Bread Loaf/New Mexico: A Vision for Multicultural Expansion
In 1991, the New Mexico campus opened, housing 61 students, and featuring courses in Native American and Hispanic literatures, as well as literatures of the Southwest.
The new campus site, our third, was selected by Bread Loaf’s director Jim Maddox (1989-2010).
“One of the many reasons for locating in Santa Fe,” commented Maddox at the time, “was to take advantage of the meeting-point of different American peoples in the Southwest – most obviously Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo.” As Maddox put it, “a constant subtext in Bread Loaf classrooms…is the diversity of American education, the diversity of American experience [and] the multicultural nature of American culture.” The geographic and curricular expansion of Bread Loaf into the American Southwest was a natural step for an institution that promotes, in Maddox’s words, the “plurality of voices within a classroom…and within a culture.”