Farmington, NM

Farmington, New Mexico — the Civic Center in the event records fixes the entry to the Four Corners — sits where three rivers meet in the high desert of the San Juan Basin, the largest town in the vast quadrant where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado touch at the only four-way state boundary in America. This is deep ancestral country: the great Chacoan outlier of Salmon Ruins stands at the town's edge, Aztec Ruins National Monument with its reconstructed Great Kiva lies just upriver, and the Navajo Nation begins immediately to the west, its traders' turquoise and weaving filling Farmington's galleries. On the horizon floats Shiprock, the winged volcanic monolith sacred to the Diné.

The town itself grew on orchards — its Navajo name, Tóta', means "among the waters" — then on oil and gas. Each summer it hosts an American institution: the Connie Mack World Series, the national championship of elite youth baseball, has been played in Farmington since the 1960s, filling Ricketts Park on August evenings. The Farmington Civic Center, the municipal hall documented in this archive, serves as the region's stage for touring concerts, opera and community performance — the one roof under which the energy town, the reservation borderland and the ancient river valley all take their seats together.