Spanish settlement in New Mexico dates from 1598, nine years before the English settled Jamestown and 22 years before Massachusetts got its Pilgrims. The Spanish had already been in and out of New Mexico for a while. Cabeza de Vaca wandered through about 1536 and Coronado came looking for Cibolo in 1540. Exploration was reasonably frequent after that.
The Spanish left for a bit too. After the 1680 Pueblo Revolt drove the surviving Spanish out, they stayed out for 12 years, but they came back and picked up where they left off. Permanent European settlement of the 50 States really begins with the Spanish in New Mexico.
Settlers’ arrival in 1598 was two years before the birth of Diego Velasquez in Seville, twelve years after the birth of Cervantes, and the year that Phillip III, King of Spain, ascended as Phillip II to the thrones of Portugal, Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia, and to the Dukedom of Milan. The Spanish Armada had failed to invade England only ten years before, but that failure was more an act of God than of man. New Mexico was the furthest settled edge of one of the 16th Century’s most powerful and sophisticated nations.
The Spanish settlers brought with them Catholicism, government structures, laws, language, and culture, including folkways and a debt peonage system for poor Hispanics and out-and-out slavery for captured Navajos that were every bit as inhumane as chattel slavery. Both outlived adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment by a decade.
Spanish communities persisted in isolation, preserving a culture with roots not in Pennsylvania or Virginia or Massachusetts, but in Spain and Colonial Mexico. Settlers adopted Pueblan crops–beans, squash, chilis, and corn were as important to the Hispanos as they had been to the Chacoans–but they also developed their own sometimes peculiar offshoots of Spanish culture–Los Penitentes come to mind, as does the possible existence of Crypto-Jews.
In 1848 the United States took New Mexico from Mexico under the treaty ending the Mexican-American War. If they chose, then-Mexican citizens of New Mexico could either keep their Mexican citizenship or renounce it and become Americans. It was a mess. There were no real records of who renounced and who didn’t, and because Mexican citizens couldn’t vote or serve on juries, there were persistent questions as to whose vote counted. Some things don’t change. Questions of who was and who wasn’t a citizen persisted until statehood was finally granted in 1912, more than 300 years after the founding of Santa Fe.
The American conquest of New Mexico was deeply distrusted by both Mexicans and Indians. The invading Americans disliked the Hispanos’ language and religion. The Hispanos disliked the Americans’ language and religion. In 1847, the allied Taos Pueblans and Spanish New Mexicans violently revolted. The territorial governor, the trader Charles Bent, was murdered and scalped, along with just about everybody else in Taos holding office under the American government. When troops came to re-secure Taos, the rebels took sanctuary in the Taos Pueblo church, which was promptly leveled. In a strange mis-labeling, 28 of the rebels were hung for the crimes of murder or treason, though strictly speaking they weren’t American citizens and were being hung for committing treason against an invasion.
As an attempt to understand this jumble of cultures and prejudices, I’m particularly fond of Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop , and every few years will re-read all or parts of it. I always wonder how Cather arrived at writing about a French Jesuit New Mexican bishop. She was not New Mexican, she was not Catholic, and she was not French. It’s a novel with not so much of a plot as a progression, the fictionalized life of Bishop Lamy recounted in a series of episodes, but Cather’s themes, Catholicism at the church’s margins and the intersection of New Mexican cultures, still hold true, though these days there are fewer donkeys.
In addition to Spanish and Chacoan descendants, Navajo, and Apache, New Mexico also has Anglos. Of the roughly 2.1 million people in New Mexico, 36.8% are white only, 49.3% are Hispanic, 11% are American Indian, 2.6% are Black, and 1.8% are Asian. It’s not a populous state; by population, New Mexico ranks 37th. By population density, it ranks 6th, less dense than South Dakota, but denser than Idaho. It is a Western state.
Eastern New Mexico shares the Llano Estacado with the Texas Panhandle, and driving the 335 miles from Clarendon, Texas, pop. 1,842, elev. 2,733 feet, to roughly Santa Rosa, New Mexico, pop. 2636, elev. 4616 feet, is a lesson in humility, a spur to daydreams, and one of the great challenges to ownership of an electric car. The drive from Fort Worth to Santa Fe is 620 miles, about 12 hours, and, depending on your taste, it is either magnificent or hell, or maybe both.
