Mortal highway

For years Northern New Mexico’s dominant Hispanic population has erected powerful and poignant descansos or roadside memorials to remember family and friends killed in automobile accidents.

Mortal Highway offers an intimate view in photographs and verse into the lives of families who find expression of their grief in these increasingly elaborate works of art.

The photographs bring into focus details of the descansos and anchor the memorials in the physical context of the dramatic high desert landscape of the Southwest. -- Judith Hidden Lanius