Looking Back on the High Road

In 1972, William deBuys arrived in Northern New Mexico as a research assistant, assigned to document the region’s people and places. He soon made the area home, eventually settling in the village of El Valle. Don Usner, a native with deep family roots in the area, was then finishing high school and already writing about his home village of Chimayó. In the decades since, both have written extensively about Northern New Mexico and its people, drawn by an abiding affection for the land and its communities. Now, nearly forty years after their first meeting, they’ll sit down together to look back on their paths and consider the future of the High Road communities in the face of accelerating change.