Armijo, educator and groundbreaking journalist, dies at 60

There was the young man who’d sharpened a set of knives for his mother’s friend and delivered them to her, expecting, perhaps, only a smile and a thank you.

He got a smile, a thank you and a steak dinner.

There was the nephew who, before each school year, would be taken out shopping by his aunt.

“They’d go have lunch,” said Diana Armijo, the boy’s mother and the doting aunt’s sister, “and she’d buy him a pair of shoes.”

Barbara Armijo, a groundbreaking journalist and a devoted educator, died on Nov. 28 after having suffered a massive stroke some six weeks before. She was 60.

As talented and dedicated a professional as she was, friends and family members said, it was Armijo’s kindness and generosity that set her apart.

Armijo and Liz Otero met while both worked at the Albuquerque Journal. Long after each had left the newspaper, they remained the closest of friends.

“We spoke every single week,” Otero said in a phone interview. “… We’d text every day.”

Otero said Armijo, a divorced mother of two sons, a grandmother as of last year and a full-time employee at New Mexico’s Public Education Department, always made herself available to others in her life.

“A lot of people, life gets in the way, they have their family, they have their lives,” she said. “But (Armijo) always found time to make you feel special and give of herself.”

A South Valley native and a Rio Grande High School graduate, Armijo began working at the Albuquerque Journal in 1986. It had been suggested to her that sports — a journalistic field into which relatively few women had ventured at the time — might prove to be a leg up.

Initially, sports editor Dennis Latta put her to work taking phone calls and typing in results for the scoreboard page. Her first bylines were as a stringer, a correspondent.

But Latta, and others, were impressed by her enthusiasm, willingness to learn and her highly developed people skills. Hired as a staff writer, she covered sports — initially, mostly the high schools — for the West Side Journal and for the main sports section.

From 1989-93, under sports editor Mike Hall, Armijo covered the Albuquerque Dukes Triple-A baseball team for the Journal.

Dealing with professional baseball players on a daily basis, said then-colleague Phill Casaus, was a challenge for any sports writer of either gender. For a woman, though, disrespect and condescension were a price to be paid.

“She’d talk about some of the strange things that would go on,” Casaus said. “Then she’d say, ‘I’m ready for tomorrow.’”

Armijo was not the first woman to work as a full-time sports staffer at one of Albuquerque’s daily newspapers of the era. But it’s clear from comments on social media since her death that she and her career served as an inspiration for many.

Casaus, now editor-in-chief at The New Mexican in Santa Fe, was Armijo’s supervisor for a time in his role as the Journal’s assistant sports editor. But, he said, “It’s funny, because I’m not sure I ever thought of her in any way but as a friend.”

Like Otero, Casaus marveled at Armijo’s kind, giving nature.

“I was trying to explain this to people,” he said. “… When somebody dies that you think the world of, you always say they were the nicest person, they were this, they were that, they were fantastic.

“But in her case, it was true every day.”

Diana Armijo said her older sister — their brother, Patrick, is the eldest of the three — was the glue that kept the siblings close after the passing of their parents.

“She was, like, the leader,” she said. “She’d start planning the holidays and the get-togethers. … Just her giving, setting us up and keeping us all together.”

After both their parents had died, Diana Armijo said, her sister bought the family home. “That was great,” she said, “because we kept that family tradition.”

Barbara Armijo’s marriage to Chuck Chavez in 1991 ended in divorce but produced two sons, Craig and Drew. “Her boys were her life,” Otero said.

Armijo became a grandmother in 2022 when Zayden, Drew’s son with his wife, Bianca, was born. Zayden’s first birthday occurred on the day his grandmother died.

Craig Chavez and his wife, Arianna, are expecting.

Armijo’s journalism career was interrupted for some two years when she took a job at Sun Healthcare. When she decided to return to the Journal, management was eager to bring her back. After leaving sports, she worked on the business desk and as an award-winning editorial writer.

In 2007, Armijo left the Journal and began a career in education — first as a classroom teacher at Atrisco Heritage, then with PED.

In 2014, she finished her requirements for a master’s degree in business from Grand Canyon University.

Leslie Kelly, Armijo’s supervisor at PED for the past year, had crossed paths with her before when both worked at APS.

“Barb had this enthusiasm and excitement and unbelievable kindness,” Kelly said, “and she also had this great sense of humor.

“She was somebody who I’d see in action, even in hard situations, and I’d think ‘I need to channel Barb.’”

Before Armijo became ill, Kelly said, she’d been planning to have everyone in the bureau to her home “because she wanted to show us all how to make tamales for Christmas.”

Armijo, Otero recalled, had a wicked but non-wounding sense of humor and a gift for mimicry. Conversations between the two, and with fellow journalists such as Tracy Dingmann and Autumn Gray, often left them helpless with laughter.

“She just impacted everybody’s life,” Otero said, “with her generosity and beautiful spirit. … So full of genuine joy.”