And So We Moved to Petaca: Portrait of a New Mexico Community

A sublime photographic chronicle of the efforts of several counterculture families to adopt a traditional Nuevomexicano life in the tiny village of Petaca, New Mexico, in the early 1970s. In the early 1970s there weren’t many women photographers, and fewer still who used their camera to make ethnographic studies.Lynn Adler was a self-taught photographer using an old 35 mm camera her mother had left to her.But her instinct for seeing the collision of cultures, along with her savant’s eye for constructing beautiful frames, allowed her to capture a moment both rare and spectacular in a tiny village in Northern New Mexico called Petaca. At the time, Petaca was home to about fifty very traditional Hispano families with roots in the area going back well over a hundred years.The town had no schools, no hospital, no stoplights; it had one church, one bar, one dry-goods store, and a single gas pump.Spanish was nearly everyone’s first language, and the only real employment had been a mineral min