On a spring Saturday afternoon, two “hermanos” knelt to pray in the chapel of their Catholic brotherhood of St. Isidore the Farmer, nestled by the pine forest outside this hamlet in a high mountain valley.

Fidel Trujillo and Leo Paul Pacheco’s words resounded in New Mexican Spanish, a unique dialect that evolved through the mixing of medieval Spanish and Indigenous forms. The historic, endangered dialect is as central to these communities as their iconic adobe churches, and its best chance of survival might be through faith, too.

“Prayers sung or recited are our sacred heritage,” said Gabriel Meléndez, a professor emeritus of American Studies with the University of New Mexico who’s also a hermano. “When prayers are said in Spanish, they’re stronger. They connect us directly to people who came before us.”

Preserved mostly in devotions, particularly in humble “moradas” – as the brotherhoods’ chapels are called – built of mud and straw in rural communities across the northern reaches of the state, New Mexican Spanish is different from all other varieties of the language.

“Unlike most other forms of Spanish used in the U.S. today, it’s not due to immigration in the last 100 years, but rooted back to the 1500s,” said Israel Sanz-Sánchez, a professor of languages at West Chester University in Pennsylvania who has researched the dialect.

Spanish explorers and missionaries first reached these valleys isolated between mountains, deserts and plains at the end of the 16th century. Pushed back south by the Pueblo Native Americans, they resettled a century later – and their language evolved to incorporate not only words carried from medieval Spain but also a mixture of expressions derived from Mexican Spanish, Native forms and eventually some English after the territory became part of the United States.

Removed from the center of political and economic power for centuries, these villages preserved the dialect orally.

“You never heard English here,” said Felix López of growing up in the 1950s in Truchas, a ridgetop village between Santa Fe and Taos, where this master “santero” – an artist specializing in devotional art – has been helping preserve the 1760s Holy Mission church.

But by the mid-20th century, the push to promote schooling in English led many educators to correct students who used New Mexican Spanish’s idiosyncratic mix of grammar, pronunciation and vocabulary, said Damián Vergara Wilson, a professor of Spanish at the University of New Mexico.

He has been working on teaching Spanish not as foreign but as a heritage language that has developed into something uniquely New Mexican.

It contains some words from medieval Spanish, but it also includes pronunciations that developed in New Mexico’s villages and words unique to its geographical and historical place at a crossroads of American civilizations. There are several words for turkey, for instance, including an anglicized one used in the context of Thanksgiving.

With such code-switching sometimes disparaged in education and among the public, younger generations often stick to English only or learn contemporary Spanish, especially as spoken in Mexico, with which the state shares a border. That leads many villagers to worry about being able to preserve New Mexican Spanish.

“The dialect we speak is dying out. We’re the last generation that learned it as a first language,” said Angelo Sandoval, 45, who serves as the “mayordomo” or caretaker of the 1830s San Antonio Church in Cordova, a village just down the valley from Truchas.

Its best chance for survival is prayer. Traditional devotions have been passed down through generations by hermanos, easily memorized because of their ballad-style rhyming. Sometimes they are transcribed into notebooks called “cuadernos.” In an adobe niche in a chapel in Holman, some of the handwritten notebooks are 120 years old.

Even in larger cities, people often request prayers in New Mexican Spanish for special occasions, like rosaries for the deceased or novenas for the holidays.

In Santa Fe, the prayer to the widely venerated statue of Our Lady of Peace contains some of the original Spanish terminology, such as “Sacratisimo Hijo” for the “most holy Son,” said Bernadette Lucero, director, curator and archivist for the Archdiocese of Santa Fe.

A nearly century-old women’s folklore society — Sociedad Folklórica de Nuevo México — also regularly practices the dialect for their hymns and nine-day “novenas” prayers to baby Jesus, Lucero added.

In the small town of Bernalillo, where the outskirts of Albuquerque fade into vast mesas, the mayordomos of San Lorenzo also preserve the dialect in their prayers and annual celebrations.

“When we sing an old ‘alabado,’ we can trace who wrote that,” said Santiago Montoya of the Catholic praise (in Spanish, “alabar”) hymns that have been passed down through New Mexican brotherhoods.

