From May Street to the Memorial Wall

On leadership

“I didn’t think of myself as a leader. It was just that things needed to be done, and I was in a position where I could do them — so I did.””

Dolores Archuleta

The story Dolores Archuleta tells about herself begins, as many of hers do, with a problem.

She was in the second grade, walking home from Holy Cross School to the adobe house her father built on East May Street. In the yard, a group of blond-haired men were digging a trench under the watch of an armed guard.

German prisoners of war, her father explained. They were being used across Las Cruces to install plumbing during World War II.

Dolores listened. Then she asked the question that mattered: Why weren’t they at her house? Their bathroom had been ready for weeks. Just waiting for someone to do the work.

The next day, without asking permission, she left school, crossed the street, and went looking for the city manager.

“I didn’t know what an appointment was,” she said, laughing at the memory. “I just knew I was going to find him and tell him our bathroom was ready and we needed the work done.”

She found him and made her case. Two days later, the work crew showed up.

It’s a simple story, almost a childhood anecdote, but it also explains the rest of her life.

Dolores grew up in a house built on determination. Her father, a Pueblo man, had been taken as a teenager to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, part of a system designed to erase Native identity. He returned speaking English but carrying a life he rarely talked about.

Her mother, from Tularosa, spoke only Spanish.

“They couldn’t speak each other’s language when they met,” Dolores said. “My father went into the Navy, learned Spanish, and came back so they could build a life together.”

He used his Navy earnings to build the adobe home on May Street — large, sturdy, and close to everything. He added rental apartments, creating not just a home but a livelihood. Inside, the lessons were clear.

Every evening, the family gathered at the kitchen table. Homework came first. Then the newspaper.

“My father made sure we read it, listened to the news, paid attention,” she said. “He wanted us to know what was happening in the world, because that’s how you learn, and that’s how you understand what’s going on around you.”

It wasn’t framed as leadership. It was framed as responsibility.

You learn. You stay aware, and when something needs to be done, you don’t wait.

The war didn’t arrive as history. It delivered a sense of fear.

After Pearl Harbor, her father gathered the family and told her brothers they would likely be called to serve. Two of them eventually did.

The war reshaped daily life in quieter ways, too — rationing, absence, uncertainty. And then one day, the church bells rang.

They rang so long that her mother sent Dolores to find out why. She climbed the steps, found the priest, and asked.

“He sat me down and told me, ‘Go home and tell your mother your brothers are coming home. The war is over.’”

The church filled that night. People prayed and no one wanted to leave. Even then, as a child, Dolores felt the shadow behind the celebration.

“It hit me later,” she said. “We were all so happy, but what about the families whose sons didn’t come home?”

It’s a question that would quietly shape her life’s work.

By the time she reached high school, Dolores wasn’t waiting for direction. She went looking for a job.

At McBride’s Hospital, she expected small tasks like running errands and helping patients in simple ways. Instead, she was handed responsibility.

“They gave me a uniform and told me I’d be doing more — taking temperatures, checking blood pressure, feeding patients, whatever needed to be done,” she said.

Her father had only one instruction.

“Be kind to them. Treat them with respect. Sometimes they’ll do things you don’t like, but you still treat them right.”

She took that seriously. Working long hours before and after school, she found herself in the emergency room, witnessing the hardest moments of people’s lives. Severe injuries. Violence. Loss.

One moment stayed with her. A man who had shot his family, killing his mother-in-law and wounding his pregnant wife, was brought in as a patient. Dolores didn’t want to care for him and she walked away.

The head nurse stopped her.

“She told me, ‘God is the one who decides when someone dies — not you. You go back and do your job.’”

Dolores went back. Not because she felt like it but because it needed to be done.

The world she moved through wasn’t always forgiving. She remembers traveling with her sister to visit their father, stopping at a restaurant after a long drive.

They were hungry so they ordered and they ate. Only afterward did they see the sign posted outside: “No Mexicans or dogs allowed.”

“We hadn’t seen it when we went in,” she said. “But when we came out and read it, I just started crying.”

Experiences like that weren’t rare. Her father had faced his own version of it in schools, in the military, in a country that often didn’t know what to do with someone who didn’t fit neatly into one identity.

But he never taught bitterness. He taught awareness, and action.

Dolores never mapped out a career. She stepped into what was in front of her. After her nursing plans changed, a colleague handed her an application.

NASA was hiring at White Sands. She stayed for 30 years.

It was demanding work, with long hours and constant pressure, but it sharpened the instincts she had already developed.

One day, walking down a hallway, she noticed a man sitting still, his face drained of color.

“I knew something was wrong the moment I saw him,” she said. “So, I went straight to the clinic and told them he was having a heart attack, and they needed to come right away.”

They did and he survived. It wasn’t part of her job description, but that never seemed to matter.

After retiring, she thought she might finally slow down. Then a city councilor approached her in a grocery store. They needed someone to step in immediately.

“I told him I had just retired and needed some time,” she said. “And he told me, ‘No, we need you now.’ So I said, ‘Okay, we’ll talk about it.’”

Talking turned into running and running turned into serving. From 2001 to 2004, Dolores Archuleta sat on the Las Cruces City Council, not as someone chasing power, but as someone responding to need. She attended everything and asked questions others didn’t ask. She pushed conversations forward.

When officials talked about tearing down the historic Amador Hotel, she intervened, bringing decision-makers together and forcing the issue.

“All they had to do was ask,” she said. “And if they didn’t, I was going to ask for them.”

It was through the council that her most lasting work began. Her connection to veterans wasn’t abstract. It was personal.

Her father. Her brothers. Her husband, who returned from Vietnam to a country where soldiers often avoided wearing their uniforms in public.

“They weren’t treated the way they should have been,” she said. When efforts began to create what would become the Veterans Memorial Wall in Las Cruces, she stepped in alongside Col. Roach and others. She became chair of the committee.

“They gave me that role because I knew who to talk to,” she said. “I could call people; I could get things moving.”

They built more than a wall. They built a place of remembrance.

She organized candlelight ceremonies. Hundreds of candles, one for each name of those killed in action. She helped lead Veterans Day parades. She worked with Honor Flight, escorting veterans across the country to see the memorials built in their honor.

And sometimes, the work becomes something more.

One day, she received word from a woman in Normandy who had been tending the grave of an American soldier named Melendrez. The woman wanted a photograph of him to place at the grave. Dolores began searching.

“I started calling people, asking if anyone knew the family,” she said. “Finally, someone told me about a daughter living in California, so I called her.”

What she didn’t expect was what came next.

“She started crying right away,” Dolores said. “She didn’t know her father had died. All she knew was that he left for the war and never came back.”

For decades, that was all the family had known. Now, they knew where he was. Now, they knew someone had been taking care of his grave. Now, they knew he was not forgotten.

Ask Dolores Archuleta about leadership, and she’ll dismiss it. She doesn’t see her life that way.

“I didn’t think of myself as a leader,” she says. “It was just that things needed to be done, and I was in a position where I could do them — so I did.”

It’s a simple explanation, but it carries across decades of moments.

A child walking into a city office.

A nurse doing the work no one else wanted.

A worker recognizing a life-threatening emergency.

A councilwoman preserving history.

An advocate making sure a fallen soldier’s family finally knew the truth.

She never waited to be asked.

She never needed the title.

She just paid attention. And then she stepped in.

Faces & Places 2026 is the inaugural edition of our new lifestyle magazine. Combined with the fall edition, titled Life is Good in Las Cruces, it is filled with feature content about the people, places, and events that make southern New Mexico special.