Frederick Hammersley Foundation... Urban Enhancement Trust Fund of the City of Albuquerque... New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs with supplemental funding by the New Mexico CARES Act and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

...and Viewers Like You.

IN THIS FIRST OF A TWO PART SPECIAL...

IN ONE OF THE MOST AGRICULTURALLY RICH LANDSCAPES IN NEW MEXICO, ALBUQUERQUE HAS THRIVED ALONG THE RIO GRANDE FOR CENTURIES.

ALBUQUERQUE'S ROOTS CELEBRATES OUR LOCAL FOOD SHED AND LOOKS BACK AT HOW WE SUSTAIN A RICH AGRICULTURAL PRACTICE TO THIS DAY.

ARTIST AND ANTHROPOLOGIST ZOE BRAY EXPLORES "WHAT IS IDENTITY TODAY?"

BRINGING OUT A PET'S CHARACTER, PHOTOGRAPHER ADAM GOLDBERG HELPS THEM FIND THEIR FOREVER HOME.

IT'S ALL AHEAD ON COLORES!

A PLACE WHERE ONE DRAWS STRENGTH, WHERE ONE GENERATION SUSTAINS ANOTHER.

Moisés Gonzales: If agua is la vida... Querencia is our corozon.

Querencia is the love of place, the love of being...

It defines where you're from.

So, we all share the querencia of the river.

We share the querencia of the acequia.

And, that's what binds us together.

Narrator: The Middle Rio Grande valley has been a place where over the centuries different communities put down roots, it has sustained our past and holds our future.

Brett Bakker: The feeling I get when seeing a farm is, first of all, it's a green space, it's not only producing food for humans, it's habitat for birds and insects and mammals, there's the fresh air, there's open space.

Reyna Banteah: Whether we know it or not agriculture is a big part of who we all are.

(CHATTER FROM THE CROWD) Most of the produce I grow, I usually take to the Grower's Market.

So that's one of my main outlets.

Seth Matlick: I'm still very much amazed by the power of the seed and the power of growing food.

It's magical to pull something out of the ground and have it be, not only delicious and beautiful but nutritious, something that sustains you, gives you power, gives you life...

I mean, food is pretty awesome.

(All of the greens are four dollars or any two for seven) Ana Baca: My Dad always used to say that he was bred on red and weaned on green, and of course he was referring to chile.

As a little boy, he grew up on a small family farm in the South Valley of ABQ and they grew chile, they sold it.

He remembers walking up and down 4th street and selling their chile out of a wagon.

Narrator: Archaeological sites indicate that the population grew as people fleeing a drought arrived in the Albuquerque area by the 1300's.

They settled along the river for the constant water source and fertile land.

Moisés Gonzales: Beginning with the Tiguex Pueblos, I would say that agriculture has always been a center of our culture in Albuquerque, it centers us.

The same three sisters, the corn, beans and You'll still see the plantings of the Rio Grande Blue Corn which is a staple and has been a staple of the Rio Grande.

Moisés Gonzales: The ancestors have given us this connection to place and that's what we pass the next generation.

Brett Bakker: Having a relationship with the land is important in many ways.

There was one elder farmer who I respected very highly and learned a lot from.

It was watching him work and a few little clues here and there.

One of the things he taught me is it's a farmer's job to be on the farm.

You don't check out at 5 o'clock when you're done hoeing.

You have to be present, you have to watch your crops.

Watch the weather, watch the animals, watch the insects and learn when they come.

What it means when they come, when the rains are coming, when they're not coming.

You actually become part of the landscape with your crops.

Seeds have been passed down for many generations, through many different hands, through many different families.

And the seeds are also part of the community.

Just as the animals are part of the community as the weeds and wild plants and animals are part of the community.

Narrator: Encompassing generations, each seed is a small history of its own.

Reyna Banteah: The seeds that I do grow are particularly draught tolerant.