For 23 years, Montoya and his sister have been the mayordomos of San Lorenzo, a church that was constructed in the mid-19th century with 4-foot-wide adobe walls. The community fought to save it when a bigger, modern church was built next door.

But he’s also a “rezador,” reciting or singing the rosary — a prayer consisting of sets of Hail Marys called “decades” — which he does in the community and particularly for the deceased. He insists on using New Mexican Spanish even if the families speak only English.

“I tell them, ‘I’ll do three ‘decades’ in English, but let’s teach the kids,'” Montoya said.
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On a September day he knew would be hard, Damone Presley marked the occasion with barbecue and balloons.

He was commemorating the one-year anniversary of the day in 2021 when his daughter and her three friends were fatally shot in Minnesota by a man who left their bodies in an abandoned SUV in a Wisconsin cornfield. Presley gathered 50 friends to celebrate the life of his daughter, Nitosha Flug-Presley, who was 30 when she died. He went big on the anniversary because he felt sure that’s what his daughter would have wanted.

“She would always do stuff big,” Presley told The Associated Press.

There have been 553 mass killings in the United States since 2006, and at least 2,880 people have died in them, according to a database maintained by The Associated Press and USA Today in partnership with Northeastern University. Those include killings where four or more people died, not including the assailant, within a 24-hour period. So far in 2023, the nation has witnessed the highest number on record of mass killings and deaths to this point in a single year.

As the number of people who die in mass killings in the U.S. continues to rise, thousands more are left to handle the trauma of losing someone they love to a senseless act of violence. They struggle with a special kind of grief, haunted both by the loss and by how it happened.

One of the hardest days they confront each year is the anniversary of the killing.

Wednesday, families in Uvalde, Texas, will face that one-year anniversary — transporting them back to the day when a gunman entered Robb Elementary School and fatally shot 19 children and two teachers as they gathered to celebrate the end of the school year. And last week, families of 10 people in Buffalo, New York, crossed the one-year mark from the day a white supremacist opened fire in a supermarket.

People cope with these anniversaries in different ways. Some throw a party to get through the pain. Others prefer to be completely alone. Many fall somewhere in the middle, adopting little rituals to help get them through the day.

But they all grapple with the same question, sometimes after many years have passed:

What do I do with myself on the date that changed everything?

Spending the day alone

On the same day Presley gathered with friends and family at his home, Angela Sturm — whose children, Jasmine Sturm and Matthew Pettus, were killed in the same attack — chose to spend the day alone.

“I turn down invites to ‘celebrate’ because it’s not a celebration to me,” she said.

Instead, she honors her children privately by looking at their photos and remembering how their life together used to be. She writes, cries and practices self-care by reading a good book or taking a hot bath. She hopes people will understand that she wants to be alone, and that they shouldn’t worry or be upset if she turns down invitations or doesn’t respond to texts.

Everyone deals with grief differently, said Jeffrey Shahidullah, a pediatric psychologist at UT-Austin Dell Children’s Medical Center.

Shahidullah was part of a team that stayed in Uvalde for months after the shooting to operate a crisis walk-in clinic for first responders, community members, family and friends of victims.

In the short and long term, mass shootings can traumatize entire communities, Shahidullah said. That can lead people — even those who didn’t know the victims personally — to avoid situations that remind them of the event, feel constantly unsafe and experience intrusive flashbacks to when they first heard about the killing.

“A lot of these symptoms could be exacerbated or worsened around the time of these anniversaries,” Shahidullah said. “Over time, those symptoms do tend to subside. But everyone has their own timeline.”

A solemn Mother’s Day

By cruel coincidence, the first anniversary of the Buffalo supermarket shooting fell on Mother’s Day. That made things especially hard for Wayne Jones, whose mother, Celestine Chaney, was among the 10 people killed by a white supremacist that day.

Jones said some friends came over on the anniversary, and they talked about other things.

“5/14 is every day to me still,” he said.

The video and a photo of the shooter — standing with the gun he used, a vulgar racial slur scrawled on its barrel — are “ingrained in my brain,” he said.

