NEW MEXICO

NEW MEXICO. Having encountered unfathomable wealth and high civilization among the Aztecs in the Valley of Mexico, Spaniards quickly turned their attention northward, hoping to find another Mexico. New Mexico acquired its name and its early European visitors and residents from this misplaced belief in its potential mineral wealth. The Europeans found a dry, mountainous land of few trees and even less water populated by indigenous descendants of Anasazi Indians, whom the Spaniards named "Pueblos" for their towns that occupied the best lands along the banks of the Rio Grande. Seminomadic Athapascan and Shoshonean peoples, the Apaches and the Navajos, also called the high desert plateau home. The descendants of all of these groups inhabit the "Land of Enchantment" in the twenty-first century. New Mexico's history revolves around the relationships, sometimes tense, sometimes violent, sometimes friendly, among these groups and the land.

Another Mexico

The miraculous return in 1536 of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, the Moorish slave Esteban, and two others from the disastrous 1528 Florida expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez piqued the curiosity of Spaniards. Cabeza de Vaca and his compatriots did not return with glowing reports of northern wealth, just rumors of a populous country to the north with large houses and trade in turquoise and other valuable items. These rumors sparked wild speculation as to the existence of another Mexico. When Cabeza de Vaca refused Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza's offer to return to the north, Mendoza selected the Franciscan

Fray Marcos de Niza to lead the expedition to verify the presence of wealthy northern cities. He was accompanied by the experienced Esteban.

After departing from Culiacán in 1539, Esteban and his Native retinue ranged ahead of Fray Marcos. In accordance with their plans, Esteban sent to Fray Marcos crosses of varying sizes, depending on his findings. When Esteban heard of Cíbola, he sent a large cross to Fray Marcos. The friar instructed Esteban to wait but to no avail. Esteban forged ahead, arriving at one of the Zuni pueblos, Háwikuh, where the Zunis seized and killed Esteban. Horrified at his companion's fate and eager to return to Mexico City, the Franciscan friar caught a glimpse of the Zuni village from afar, declared it Cíbola, and returned to Mexico City.

Fray Marcos's report of the golden glories of the north prompted Viceroy Mendoza to appoint his protégé Francisco Vásquez de Coronado to lead an expedition northward. The expedition seemed a mobile colony, including 350 Spaniards outfitted in armor and weaponry, 1,000 Native Mexican auxiliaries, six Franciscans, and hundreds of support staff. In July 1540 the expedition's vanguard arrived at the Zuni villages Fray Marcos had identified as the legendary Seven Cities of Cíbola, a rival to the wealth and size of Mexico City. Coronado and his forces discovered an adobe pueblo of some one hundred families. Disgusted with the friar's apparent lies, Coronado sent him back to Mexico City. The expedition settled down at Zuni for five months, where Coronado entertained delegations from other pueblos. The delegation from Pecos Pueblo told him all about the Great Plains, prompting Coronado to send Captain Hernando de Alvarado to return to Pecos with the delegation. At Pecos, a citadel of some two thousand people on the western edge of the Plains, Alvarado learned from an Indian slave called "the Turk" of a rich kingdom known as Quivira out on the Plains.

Alvarado brought the Turk to Coronado, who had relocated to Tiguex Pueblo. The expedition settled into a pueblo vacated for them north of present-day Albuquerque, where they spent the severe winter of 1540–1541. When spring finally arrived, almost the entire expedition headed for the Plains in search of Quivira, which proved elusive. Coronado, at the behest of the Turk, took thirty Spaniards and support persons deep into the Plains of central Kansas. Although other Indians claimed the Turk was lying, Coronado pushed onward. At last he located Quivira, not a rich kingdom but a village of grass lodges. In league with Pecos Pueblo, the Turk had hoped the Spaniards would be enveloped by the Plains and never return to New Mexico. For his treachery the Turk was garroted. Now convinced that no kingdom or city filled with riches lay hidden in the north, Coronado returned to Mexico in the spring of 1542. Although Coronado took no gold or riches back with him, his expedition mapped out much of the American Southwest, transforming the region from a mystery into an area ripe for permanent European settlement.

European Settlement

The scion of a silver-rich Zacatecas family, don Juan de Oñate received royal permission to colonize New Mexico in 1595. He spent three years organizing the privately funded expedition and recruiting colonists. After six months of travel, Oñate and his colonists arrived at San Juan Pueblo on the banks of the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico. The San Juans graciously shared their food and homes with their new neighbors, who soon founded their first capital at San Gabriel. Oñate and his colonists hoped New Mexico would prove rich in mineral wealth, and to that end the governor made several early forays into the New Mexican wilderness. While Oñate was out on one such journey in the late fall of 1598, his nephew Juan de Zaldivar, who was second-in-command, was killed in a battle with the Acomans at the summit of their sky city fortress. In retaliation Oñate launched a successful war party against Acoma. Determined to send a message to would be rebels among the Pueblos, Oñate passed harsh punishments onto the Acomans, the severity of which set the stage for rebellion against the Spaniards.

Finding no mineral wealth, Oñate's colony failed, leading the Spanish government to take it over in 1608. No longer proprietary, New Mexico became a royal colony maintained to secure the thousands of indigenous souls Franciscan friars had baptized during Oñate's tenure. Spain also found it prudent to maintain New Mexico as a buffer zone against foreign encroachment on the profitable mining areas of northern New Spain. The royal governor Pedro de Peralta replaced Oñate in 1608 as a symbol of Spain's takeover of the colony. In 1610 Peralta removed the San Gabriel settlement to a site further from Pueblo settlements and renamed it Santa Fe.

