Lend Your Story to Ignacio’s Archive

The Ignacio Community Library is encouraging Ignacio residents to share their history as part of a project to help showcase and preserve what makes this area special. This edition of the Local News Network is brought to you by Tafoya Barrett and Associates and Kroegers Ace Hardware. I’m Connor Shreve. The goal of Voices of Ignacio is to create a catalog of short stories from residents of and around the town of Ignacio.

We’re hoping that it will create a mosaic that’s going to help us see what the whole community is and was, stories about people, about families, about institutions, events, anything like that that will help everybody who is interested. We’ll put these on the website and help them know what Ignacio is about, what it was, how it developed.

Library volunteer, Judy Bundy, wants to curate an oral history of Ignacio and the surrounding area. She welcomes anyone who wants to share a familial, historical, or regionally relevant tidbit to put it on record through an audio recording. She says Ignacio’s status as a true, tri ethnic community is unique, and she hopes archiving stories can celebrate the area’s sense of community or communality.

I grew up here and I left for about 50 years and came back, but as far as I know, there’s never been any tension I think. As I recall from what my siblings said, the biggest tension in the town earlier on was between the hippies and the kickers, you know, and so I don’t think there’s ever been any kind of tension among the races, but you know, it helps if everybody understands what everybody else is about.

There is of course an element of discovery with the project because there’s no knowing what stories will present themselves, but Bundy is eager to hear them. She thinks Ignacio’s spirit of friendliness could be an underlying current of most of the stories she ends up uncovering.

I think most people who live here think of it as a community, they feel like they belong here. And my mother lived here all of her life, and she lived to be 97, and she always said it was the best place in the world to live. And I think a lot of people who live here think that.

Bundy feels like the stories will be more organic if she avoids actively contacting residents, and instead relies on getting word about the program out in the community. So for now, Voices of Ignacio is relying on residents coming forward on their own volition. If you have a story to share that could help add to or illuminate the history of Ignacio or the outlying area, reach out to the library to coordinate recording. Details on this and other stories are available at durangolocal.news. Thanks for watching this edition of The Local News Network. I’m Connor Shreve.