By Creative Startups Lead Researcher Mike Young
Guess all the accents you might expect to hear after wandering into an underground music venue in Gallup, New Mexico.
Are you done?
Did you miss “Staten Island?”
Brian Connelly—Army vet, Staten Island native, rapper, MC, proud father of a chess champion, and self-professed “asshole on Mondays”—grins through his beard as he describes his Gallup acclimation: “Drank the water, fell in love.”
He shows us around Juggernaut Music, which Visit Gallup calls the “most unique musical instrument store, performance venue and recording studio” in New Mexico. Run by Ernie Santiago, Juggernaut sells, repairs, and offers instruction on a variety of music equipment. In the back is a well-equipped recording studio. Beyond that is a sprawling 300 capacity performance space, dark-ceiled and mural-walled, the hub of a thriving regional music scene for many genres, especially “folk, punk, metal and hip-hop,” according to the Navajo Times. Juggernaut shares its building—across the street from the popular Gallup Skate Park—with Enchantment Skate Park, New Mexico Pottery, and the Time 2 Grind coffee shop.
Determined surprises and do-it-together clusters are hallmarks of the Gallup creative economy. I am in town with my colleague Raashan Ahmad—community organizer, vocalist, DJ, and the Executive Director of Vital Spaces—as part of a field research project Creative Startups is conducting for the New Mexico Economic Development Department’s new Creative Industries Division.
We are traveling across the state to meet creatives where they live and work, where they take risks and raise families. This research will culminate in a plan for the Creative Industries Division rooted in equity, with enhanced education and workforce training initiatives. If all goes well, the Creative Industries Division will help make creative livelihoods more accessible, dependable, and sustainable for more people across the state.
Gallup, our first stop, has a long history with not only creative livelihoods but as a city of general trade. Named after a railroad “paymaster,” the city now known as Gallup existed as a hub of commerce even before David Gallup set up his office for railroad workers to collect their pay along the transcontinental route. The 2022 Gallup Economic Development Plan explains that the city was once known as “Na'Nizhoozhi, or ‘The Bridge’” among the Diné. While coal and uranium extraction boosted Gallup’s economy for spurts in the 20th century (and left the scorch marks of ongoing environmental and public health issues), Gallup’s role as a trading hub is its enduring personality, spanning from pre-colonial times—where Diné and Zuni populations traded with neighboring Apache, Hopi, Laguna, and Acoma communities—to the city’s participation in today’s global creative economy.
Today, Gallup is the McKinley County seat whose minority-majority population is 49% Native American and 31% Hispanic/Latino. Author and former mayor Bob Rosebrough has called Gallup a “place of thin veil,” the city tingling with the liminal energy of imposed borders. Not only is Gallup the gateway to the Navajo Nation (west), Zuni Pueblo (south), Hopi Reservation (southwest), and Ramah Navajo Reservation (southeast), it’s also arguably New Mexico’s unofficial capital of the “checkerboard area,” where land is parceled up in complex divisions between various jurisdictions of “federal, state, tribal, private, and allotment,” as explained for the Rio Grande Sierra Club by Diné CARE organizer Kendra Pinto.
The 22,000 person city—namechecked in Bobby Troupe’s 1946 classic pop hit as one of the best places to get your kicks on Route 66—is a critical destination for surrounding communities. When we visited with citizens in surrounding rural towns, they lamented the long drive to Gallup for affordable essentials like groceries, gas, and reliable internet access. These citizens also bring to town their high value intellectual property—often in the form of cultural heritage practices such as jewelsmithing and textile arts—and attempt to translate that value into fair economic reward.
Within Gallup, struggles with intergenerational poverty and the legacy of systematic oppression mingle with the intriguing economic possibilities of the creative industries. These possibilities include not only the direct-to-customer export of intellectual property in the form of goods, but they also include export of educational services (such as offering online classes in Diné weaving) and heritage-rooted innovation (such as the work being done through makerspaces at the Octavia Fellin Public Library or fashion entrepreneurs such as Goldie Tom).
Finally, Gallup is also home to regionally authentic creative entrepreneurship that stems from burgeoning cultural practices and follows consumer growth trends around wellness and public health—such as the flourishing skateboard and hardcore music scenes.
These possibilities come as no surprise to gallupARTS Executive Director Rose Eason, who explained to us that 25% of McKinley County residents make at least part of their living in the creative economy, a number roughly 2.7x higher than the state average. Eason came to gallupARTS in 2016 and has pushed the organization into a powerhouse of local impact. From art/transferrable skill education youth programs to local festivals, Eason’s efforts have brought over $1M in outside funding into Gallup and tripled local funding. These efforts have also raised Gallup’s profile as a creative economy nexus. For example, Eason secured a sizeable grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to build an innovative “virtual museum” of local WPA art. Practicing her community dedication, Eason has worked closely on this project with many prominent local artists, such as the Mariano Lake abstract painter Jerry Brown, whose work exploring social justice has routinely appeared in state collections and public buildings.
