Dale King, "must soon commence to produce rich dividends of visitor interest, education, and appreciation." The NPS, however, had trouble finding monies to support the work of Charlie Steen at the Berkeley laboratories, as he needed travel money for two to four months of research. In addition, the desire of Frank Pinkley and Tom Charles to tell the story of the Mescalero Apaches created delays. The tribe had few objects of material culture on display at major museums like the Smithsonian, and almost none that could be loaned or transferred to White Sands. Other than Morris Opler, few anthropologists had cared to study Mescalero life. The comments of an anonymous NPS museum staffer in Washington said much about the challenge of interpreting Tularosa basin history: "There may be some difficulty in securing a large quantity of duplicate [Mescalero] material since we understand from our contacts these people being under poor ecological conditions were not over rich in their art production."[1]
While exhibit cases drew most of the NPS' attention, a more modest issue (tin light fixtures, or "sconces") revealed the interplay of political, economic, historical and cultural forces affecting White Sands. In the mountains northeast of Alamogordo, the federal government had established "Camp Capitan" as part of its National Youth Administration (NYA) programs. The NYA targeted teenaged youth at risk of dropping out of high school or college for lack of funds. NYA staff sought to teach them vocational skills for future employment, or provided "work-study" jobs that kept students enrolled in school. In New Mexico, the NYA became a savior not only of students but also of their institutions, as UNM detailed its comptroller (and future president), Tom L. Popejoy, to serve from 1936–1938 as state director (he would also work in 1939 in Washington as deputy NYA administrator). Popejoy encouraged NYA personnel to seek contract work from federal and state agencies to provide opportunities for impoverished New Mexican youth, and in the case of White Sands this meant association with Camp Capitan.[2]
In the spring of 1938, Lucy Lepper Shaw, director of the mountain camp, met with Lyle Bennett of the NPS to discuss production of light fixtures, pottery, and woven curtains for the new visitors center at the dunes. Suzanne Forrest, author of The Preservation of the Village: New Mexico's Hispanics and the New Deal (1989), wrote that Capitan "was considered to be the state's outstanding NYA project." It employed 125 girls and young women, ages 16–25, mostly Hispanic, for three months at a time to learn Spanish colonial arts and crafts. Historians like Forrest and Sarah Deutsch, author of No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940 (1987), have warned of the paradox of such New Deal programs: training people for skills not in demand in the modern, urban-industrial
- ↑ Steen, "A Revised Plan of Exhibits for the White Sands National Monument Museum," July 15, 1938; Pinkley to Dorr G. Yeager, Assistant NPS Museum Chief, Berkeley, October 29, 1938, RG79, NPS, WHSA Files. Denver FRC; Acting Chief, NPS Museum Division, to SWNM Superintendent, December 2 1 , 1938, Historical Files, WHSA (1938), July 1–December 31, 1938.
- ↑ Suzanne Forrest. The Preservation of the Village: New Mexico's Hispanics and the New Deal (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 115.
