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Last Updated: Jan 16th, 2010 - 15:26:11 |
Martha Egan, the fourth of Margaret and Charles Egan's nine children, was born in Evanston, Illinois and raised in De Pere, Wisconsin. In 1963 she graduated from St. Joseph's Academy in Green Bay and began college at Colorado State University in Ft. Collins. She transferred to the Universidad de las Américas in Mexico City, receiving a B.A. in Latin American History in 1967.
After two years as a Peace Corps volunteer working with credit unions in rural Venezuela, she worked in Washington, D.C. with various Federally-funded programs for migrant farmworkers. Between 1972 and 1974 she bicycled from Belgium to southern Spain via Norway, stopping to odd-job as a fruit picker, a youth hostel manager, a kindergarten teacher, a set builder at an opera house, and a student. In 1974, she settled in New Mexico, where she joined her sister, Polly Arango, in a new business, Pachamama, importing and selling Latin American folk art and antiques in Old Town Albuquerque. In 1978, she bought the business, and a decade later, she opened a new store in Santa Fe, now Pachamama's sole location. As a sideline business, she identifies and appraises museum and private collections throughout the US. Since 1991, she has held the honorary position of Research Associate at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. In 2004, she received the first Van Deren Coke Annual Achievement Award for her efforts to educate the public about Latin American folk art.
In 1991, the Museum of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe, published her first book, Milagros: Votive Offerings from the Americas; and in 1994, her second book, Relicarios: Devotional Miniatures from the Americas. Both books remain in print. Her other publications include museum catalogue entries and magazine articles published in the US, Mexico, and Italy. In 2002, The Santa Fe New Mexican began publishing her travel articles and photographs.
She began writing her first novel, Clearing Customs, in 1988, in response to the US Customs Service's dirty little war on small import businesses like hers. Santa Fe's Papalote Press will release the work in February, 2005.
In her spare time, Martha Egan is an environmentalist, serving on the Corrales Air Toxics Task Force from 2002 to 2004. She's also a gardener, a Big Sister for more than two decades, Auntie Mame to dozens of nieces and nephews, a foreign languages enthusiast, a foodie, a bicyclist, and a rabid Packers fan. She lives in semi-rural New Mexico with the ghost of an old cat.
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