It’s a drive I’ve made all or parts of hundreds of times, and I like it. The world changes west of the 90th meridian. Texas sheds more of its Southern heritage and becomes more Western, wet clothes dry faster, all those pesky trees are rarer–and in a lot of it trees just aren’t there. You can see mountains from Albuquerque, and there are mountains south around Cloudcroft and Ruidoso. The gaudiest beauty of New Mexico though is in the northern mountains, surrounding Santa Fe and Taos. Further west things generally flatten again, though it’s high desert, and certainly not flat by Llano Estacado standards. By the time you reach the far west of the state, Farmington’s elevation is 5,394 feet, Gallup’s is 6,468 feet, and even Anthony, just outside of El Paso, is 3,802 feet. Back in the Rockies near Taos, Wheeler Peak in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is 13,167 feet.
In recent years, New Mexico has tended Democratic, but it switches between Republican and Democratic governors fairly regularly. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried the state 48.26%, against Donald Trump’s 40.04%, but Gary Johnson, a home-grown Libertarian, received 9.3% of the 2016 vote (which probably hurt President Trump more than Senator Clinton). In a landslide, Joe Biden received 54% of the vote in 2020, and Trump stayed relatively flat at 43%. Oddly, while rural Eastern New Mexico lines up decidedly Republican, the state is not so clearly split between rural Republican voters and urban Democrats. There’s some of that, but some of New Mexico’s blue counties are decidedly rural. It’s almost as if the high country tends left, both geographically and politically. Maybe the Navajo and the Zuni vote blue. The Zuni are certainly mysterious.
Both United States Senators from New Mexico are Democrats, and both houses of the New Mexico legislature are controlled by Democrats.
So what about New Mexico Anglos? For 13,000 years, New Mexico has been a settlement magnet, and Anglo-Americans are just the arrivistes. American traders out of Independence, Missouri, first opened the Santa Fe Trail in 1821 to reach New Mexico silver. That makes Anglos a bit later than the Navajo and the Spanish, but even the Anglos are closing in on two centuries.
What do New Mexicans like about Texans? We visit and then get out. We’ve invaded New Mexico twice, once under the Republic of Texas (while New Mexico was controlled by Mexico), and once during the Civil War (while New Mexico was controlled by the Union). Both invasions were disasters. Now Texans just go to New Mexico for vacations, or maybe to retire, which is a kind of extended vacation.
What do New Mexicans hate about Californians? They come and then they stay. California stuff has proliferated, and now it’s a lot easier to find a good yoga class, or a cute restaurant, or decorative coyotes. Are there still decorative coyotes? I’ll have to check.
My friend Darrell used to insist that Santa Fe was a town run by rich women. What did he mean? I never knew, exactly, but it’s a statement I’ve pondered–Darrell rarely says things that aren’t worth pondering–and I think I kinda know. The culture of Northern New Mexico was shaped in part by women like Georgia O’Keefe and Millicent Rogers. It’s loaded with museums and opera and of cute and very expensive fine and traditional art galleries in Taos and Santa Fe. Oh sure, there are normal everyday folk in New Mexico. Still, it’s the influx of art beginning in the 1920s that’s so much a part of New Mexico’s appeal, and that gave women space to shape the culture. After New York and Los Angeles, Santa Fe is the States’ third largest art market. Maybe I just made that up, but the notion feels right: New Mexico is one of those places where not just manly industry but feminine high culture has its say.
Maybe that’s what Darrell meant, or maybe he just meant that the Santa Fe city council was stacked with rich woman. Maybe it’s all just sexist drivel. I’m not sure.
Beyond high culture, New Mexico is also poor. It’s per capita annual income, $23,683, ranks 47th among the states. Out there among the decorative coyotes, there’s real poverty. New Mexico’s alcohol-related death rate is the highest in the nation, and is highest among Native Americans. Española, New Mexico, a largely Hispanic town of 10,044 near Santa Fe, is regularly ranked as one of the most violent communities in the nation. In 2017, the violent crime rate in Española was 644.86% higher than the national average. Traveling the 30 miles to Española from Santa Fe, you can turn right to go to Chimayo, left to Abiquiu and the San Juan, or continue northwest to Taos. You can’t get many places north of Santa Fe without going through Española, and there are plenty of places in the north worth going to. Española, maybe not so much.