Tirzah Patterson and her 13-year-old son, Jaques “Jake” Patterson — who lost his father, church deacon Heyward Patterson, in the supermarket shooting — left town altogether for the anniversary.

They have not set foot in Tops Friendly Market since it reopened last summer and did not attend the memorial events in Buffalo for her ex-husband and the others who were killed.

“We don’t want to go through that again,” Tirzah Patterson said before the weekend. “We’re going to be gone.”

They spent Mother’s Day weekend in Detroit and attended a church service there.

Marking a decade

While some are just crossing the one-year mark, others have been dealing with these anniversaries for years.

Topaz Cooks marked the 10-year anniversary of her father’s death last September. She was a month shy of her 21st birthday in 2012 when her dad and several others were shot and killed at their worksite in Minneapolis by a man who was fired from the company.

“I still cannot believe that happened to my family,” she said.

On the anniversaries, she likes to do things her dad, Rami Cooks, enjoyed. Last year, she went on a hike and ate dessert — because her dad loved rugelach, birds and wind. She loves that her friends send her photos of their dessert that day each year with the caption: “For your dad!”

She also has a journal she writes in once a year on that day, filling her dad in on the highlights, challenges and thoughts from the year that she wishes she could share with him.

Seven years after the killing, Topaz Cooks said she experienced PTSD while working as a theater stage manager. She was surprised because she didn’t expect it to hit so late. The production’s plot may have triggered it — the play was about a woman avenging her father’s death. It took months of therapy to feel like she was back in control.

Talking about the loss isn’t for everybody, but Cooks said it’s important to her.

“I wish that people talked about it more and normalized it,” she said. “Grief is just so lonely.”

Remembering life, not death

A hint of fall hung in the air on Sept. 12, the day Presley threw a party to mark the day his daughter and her three friends were killed. He said he wanted to think about who his daughter was rather than how she died.

She loved to throw exciting and glamorous birthday parties for her kids, friends and family.

Presley placed a life-size cardboard cut-out of his daughter smiling in a pink outfit by the door. Guests wore T-shirts with photos of her and phrases like “Never Forgotten” and “Daddy’s #1 Angel.” At Presley’s request, guests gave speeches about the funniest things they remembered his daughter doing.
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A group of Chinese citizens living and working in the southern U.S. state of Florida sued the state Monday over a new law that bans Chinese nationals from purchasing property in large swaths of the state. 

The law applies to properties within 16 kilometers of military installations and other “critical infrastructure” and also affects citizens of Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia, and North Korea. But Chinese citizens and those selling property to them face the harshest penalties. The prohibition also applies to agricultural land. 

The American Civil Liberties Union says the law will have a substantial chilling effect on sales to Chinese and Asian people who can legally buy property. The suit says the law unfairly equates Chinese people with the actions of their government and says there is no evidence of national security risks from Chinese citizens buying Florida property. 

The law “will codify and expand housing discrimination against people of Asian descent in violation of the Constitution and the Fair Housing Act,” the ACLU said in a news release announcing the suit. “It will also cast an undue burden of suspicion on anyone seeking to buy property whose name sounds remotely Asian, Russian, Iranian, Cuban, Venezuelan, or Syrian.” 

U.S.-China ties are strained amid growing tensions over security and trade. In nearly a dozen statehouses and Congress, a decades-old worry about foreign land ownership has spiked since a Chinese spy balloon traversed the skies from Alaska to South Carolina last month. 

Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to launch a presidential campaign this week, signed the bill May 8. His office didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment. 

The law is set to take affect July 1. Under the new regulation, it will be a felony for Chinese people to buy property in restricted areas or for any person or real estate company to knowingly sell to restricted people. For the other targeted nationals, the penalty is a misdemeanor for buyers and sellers. 

It applies to land near military instillations as well as land near infrastructure like airports and seaports, water and wastewater treatment plants, natural gas and oil processing facilities, power plants, spaceports, and telecommunications central switching offices. 

The ACLU says the law “will have the net effect of creating ‘Chinese exclusion zones’ that will cover immense portions of Florida, including many of the state’s most densely populated and developed areas.” 