They have more resistance to certain diseases and pests because they have been growing here for so long and they're more used to high heat and less water.

Brett Bakker: They are reliable producers.

They may not always produce as much as a new super hybrid would when it's fertilized very heavily with petro chemicals but there will always be a crop.

So that becomes part of sustaining the community through food and nutrition.

Reyna Banteah: With climate kind of changing through the whole country and around the world it's important for these crops to still be growing so that in case climate continues to change that we have those seeds that are more persistent.

Moisés Gonzales: Before the Spanish come the Tiguex Pueblo people of this valley had a very sophisticated agricultural system in a Utilizing terraced gardens from the mesas, along the arroyos, along cultivated farm plots in the flood plain.

When the Spanish come the acequia system, which is an adapted from the Moors that's brought from North Africa, to the Iberian Peninsula and expanded through Northern Spain.

And within a dry arid environment it allows for the shift of the flood plain into an irrigated agricultural valley.

The transformation of the acequia allows for the irrigated bosque landscape of Albuquerque.

Moisés Gonzales: The River.

The Rio Bravo, The Rio Grande as it's called today is everything about Albuquerque.

It defines our natural features.

Without the river, we don't have a core.

The river serves the core of our being.

That centers us from the Sandia Mountains and the West Mesa.

And it is this very green and lush landscape that really provides us with the sense of shelter.

That provides us some relief from this very harsh desert landscape.

And we think about how it might have existed before the acequia system, the farm plots went in.

The Rio Grande River had a wide flood plain.

From basically the sand banks of the West Mesa, up to the lomas which are around present day University of New Mexico.

And it would shift from time to time and never had a really set river bed because it was always in motion.

The Spanish called it the Rio Bravo because it was untamed, is a living system.

Narrator: Early Spanish accounts note the Albuquerque area "a goodly place of fields, waters, pasturage, and timber" and settled estancias.

These settlers were later counted as part of the plaza to found the Villa de Alburquerque.

Moisés Gonzales: In 1706 Francisco Cuervo y Valdez was assigned by the governor to establish the Villa de Alburquerque.

And one of the main ideas for it was because the amount of water and the wide flood plain in the middle Rio Grande Valley.

The site of the Villa de Alburquerque was seen as a way to create an agricultural settlement.

The founding of Alburquerque was based on the Laws of the Indies, Las Leyes de las Indias.

The laws in which settlements were established.

A major principle of the Laws of the Indies was based on the size and distance between settlements to develop sustainability within the planning.

The layout of the agricultural systems.

The layout of the suerte's, the farmland.

And that way agriculture was imbedded in the building fabric of a town or city.

You had townlands and a plaza was designated.

Usually about 100 vatas by 100 vatas.

Which is roughly 300 feet by 300 feet.

A dense plaza that was established in a fortified way.

And then farm plots were assigned.

Which were the suerte's.

And a communal acequia had to be built.

From the acequia the farm plots were assigned in order for agriculture to be established and those were the individual lands of each individual that was allotted.

And then going outside of that were the grazing lands which were the ejitos or the lands in which to gather fuelwood or for hunting.

It's main acequia system ran nearby the plaza.

Near what's present day the Sawmill District.

Coming out towards the community of Barelas.

So we can imagine an extended irrigated farmland system outside a very condensed plaza.

It probably looked like a medieval city at the time.

Moisés: The major transformation of Albuquerque's urban landscape shifted at the arrival of the railroad.

By the late 1800's the railroad brought more urban development.

You had the development of New Town which is present day downtown Albuquerque.

You essentially had two centers.

You had the Villa, the plaza and then you had Albuquerque which was pretty much driven by railroad development.

Narrator: Bustling streets grew up between New Town and Old Town connected now by Railroad Avenue, now Central.

Soon neighborhoods grew up along with Albuquerque's first park... Robinson Park, where today's Downtown Growers Market is held.

