The 2015 Legislative Session started on January 20th at noon and ended at noon on March 31st.   This session marks my 25th session as a member of the House, including regular, special and extraordinary sessions. My standing committees for each of those sessions are the House Appropriations and Finance Committee and the House Transportation and Public Works Committee.

Each Session starts about the same way, the legislators living outside of the Santa Fe area move to Santa Fe a day or two before the session starts, bright eyed and anxious for the session to start.  It is not unlike children going back to school after a long summer. You can feel the excitement among the hotel staff and...

The ‘athlon’ competitions feature multiple events rewarding a compilation of diverse achievement. Most of these are strictly measures of athletic ability such as the triathlon, heptathlon and decathlon. Others such as the biathlon and pentathlon have included finesse events like fencing, shooting and equestrian.

The Grants Quadrathlon has achieved national status in over 30 years of existence with hundreds paying their $60 fee to bike, run, cross country ski and snowshoe 43 miles every February with the winner receiving a modest $1,000 prize.

Awards are given for teams, age groups and gender. In fact almost all athletic competitions nowadays are gender exclusive with women’s...

Welcome to the new Gallup Sun free weekly newspaper. We hope you enjoy our debut issue. We not only want to keep you informed, but we want you to feel entertained and proud of Gallup and the surrounding community, even with the challenges we face in this growing region.

We thank our debut issue advertisers for taking a leap of faith and advertising with a new publication. Providing clear and crisp ads that customers will take notice of is our #1 priority.

Also, a big thank you to the establishments that are carrying the Gallup Sun. You support both local businesses and a free, local community newspaper.

As publisher/editor of the Gallup Sun, I welcome story ideas and feedback on...

Dear Mexican: I’m a 23-year-old Latina attending a Texas university. I’m taking a class that is centered around Latino culture and history. I’m a first generation Tex-Mex kid, and lately all of the documentaries and other course work have been making me “feel some type of way” angry/sad/and overall confused, for lack of better phrasing. I don’t know how to handle these feelings, and it is making me be more introspective about the Latino/Mexican part of my identity—as if I didn’t already have enough issues there. I don’t want to overthink it, and I don’t want to always wonder how people perceive me because of my background. But I don’t know how to feel about what I...