“This impact is exactly what laws like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the California Alien Land Law of 1913 did more than a hundred years ago,” the lawsuit says. 

Those on the restricted list that already own property near critical infrastructure must register with the state or face fines of up to $1,000 a day. They’re also prohibited from acquiring additional property. The law has provisions to allow the state to seize property from violators. 

The number of states restricting foreign ownership of agricultural land has risen by 50% this year. 

Heading into 2023, 14 states had laws restricting foreign ownership or investments in private agricultural land. So far this year, restrictive laws also have been enacted in Arkansas, Idaho, Montana, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia. 

Foreign land ownership has become “a political flashpoint,” said Micah Brown, a staff attorney for the National Agricultural Law Center at the University of Arkansas. 

Brown said the recent surge in state laws targeting land ownership by foreign entities stems from some highly publicized cases of Chinese-connected companies purchasing land near military bases. Earlier this year, the U.S. Air Force said that the Fufeng Group’s planned $700 million wet corn milling plant near a base in Grand Forks, North Dakota, poses a “significant threat to national security.” 

After a Chinese army veteran and real estate tycoon bought a wind farm near an Air Force base in Texas, that state responded in 2021 by banning infrastructure deals with individuals tied to hostile governments, including China. 
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The United States is not considering lifting current sanctions on China’s defense chief, Li Shangfu, the State Department said Monday.

U.S. officials had said sanctions on Li do not prevent him from conducting official meetings with his American counterparts, nor should sanctions be hurdles for military talks between Washington and Beijing.

Over the weekend, U.S. President Joe Biden told reporters that he would not consider easing sanctions on Chinese officials to improve relations. He later suggested that lifting sanctions on the defense chief is “under negotiation right now.”

The State Department clarified the U.S. position Monday.

“No, we are not,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller told VOA on Monday during his first on-camera briefing. Miller was asked if the U.S. is considering or entertaining the idea of whether to ease sanctions on the top Chinese military official for negotiation purposes.

The People’s Republic of China named General Li Shangfu as its minister of national defense in mid-March. In 2018, the U.S. sanctioned Li under the so-called Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) when he headed the Equipment Development Department of the Chinese military.

The sanctions were related to China’s purchase of ten SU-35 combat aircrafts in 2017 and S-400 surface-to-air missile system-related equipment in 2018, according to the State Department.

U.S. officials have been eager to resume talks with their Chinese counterparts. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Li are both expected to attend next month’s Shangri-La Dialogue, a high-level Asia security summit in Singapore.

The Chinese military has not accepted the U.S. proposal for a meeting between their defense chiefs on the margins of this annual gathering.

In Beijing, Chinese officials questioned Washington’s “sincerity” in its outreach for communications.

“China always firmly opposes illegal unilateral sanctions and has made clear its stern position to the U.S. side. The U.S. side should immediately lift sanctions and take concrete actions to remove obstacles, create favorable atmosphere and conditions for dialogue and communication,” said Mao Ning, the spokesperson of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on Monday.

Both U.S. and Chinese officials have said there is a need to stabilize fraught relations between the world’s two largest economies. Ties that have been increasingly strained in recent months over security, trade and technology issues, Taiwan and the South China Sea.

Chinese officials have signaled a willingness to stabilize relations with the U.S., but at the same time they demand that the U.S. stop harming Chinese interests by strengthening ties with Taiwan and imposing technology restrictions on China.

Experts told VOA the ball is in China’s court.

“It’s unclear whether Beijing will proceed to take steps toward stabilizing ties unless the U.S. rolls back some of the measures it has taken that China objects to,” said Bonnie Glaser, managing director of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.

Diplomatic visits to Beijing

Biden also said a “thaw” in the bilateral relationship would begin “very shortly.”

U.S. climate envoy John Kerry’s visit to Beijing for talks with his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua would come after Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other U.S. cabinet members’ planned visits to Beijing, which was agreed during a recent phone call between Kerry and Xie, a diplomatic source who wishes not to be named told VOA.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo had also indicated their plans to visit China.
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President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy are engaged in negotiations over raising the nation’s debt ceiling and the government reaches a “hard deadline” and run out of cash to pay its bills.

