Youthful Impact: Joseph Maestas

SFR recently met with a trio of Santa Fe Prep students—Alex Mazur, Vickie Hsin and Oliver Lehman, all 16—who are working with the Convergence Project, a teen-run organization dedicated to creating opportunities for youth. Both they and we were curious about how a town famous for catering to older demographics might impact a younger generation from a cultural aspect and how an incoming mayor might support existent or new initiatives.

SFR will present the teens' findings over the next several days as we lead to the March 6 election day in Santa Fe. Candidates are presented in no particular order.

Next on the docket: Joseph Maestas.

Arts and culture of Santa Fe seem to be directed towards an older demographic and tourism, which leaves many teens saying that there is little to do for them. So, what do you see that the city is doing to contribute to teen culture, and how would you support those programs?

We do provide support to programs where we expose children to the arts. We actually have a certain portion of lodgers' tax revenues. … We have a lot of these arts and schools, and what I would do is continue supporting that. I know that we recently changed the mission of Warehouse 21, but we probably need a broader one-stop shop for youth, and it should address several things. One of the needs is helping youth prepare for the job market and learn how to develop a resume, interview for a job, and teaching them those basic skills—and we need a teen job center.

The other thing we need is we need a safe haven where teens can be themselves and where they can have poetry slams and regular teen dances. I'm not sure that Warehouse 21, with its mission changed, can do that, and I know that there are other after-school programs, but [they're] for younger kids. But you're right; District 2, my district, includes the arts, includes Canyon Road and Museum Hill, and so I see that older demographic, and I see why we really need to do more in terms of establishing city-funded programs to expose our youth to the arts. Another thing that I'll do as mayor is increase the allocation of city funds for youth and family programs.

We have two distinct, I call them 'soft programs,' that the city funds; one is youth and families fund, and the money is allocated through the youth and families commission, and that's about one and a half million. We just increased that amount. The minimum now is three percent of gross receipts taxables. It's through that youth and families funding that we fund a lot of arts-related programs, and, as mayor, I commit to continue having the annual youth summit to try and address a lot of these issues and maybe have a more centralized facility so teens can go and hang out and do different things and make new friends.

What programs or initiatives would you create that would support and improve teen culture in Santa Fe? How would you fund those programs?

I'm an engineer, and careers in math and science are very lucrative for young people. I'd like to see more exposure to the STEM programs and get more kids interested in science and math, and get them to pursue careers in either physical science or engineering and other fields that really require a lot of math and science. And I think that we're seeing nationally that some of these immigration restrictions are limiting the technological corporations. There's not enough American, naturalized students with upper-level PhDs in these high-tech areas, so we're already seeing this as a national workforce problem. Los Alamos National Labs is next door; we just supported a startup company called Descartes Labs, and the technology that they have commercialized was licensed from Los Alamos National Labs, so we have an opportunity to really create a high-tech startup sector for our economy and start benefiting from the commercialization of technology developed at LANL.

I'd like to see kids exposed more to the film and digital media industry. It's an industry that's growing rapidly. We have the infrastructure in place but we need more. The direct spend for the film industry is about $125 billion a year, and with a 3:1 economic multiplied that's 4375 billion a year; almost 4400 billion a year is the financial impact of the film industry, and it's growing, but we have some chokepoints. We need better high-speed broadband for businesses. We need a post-production facility with storage space. We need to continue the film school. I'd like to see the Santa Fe University for Art and Design continue in that mission, being a film school, so we can grow our own young people who want to seek a career in film or digital media. I want to help kids with a foundation for empowerment, and to do that is to get them prepared to be a member of the workforce.

What did you do as a teenager in your free time?

I grew up in a very rural area. We had a small farm, we had farm animals. We also had a family business. My father was actually a teacher—I had him for seventh period science. I sat right in the front, and he was really a strict guy, a strict disciplinarian. He was the first in his family to get an advanced degree. He had a bachelors and a masters, so education was everything.

So, growing up as a kid, I had just so many tasks: Go feed the animals, go clean the business, go order new inventory for the business. I had to go study, I couldn't watch TV, so it was a very structured environment. I did have a paper route. My brother handed his paper route over to me so I was the paperboy for my neighborhood. I also joined organized sports in junior high. I was on the cross country team, and in high school I played varsity football and track, but I still maintained my grades. I was an honor student. I was on the national honors society, and I went on to be an honor student at a graduate/undergraduate school. But as a kid, we'd play football and go to swimming holes, we'd go fishing. Growing up as a kid, I just worked really hard—I was never bored.