

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Volmert reported from Lansing, Michigan.