The two sides are working to reach a budget compromise before June 1, when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said the country could default.

McCarthy and Republicans are insisting on spending cuts in exchange for raising the debt limit. Biden has come to the negotiating table after balking for months but says the GOP lawmakers will have to back off their “extreme positions.”

On Sunday evening, negotiators met again and appeared to be narrowing on a 2024 budget year cap that could resolve the standoff. After speaking with Biden by phone as the president traveled home from a trip to Asia, McCarthy sounded somewhat optimistic. But he warned that “there’s no agreement on anything.”

A look at the negotiations and why they are happening:

WHAT IS THE DEBT CEILING FIGHT ALL ABOUT?

Once a routine act by Congress, the vote to raise the debt ceiling allows the Treasury Department to continue borrowing money to pay the nation’s already incurred bills.

The vote in more recent times has been used as a political leverage point, a must-pass bill that can be loaded up with other priorities.

House Republicans, newly empowered in the majority this Congress, are refusing to raise the debt limit unless Biden and the Democrats impose federal spending cuts and restrictions on future spending.

The Republicans say the nation’s debt, now at $31 trillion, is unsustainable. They also want to attach other priorities, including stiffer work requirements on recipients of government cash aid, food stamps and the Medicaid health care program. Many Democrats oppose those requirements.

Biden had insisted on approving the debt ceiling with no strings attached, saying the U.S. always pays its bills and defaulting on debt is non-negotiable.

But facing a deadline as soon as June 1, when Treasury says it will run out of money, Biden launched negotiations with Republicans.

IS IT CLOSE TO BEING RESOLVED?

There are positive signs, though there have been rocky moments in the talks.

Start-stop negotiations were back on track late Sunday, and all sides appear to be racing toward a deal. Negotiators left the Capitol after 8 p.m. Sunday and said they would keep working.

McCarthy said after his call with Biden that “I think we can solve some of these problems if he understands what we’re looking at.”

The speaker added: “We have to spend less money than we spent last year.”

Biden, for his part, said at a press conference in Japan before departing: “I think that we can reach an agreement.”

But reaching an agreement is only part of the challenge. Any deal will also have to pass the House and Senate with significant bipartisan support. Many expect that buy-in from the White House and GOP leadership will be enough to muscle it over the finish line.

WHAT ARE THE HANGUPS?

Republicans want to roll back spending to 2022 levels and cap future spending for the next decade.

Democrats aren’t willing to go that far to cut federal spending. The White House has instead proposed holding spending flat at the current 2023 levels.

There are also policy priorities under consideration, including steps that could help speed the construction and development of energy projects that both Republicans and some Democrats want.

Democrats have strenuously objected to a Republican push to impose stiffer work requirements on people who receive government aid through food stamps, Medicaid health care and the cash assistance programs.

Biden, though, has kept the door open to some discussion over work requirements.

WHAT HAPPENS IF THEY DON’T RAISE THE DEBT CEILING?

A government default would be unprecedented and devastating to the nation’s economy. Yellen and economic experts have said it could be “catastrophic.”

There isn’t really a blueprint for what would happen. But it would have far-reaching effects.

Yellen has said it would destroy jobs and businesses and leave millions of families who rely on federal government payments to “likely go unpaid,” including Social Security beneficiaries, veterans and military families.

More than 8 million people could lose their jobs, government officials estimate. The economy could nosedive into a recession.

“A default could cause widespread suffering as Americans lose the income that they need to get by,” she said. Disruptions to federal government operations would impact “air traffic control and law enforcement, border security and national defense, and food safety.”

IS THERE A BACKUP PLAN IF TALKS FAIL?

Some Democrats have proposed that they could raise the debt ceiling on their own, without help from Republicans.

Progressives have urged Biden to invoke a clause in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment that says the validity of the public debt in the United States “shall not be questioned.” Default, the argument goes, is therefore unconstitutional.