Eason flexed that community dedication and connection to local artists like Brown to help us organize a breakfast on January 22nd at gallupARTS’ headquarters, ART123 Gallery. Present were local creative entrepreneurs, city officials, business leaders, community organizers, and cultural workers. Thanks to this cross-section of demographics, the conversation was robust. Leather workers, graphic designers, silversmiths, makerspace educators, fiber arts entrepreneurs, hair/makeup artists and creatives of all stripes exchanged ideas, hopes, and concerns with business improvement district directors, city tourism managers, regional EDD reps, and other public officials. The Gallup Cultural Center was represented by Director Teri Frazier, a well-respected local leader who for years has coordinated the dances and other night performances at the esteemed Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial.
The two hours of conversation returned frequently to the challenges Gallup’s artisans face in making a living off their intellectual property. The role of local trading posts was discussed. Some suggested workshops to help artisans connect directly with online marketplaces, while others pointed out that wariness from intergenerational trauma often make Native entrepreneurs reluctant to sign up for online services that require the disclosure of personal information. Many agreed that any such workshops would first require “teach-the-teacher” workshops to empower locals to re-teach these skills in cultural contexts.
Other highlights of the conversation included the need for more creative career pathway education for youth, unreliable internet/infrastructure, and the merit of recurring engagement by technical assistance programs. One remarkable feature of the roundtable was the intergenerational trust at play: community elders and younger entrepreneurs treated each other as equals. Perhaps this was related to the fact that several creative entrepreneurs spoke of coming from families where cultural heritage has been a source of economic value for generations. At the same time, several of these entrepreneurs have innovated their families’ traditions into new endeavors, and they suggested workforce training programs geared specifically around the transference of heritage skills into other trades.
After the breakfast, we visited several local creative industry businesses. First up, we visited Mary Walker’s Weaving in Beauty. First opening in 2017, Weaving in Beauty has become a respected staple in the fiber arts for its breadth and depth, not only in Gallup but all over the west—and the world. Weaving in Beauty aims to be a “one stop shop” dedicated to “expanding the appreciation and knowledge of the textiles of the Navajo people,” according to Visit Gallup. Walker told us her store was the only one of its kind from “San Bernardino to Texas.” Weaving in Beauty touches every part of the fiber arts economic ecosystem: sourcing churro wool from Roswell, arranging for its processing, and dying the yarn they get back. But they don’t stop there. They sell, clean, repair, and appraise woven products, mostly traditional Diné products. And if you need a loom, they sell those too. If you need to learn how to weave or knit, they offer online classes that employ local Native experts. These classes are a global hit, with students logging in from Estonia to Australia, learning from the valuable intellectual heritage of Gallup how to build looms and weave Navajo designs.
As you wander through the shop, thinking about how nothing smells like wool except wool, you tangle yourself in a world of weaving: a rainbow of yarn colors on one wall, a selection of yarns imported from all over the world on another, Diné artist Tammy Martin carefully repairing a rug with a 90s country playlist pulled up on YouTube.
With a strongly interconnected statewide wool ecosystem, New Mexico could leverage its immense heritage of churro sheep farming and multicultural weaving practices to position itself as a leader in the global wool economy, which TBRC predicts will grow at a CAGR of 8.5% to $15 billion by 2028. With the the presence of hubs like Weaving in Beauty in Gallup, Diné Bé'Iiná in Shiprock, and the New Mexico Fiber Arts Center in Española—among others—New Mexico could incubate nimble creative industry innovation on this sturdy bedrock, exploring the trends that TBRC reports are driving this 8.5% CAGR: “emphasis on circular economy practices … focus on luxury and high-end wool products, incorporation of wool in sustainable home textiles, adoption of technology in wool farming, [and] introduction of biodegradable and compostable wool products.”
After we speculated about the future of wool with Walker at Weaving in Beauty, we wove our way back to Route 66. That’s where we found Jerome Damon’s father Delbert manning Dalone Skateboards, a local skateboard manufacturing/design and apparel business that has racked up social media fans and international acclaim. In 2023, Yelp featured Dalone as the only New Mexican business in its “Behind the Business” video series. Founded by Jerome when he was just 21, Dalone sells its custom skateboards—handmade at the shop with Jerome’s custom art—all over the world. Entrepreneurship runs in the family: Delbert is also a local photographer. What’s most important to both Damons is the “get back up if you fall” mentality that Jerome learned from skateboarding and the business’s integration with the local community. “Growing up on the reservation,” Damon told Yelp, “I was raised to always give back and not to take things for granted.”
