Tita Berger, also a graduate student at UNM’s School of Architecture and Planning, works on a variety of projects involving New Mexicans’ relationships with the places they live, she said. She calls her method of research “place ethnography,” an intersection of geography and anthropology that looks at what places can reveal about groups of people. A major focus of her research is historical preservation.
Berger became interested in historical preservation while working on a Ph.D. for UNM’s political science program, she said.
“I was bored of political science due to the disconnect between the academics and the activism,” she said.
She saw a poster for Mark Childs’ “Civic Art and Public Space” class on campus and was immediately interested.
“The poster had men playing chess on it, and it reminded me of Istanbul and how their public spaces were very male-dominated,” she said, recalling an earlier trip to Turkey she had taken.
She said she became interested in how attitudes toward culture, gender, ethnicity and class affect the spaces people create. Berger stopped working on her political science degree and entered the Southwest Summer Institute’s Historical Preservation and Regionalism program.
Berger has worked with federal heritage preservation programs like the Historic American Buildings Survey on projects such as El Rancho de las Golondrinas, a living history museum modeled after a Spanish colonial village southwest of Santa Fe.
While she finds these efforts extremely valuable, Berger urges New Mexicans to question whose stories are being told through historic preservation and whose are being ignored.
“There is still a lot of elitism in what gets preserved and what doesn’t,” she said.
She said preservation efforts in New Mexico often portray a glossed-over version of Spanish colonialism, ignoring or downplaying the oppression during that time period. However, where she and other preservationists agree is that the dark side of modernization since World War II has been the destruction of historical places.
“Developers with no sense of history and culture tore down buildings that were important to the community to make way for the cities of the future,” Berger said.
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She said she considers The Alvarado Hotel one of Albuquerque’s biggest losses. The hotel, formerly located on First Street, was a Mission Revival-style Harvey House that serviced passengers from the nearby train station for decades. The hotel was known for its luxury, but was demolished in 1970 after profits plummeted due to the decline of railroad travel, she said.
Neala Schwartzberg wrote about the demise of the famous landmark when the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History held an exhibit on the hotel in 2009.
“Politicians and citizen groups tried to stop the razing of the historic building, but to no avail. In 1970, the owner of the building and the land — the Atchinson, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad — tore it down. And for over 40 years the city has mourned its loss,” Schwartzberg said.
The Alvarado Transportation Center was built on the former site with architectural elements reminiscent of the original hotel and train station, but Berger argued the damage has already been done.
“When you destroy these buildings, you’re really destroying the sense of place for many in the community,” she said.
In addition to larger, federally-funded projects, Berger said she participates in grassroots organizations such as Main Street, a project to revitalize Nob Hill into a vibrant area while holding on to its historical integrity.
Lena Guidi is a freelance reporter at the Daily Lobo. She can be contacted at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @DailyLobo.