Supporters of unilateral action say Biden already has the authority to effectively nullify the debt limit if Congress won’t raise it, so that the validity of the country’s debt isn’t questioned. The president said Sunday that it’s a “question that I think is unresolved,” as to whether he could act alone, adding he hopes to try to get the judiciary to weigh in on the notion for the future.

In Congress, meanwhile, House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries has launched a process that would “discharge” the issue to the House floor and force a vote on raising the debt limit.

It’s a cumbersome legislative procedure, but Jeffries urged House Democrats to sign on to the measure in hopes of gathering the majority needed to trigger a vote.

The challenge for Democrats is that they have only 213 members on their side — five short of the 218 needed for a majority.

Getting five Republicans to cross over and join the effort won’t be easy. Signing onto a “discharge” petition from the minority is seen as a major affront to party leadership, particularly on an issue as important as the debt ceiling. Few Republicans, if any, may be willing to suffer the consequences.
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When their homeowners association ordered Maryland residents Janet and Jeffrey Crouch to rip out the native plants in their front yard and replace them with green grass, the couple refused. Homeowners’ associations, also known as HOAs, are private organizations that oversee the management of some residential communities. They’re usually run by a board of volunteer homeowners. As VOA’s Dora Mekouar [meh-kwar] reports, the couple’s battle against their HOA, and in favor of the environment, ended up changing Maryland state law. Camera: Adam Greenbaum
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An 8-year-old girl who died last week in Border Patrol custody was seen at least three times by medical personnel on the day of her death — complaining of vomiting, a stomachache and later suffering what appeared to be a seizure — before she was taken to a hospital, U.S. immigration officials said Sunday. 

The girl’s mother previously told The Associated Press that agents had repeatedly ignored her pleas to hospitalize her medically fragile daughter, who had a history of heart problems and sickle cell anemia. Anadith Tanay Reyes Alvarez, whose parents are Honduran, was born in Panama with congenital heart disease. 

“She cried and begged for her life, and they ignored her. They didn’t do anything for her,” Mabel Alvarez Benedicks, the mother of Anadith, told The Associated Press during an interview Friday. 

In a statement, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it knew about the girl’s medical history when personnel began treating her for influenza four days before her death on May 17. 

CBP Acting Commissioner Troy Miller said in a statement that while his agency awaits the results of an internal investigation, he has ordered several steps be taken to ensure appropriate care for all medically fragile people in his agency’s custody. 

These actions include reviewing cases of all known medically fragile individuals currently being held to ensure their time in custody is limited and examining medical-care practices at CBP facilities to see if more personnel are needed. 

“We must ensure that medically fragile individuals receive the best possible care and spend the minimum amount of time possible in CBP custody,” Miller said, adding his agency is “deeply saddened” by the girl’s “tragic death.” 

Anadith’s death has raised questions about whether the Border Patrol properly handled the situation. It was the second child migrant death in two weeks in U.S. government custody since the expiration of pandemic-related order known as Title 42. 

According to a CBP statement, Anadith had first voiced complaints of abdominal pain, nasal congestion, and cough on the afternoon of May 14. She had a temperature of 101.8 degrees Fahrenheit (38.7 Celsius) 

After a test showed she had influenza, Anadith was given acetaminophen, ibuprofen, medicine for nausea and Tamiflu, a flu treatment, according to CBP. 

The family was then transferred from a facility in Donna, Texas, to one in Harlingen, Texas. 

She continued to be given Tamiflu for the next two days. She was also given ibuprofen, according to CBP. 

On May 17, the girl and her mother went to the Harlingen Border Patrol Station’s medical unit at least three times, CBP said. In the first visit, Anadith complained of vomiting. In the second, she complained of a stomachache. By the third visit at 1:55 p.m., “the mother was carrying the girl who appeared to be having a seizure, after which records indicate the child became unresponsive,” according to CBP. 

Medical personnel began performing CPR before she was taken to a hospital in Harlingen, where she was pronounced dead at 2:50 p.m. 

A medical examiner is waiting for additional tests before determining a cause of death. 

Her death came a week after a 17-year-old Honduran boy, Ángel Eduardo Maradiaga Espinoza, died in U.S. Health and Human Services Department custody. He was traveling alone. 
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