Lynn Adler: And So We Moved to Petaca documents a rare intersection of cultures in the early 1970s, when several counterculture families from San Francisco and New York City moved to Petaca, a small village in Northern New Mexico, to adopt a traditional Nuevomexicano way of life. The village, home to about fifty very traditional Hispano families with roots in the area stretching back over a century, had no schools, no hospital, no stoplights—only one church, one bar, one dry-goods store, and a single gas pump. Spanish was nearly everyone’s first language, and with the local mineral mine shut down in the 1950s, most families survived as subsistence farmers.
Lynn Adler, a self-taught photographer who used an old 35 mm camera left by her mother, made these photographs between 1970 and 1974 while visiting friends who had moved to Petaca. At a time when there were few women photographers and even fewer who used their cameras for ethnographic study, Adler’s instinct for seeing the collision of cultures and her ability to construct beautiful frames allowed her to capture a moment both rare and spectacular. Her images show her friends doing the hard work of homesteading and raising families, local people tending crops and animals, and the moments when members of both groups came together.
Half a century after Adler last photographed Petaca, the children who ran through her pictures are now in middle age and the older people have passed. And So We Moved to Petaca stands as a moving portrait of a time and place that would otherwise have been lost to history. If not for these photographs, the story of community and conflict between the counterculture newcomers and the traditional Hispano families would never have been shared. The book preserves a fleeting moment in which two worlds met, struggled, and found a common ground in a remote village where simplicity and survival defined daily life.
Lynn Adler: And So We Moved to Petaca
Category: Photographer Monographs & Art Books
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Author: Lynn Adler
Publisher: UNM Press
Publication Date:
June 2026
Print Length: 144 pages
Language: English
Price: paid
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