His success has become his community’s success: his skateboards that call attention to the #MMIW movement, which calls for justice for missing and murdered Indigenous women, have routinely sold out their limited runs. Damon donates all profits from these boards to nonprofit organizations that aid the #MMIW cause.
Damon represents a growing trend in Gallup: staying put and building deep. It’s a city that is looking within to bridge beyond. In September 2023, the Octavia Fellin Public Library and UNM Gallup worked together to present the traveling exhibition “World on the Move: 250,000 Years of Human Migration” at Gallup’s El Morro Theatre. This exhibition was the right fit for a city founded on passing through. But, of course, Gallup’s history of migration is not all drinking the water and falling in love. As UNM history professor Bruce Gjeltema made clear: “This land is an invaded land, a land that was held by others before what we talk about being Gallup existed.”
The consequences of that history continue to reverberate throughout Gallup. That 25% creative workers rate does not mask the 25% poverty rate. Within the creative economy, an admirable amount of recommendations from the 2016 Gallup Arts and Cultural District Plan have come to pass, including Coal Avenue Commons, new makerspace resources at the Octavia Fellin Public Library (and a plan for a new downtown library), the Gallup Skatepark, and the gallupARTS Gallup New Deal Art Virtual Museum project. But many of the concerns expressed in the Plan remain, especially that Native creative entrepreneurs working with heritage intellectual property “are limited to sales and marketing opportunities provided by retailers and wholesalers and have little or no opportunity to showcase and sell the items outside themselves.” Efforts to establish creative entrepreneur cooperatives similar to Zuni’s ARTZ Co-op have struggled, and deeper investigation into why—especially the complex relationships between artisans and the aforementioned “retailers and wholesalers”—is vital.
At the end of our time in Gallup, we walked across the railroad tracks to the north side of town, looking for the building where there had once been a mural honoring the late Andrew Martinez, best known by his stage name Wake Self. Martinez was born in Roswell but did most of his growing up in Fort Wingate and Gallup, giving his first performance at the Foundations of Freedom dance studio, where “rappers, beatboxers, and breakdancers [could] jam together,” Martinez’s older brother told DGO. Martinez was not only a musician but a community organizer and catalyst for positivity and creativity. His partner Noor-un-nisa Touchon is an award-winning filmmaker, and her music video for Martinez’s posthumous song “Holy Water” was shown at the American Indian Film Festival, the Independent Shorts Awards, and the London Music Video Festival.
But on Maloney and 2nd Street in January 2024, Jason Kinlicheenie’s mural honoring Wake Self has been mostly whitewashed. In the middle is Wake’s face, disembodied. My colleague Raashan Ahmad, soon after he moved to the state, toured with Wake Self and prominent New Mexico emcee Def-i. He stares at Martinez’s face. To the left, the only other remnant of the original mural is the NEW of what should be NEW MEXICO.
Gallup’s next act is far from white paint. Honoring the memory of faces lost, the city’s creative entrepreneurs are working together toward resilience. Forever a border town, Gallup is ready to cross into a future based not on passing through but connecting deeply, dying the yarn of entrepreneurship and staking (or skating) a future of creative industry.
Interested New Mexico creatives are encouraged to sign up to voice their perspective, keep up to date with events, and get involved. By joining the list, creatives will continue to play a significant role in shaping the future of the Creative Industries Division, receiving relevant information and opportunities for further contribution. Don't miss out on staying connected and actively participating—sign up now to ensure your voice continues to be a driving force in this transformative initiative.
About the New Mexico Economic Development Department (EDD):
The mission of the New Mexico Economic Development Department is to improve the lives of New Mexico families by increasing economic opportunities and providing a place for businesses to thrive.
Our programs and initiatives support our mission. The New Mexico Partnership is a statutorily-created public-private organization under contract to the department to market the state globally in order to attract new jobs and investment. Department programs provide direct assistance to New Mexico businesses and communities. Programs and services for businesses can be found in the Business Resource Center. EDD also administers several programs that support community development.
About Creative Startups
Creative Startups based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has a proven track record developing economic strategies and programs leading to measurable economic growth in the creative industries. At the forefront of the creative economy for 15 years, Creative Startups develops strategic plans for regional governments, supplies in-depth economic analyses of assets and market opportunities, supports cultural and tribal institutions, and develops and delivers innovative programs for creative entrepreneurs and artists. Through their work across New Mexico, the USA, and the world, Creative Startups has developed a comprehensive understanding of the technologies and trends driving the remarkable expansion of creative industries.