For now, there are only three, but they represent the less tourist-friendly, seamier side of north-central New Mexico quite well.

First, we have a scene that could have been taken straight from my middle-school years (in NM, it’s mid school, not junior high, for some reason). I was never one of the bad kids who skipped school to drink beer and listen to heavy metal; in fact, I was given detention in fifth grade for, during another slow moment in “gifted” (read: “do nothing”) class, saying, “…sucks!” down the hall in response to Mario Martinez saying, “Heavy metal!”. But I am perfectly familiar with where you might want to go drink the beer and listen to the music, if you had the opportunity, and I came across just one of those spots while hiking with my mom on my first day back home:

And even though I wasn’t a metal fan, I could still not deny that the best band ever was Kizz [sic]. Snicker.

While in Espanola, home of the low-rider, on my March trip, I encountered all of the town’s (and New Mexico’s) social problems handily summarized for the nonliterate:

That bottom ideogram is a bottle in a crumpled paper bag, just to clarify.

And, finally, lordy, the shocking revelation that there is something under the Virgin Mary’s skirt:

Photo quality is terrible on that one because we were in a dark little adobe church, and I couldn’t use a flash. But that’s the church-keeper helpfully answering one tourist’s oh-so-innocent question with way too much information. Alas, I couldn’t get a pic of Jesus’ amputated legs because the angle was all wrong–you’ll just have to trust me.