Reliable refrigeration was not yet available and food was delivered daily through neighborhoods by way of horse drawn wagons and then trucks.

The so called Truck Farms proliferated and soon there were even stores on wheels, like Daily's Gipsy Store.

New Town was booming and agricultural production expanded as the railroad more easily connected faraway markets.

Albuquerque was growing rapidly.

PLEASE WATCH NEXT WEEK FOR PART TWO OF ALBUQUERQUE'S ROOTS.

PAINTING FROM LIFE.

- I'm an artist and an anthropologist and therefore as an artist, a lot of my interests and what I paint and just create is related to people.

People in their environment, so that's the social, political, and national environments of how do people make sense of who they are and create their identity and relate to their surroundings.

As an artist, I'm classically trained in a sense that I've undergone a training with an old style atelier painter, and it was always with a live model so there was absolutely no drawing or painting or sculpting from photographs.

It was really, you had to have the real thing in front of you and feel it.

And this also resonated with my work as an anthropologist, I studied anthropology at the University of Anambra and then did my PhD at a European institute in Italy, in Florence.

And as an anthropologist, this is pretty much also what you do, what your research is about, people with people.

My best character is just something that I'm constantly rediscovering.

And right now I have this exhibition on Nevadan Basques with oil painting and charcoal drawings exhibiting at the City Haul of Reno.

I was interested in painting people who have some kind of connection with Basque culture, usually who have Basque lineage but not necessarily, I mean, that's also what interested me is what is identity today?

How do we identify ourselves?

Is it our lineage, our background, or is it what we choose ourselves to be right now in the present?

So painting from life is for me extremely important.

When I couldn't go into more depth into a painting or into a portrait, then I would go use the oils.

And the oils, again, it's I use very simple colors, and just with these four, you can actually mix them up and get all the nuances, all the subtleties, all the different tones that you find in nature.

If I have to define myself into what kind of painter I am, I'd say I'm a naturalist rather than a realist, I mean when people see my work, they say wow, that's so realist and, the term realist, it can be understood in many different ways, I would agree, I am a realist but as more of a naturalist realist in that I'm interested in understanding how we see things in as natural a way as possible.

So for instance, when I'm looking at somebody, when I'm painting somebody, I'm interested in focusing mainly on the eyes because when we communicate, we look at each other in the eyes.

And then I put everything else is out of focus so it's deliberate that to others parts of the portrait are not so specific, so detailed, so defined.

But then I want the viewer to have their eyes wondering around the painting and notice how they hold their hands, or what are they wearing, how significant is that to the identity of the person.

So I will try and draw these things out.

There has to be some kind of a journey for the viewer to embark on.

Every portrait is a new adventure.

HELPING PETS FIND THEIR FOREVER HOME.

So I got started in pet photography because I worked in an animal shelter.

Worked there for two years and it was there where I actually learned how to work with animals and take photos.

I was doing adoption photos at the Humane Society here in Tampa and just doing it for fun on the weekends.

And they asked me a few months in, hey, we love your pictures, we think the community would love them too.

Will you host a photo shoot fundraising event for us?

And at that point, this was two years ago, I had no idea how to do that, how to get people to sign up, the marketing behind it.

It went very well, sold out, hosted another one, that one sold out, hosted another one, that sold out.

Then I started reaching out to other animal shelters in Florida, those sold out.

So, it took off because they just had a simple request.

And that simple request turned into a career for me.

And since that first event, it was in July of 2016, posted about 200 pet photo shoot fundraisers across the country and we just surpassed about $71,000 in donations.

The goal of each photograph is to bring out the pet's personality.

Whenever I show someone their pet's photo, they're like, oh my God, that's him, that you captured Fluffy right there.

To get a good picture at a photo session it's important to have a calm demeanor.

The dog will feed off energy of me, of their owner, then I make a fool out of myself, noises, squeaks, squeals, I bark sometimes.

