My Town

The Cold War burned hotly in Albuquerque, NM, near the site where the atomic bomb was built and tested. Randall, a middle-class woman from the East, made Albuquerque her home and here uses it as a starting point as she turns an unblinking eye on the world situation and her part in it. Randall chose, at great risk, to marry political activism with courageous writing, moving among the New York abstract expressionists in the 1950s and 1960s and then allying herself with the Mexican student movement of 1968, the Cuban revolution throughout the 1970s, and Nicaragua's Sandinista project in the early 1980s; she also visited North Vietnam during the awful last months of the war there. For her trouble, she was deported by the U.S. government, but her deportation was overturned by the courts. Randall uses poetry, prose, and photographs to celebrate her hometown and its beauty, troubles, diversity, cultures, charm, sadness, and wonder and to explain, perhaps, how it fostered the woman she was to become.