State Senator Shannon Pinto stands near a bluff in Gallup, New Mexico. (Photo by Nadav Soroker / Searchlight New Mexico) Across from Tohatchi – an unincorporated community in northwestern New Mexico on the Navajo Nation – there’s a depression in the grassland that once was a lake. Senator Shannon Pinto remembers fishing there after school with her siblings when they were kids, before invasive Russian olive and salt cedar trees drank up the water. If you unfocus your vision, you can imagine the lake in the green blur of trees, a sighting of the past but maybe also the future: Pinto hopes to fill it once more, so that people can fish there again, and farmers can use the water to irrigate their fields. Looking at a place, she tends to see at the same time her memories and her relatives’ memories, the way things are now and the way they might be. It’s with this attention that she governs.