And the other thing is treats and I use a lot of peanut butter, too.

It's important for shelter animals to have great photos because social media nowadays is so prominent and without that, without a good quality picture, they're just gonna get ignored.

Suncoast Animal League gets a lot of interesting animals that have been through turmoil or trouble and I was doing a pet photo shoot fundraiser for them and one of the foster parents had Clover and asked if she could bring her in for a photo shoot just to document her progress.

- Clover was actually caught in a fire, her family was in a shed and the mom, Daisy, pulled some of the puppies out and actually she was found laying on top of some of the puppies protecting them.

A few of the puppies had little marks on them, but Clover kind of got the brunt of it where it looks like maybe one of the pen panels fell on top of her and burned her pretty badly.

When she came to us, her immune system was so compromised that not only was she healing the wounds on the outside from the burns, but she had some immune system issues on the inside that we had to work through as well.

So, she's a little fighter.

Adam is an amazing photographer.

He does a lot of good things for the rescues in the area.

Suncoast Animal League shared that fundraiser and photos of Clover on their Facebook page and through that exposure, Madeira Beach happened to be following our page.

- Our secretary, Trish Heaton, saw posts about Clover being up for adoption at Suncoast Animal League, and Clover was great, she came by, we liked her story and she's just a real sweetheart.

So, we chose her and it's been great.

- With Clover being adopted by the fire department I was so proud, and it was just amazing to see her walk down in the commission meeting with her badge on and to give kisses to her new family and just know what kind of life she's gonna have and the lives she's gonna touch.

You know, the kids that see her that have scars and see what a fighter she is and just how strong she is.

And the help that she's giving to the fire fighters, 'cause they go out and they see some pretty bad stuff on a daily basis and to come home to her and she's always happy and wagging her tail and happy to see them.

- It makes the station feel more like a home.

The job can be stressful and it's real nice to be able to come back to the station and know Clover will be here.

- I was able to do a photo shoot with her again as a follow-up and the fire fighters were there.

It was amazing, we did some photos in front of the truck and it was awesome.

Clover is the best dog for what she's doing now.

- We plan to involve her in public education and teach-ins and stuff like that.

And fire safety programs that we do with the schools and so she will have a job.

- Stop, drop and roll.

Good girl, Clover.

- I have a project called The Shelter Pet Cutout Project, and the idea behind that is to put these life sized pet cutouts at community businesses and they wear a tag that says this dog represents the hundreds of shelter animals available for adoption on a daily basis.

And the reason for that is I wanted to put my photography out there but also put it in places where people don't expect it.

Not everyone's going to the shelter, not everyone's going to the shelter website.

For this first round of cutouts, we did six dogs and they've all been adopted.

So, I started the Pit Bull Picture Project which uses my style of photography, which is the goofy, the silly, the funny side and portrays pit bulls in a positive light to inspire more pet adoptions.

So, the idea behind the project is to show the goofy and lovable side dispel some of the myths and it actually got national attention, it was in Huffpost and People magazine.

Through the projects that I'm working on, getting extra attention to pit bulls or shelter animals, I'm doing my job.

I adopted my dog, Rigby, when I worked at the animal shelter and it was the best day of my life when I rescued him and brought him home.

He was four months old at the time.

The funny thing is, I never had a dog growing up, so I didn't really know how to care for a dog, so Rigby kind of taught me.

Knowing that I'm contributing to people finding family members in the furry variety is so heartwarming to me, 'cause I'm making a difference.

TO VIEW THIS AND OTHER COLORES PROGRAMS GO TO: New Mexico PBS dot org and look for COLORES under What We Do and Local Productions.

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"UNTIL NEXT WEEK, THANK YOU FOR WATCHING."

Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Foundation... ...Urban Enhancement Trust Fund of the City of Albuquerque... New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs with supplemental funding by the New Mexico CARES Act and by the National Endowment for the Arts.

...and Viewers Like You