Clearing Customs

Martha Egan, the fourth of Margaret and Charles Egan¿s nine children, was born in Evanston, Illinois and raised in DePere, Wisconsin. In 1963, she graduated from St. Joseph¿s Academy in Green Bay and began college at Colorado State University in Fort 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 in the Peace Corps as a volunteer working with credit unions in rural Venezuela, she worked in Washington, DC with various Federally-funded programs for migrant farm workers. Between 1972 and 1974, she bicycled from Belgium to Southern Spain via Norway, stopping to oddjob 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 in Old Town Albuquerque. In 1978, she bought the business, and a decade later, she opened a new Santa Fe store, now Pachamama¿s sole location. As a sideline business, she identifies and appraises museum and private collections throughout the U.S. 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 of the Américas, 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 U.S., Mexico and Italy. She began to write her first novel, Clearing Customs, in 1988 in response to the U.S. Customs Service¿s dirty little war on small import businesses like hers. Santa Fe¿s Papalote Press will release the book for national distribution on April 1, 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.Martha Egan is the author of 'Clearing Customs', published 2009 under ISBN 9780975588116 and ISBN 0975588117.