Franciscans established missions along the Rio Grande in or near existing Pueblo Indian communities. In addition the Franciscans launched a harsh campaign of eradication against the Pueblo religion, particularly against Native priests, which angered the Pueblos. Peralta almost immediately clashed with religious authorities in New Mexico, inaugurating a competition for authority that endured until the 1680 Pueblo revolt. Civil and religious leaders argued over which group held control of and authority over Pueblos and their tributes. In essence the contest between the two groups was over control of New Mexico itself. Such squabbles revealed to Pueblo Indians the weaknesses of the sparsely populated northern colony of less than two thousand Europeans.

Pueblo Revolt

In one of their first acts of unity, most of the Rio Grande and western Pueblos (Tanos, Tewas, and Keres), with the exception of Socorro, which did not get the word of revolt in time, and Isleta, which was hampered by the presence of too many Spaniards, organized to drive the Spaniards out of New Mexico. Plans were to revolt on 11 August 1680. The New Mexico governor Antonio de Otermín found out about the plan, however, so the revolt was moved up one day to 10 August. On that day Pueblos rose up against everyone and everything Spanish, killing twenty-two Franciscan missionaries and some four hundred Spanish settlers and destroying mission churches as the most hated symbols of Spanish domination. The Pueblo Indian Popé directed the rebellion, allegedly hiding from the Spanish in a Taos Pueblo kiva. The revolt was largely successful. The Spanish survivors, many of them female heads of households, accompanied by some Isleta and Socorro Pueblos, spent twelve years in exile in the El Paso area.

In 1692 don Diego de Vargas arrived in El Paso as New Mexico's new governor and led a "bloodless" and largely symbolic reconquest of New Mexico. The Pueblos had lost their unity, and some sought to ally themselves with the Spanish. Vargas's bloodless reconquest had to be followed by force, including a room-by-room siege of Pueblo-held Santa Fe. The Spanish victory in Santa Fe provided Vargas with a stronghold, from which he conducted a difficult military campaign against the Pueblos throughout 1694. The Pueblos answered his campaign with another revolt in 1696, during which they killed five Franciscan priests and twenty-one other Spaniards and burned churches and convents. Determined to subdue the Pueblos, Vargas launched a war of attrition that lasted six months, targeting food supplies as well as rebellious Natives. By the war's end all but the three western pueblos (Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi) were subdued. The resumption of trade in European goods beckoned the rest of the Pueblos, and they fell in line.

Accommodation

New Mexico after Vargas was largely a different place from what it had been in the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century ushered in more accommodation between Spanish settlers and Pueblos, ending the "mainly missions" atmosphere of the seventeenth century and the religious intolerance of the Franciscans. The two groups intermingled on a daily basis, sometimes intimately. Most New Mexicans eked out a meager existence, combining agriculture with raising small livestock. Merchants, soldiers, and government officials fared better, often employing a retinue of servants to tend their fields and care for their families. Roman Catholicism provided a central focus for many New Mexicans, including the Pueblo Indians, who practiced a form of Catholicism that left much of their Native religion intact.

In the eighteenth century raids by Comanche and Apache Indians and foreign encroachment from the French, British, and later the upstart Americans posed the largest threats to New Mexico. In 1786 Governor Juan Bautista de Anza engineered a "Comanche peace" by defeating the Comanche leader Cuerno Verde. Spaniards learned from the French that "peace by purchase" was far cheaper in the long run than continual raids and protracted battles. Anza convinced the Comanches to join with the Spanish against their common enemy the Apaches. The joint forces were successful in ending the Apache raids that had impoverished New Mexico's Spanish and Pueblo communities. The independence-oriented turmoil in Mexico in the 1810s and 1820s brought an end to "peace by purchase" payments to the two tribes and therefore an end to the peace.

Although Spanish officials frowned upon foreign trade, a few tenacious foreign souls attempted to reach Santa Fe and its markets prior to Mexican independence in 1821. In the late 1730s the French traders Pierre Mallet and Paul Mallet embarked on a mission to establisha trade route from New France (the modern-day upper Midwest) to Santa Fe. En route to New Mexico in 1739 they lost their six tons of trade goods in the Saline River in Kansas. Spanish authorities in Mexico denied the Mallet brothers' request for a trade license, but the brothers made a private agreement to trade with Santa Feans despite the government's decision.

Over the next few decades dozens of French traders from the Illinois country carried implements, cloth, and manufactured goods to Santa Fe in exchange for furs, gold, and silver. The international trade made Santa Fe a thriving town, and by the advent of the Missouri–Santa Fe highway, Santa Fe boasted nearly two thousand inhabitants. A few intrepid Americans, such as Zebulon Pike, rediscovered the trail to Santa Fe in the early 1800s. The trade remained the same as with the French, furs and silver in exchange for textiles, cutlery, and utensils.

The American purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 put New Mexico on the defensive. Spanish officials justifiably feared invasion, as American explorers and traders kept appearing along the border and even in Santa Fe. But Spain, weak and on the verge of collapse, was in no position to guard New Mexico from the Americans. Mexican independence from Spain in 1821 brought looser trade policies to New Mexico, but Mexico had as much difficulty protecting its northern frontier from foreign intrusion as had Spain.

Santa Fe Trail

Thanks to the fortune of good timing, William Becknell, an Indian trader from Missouri, first broke open the Santa Fe trade. In so doing Becknell paved the way for American traders to tap into the pent-up consumer desires of New Mexicans. In the autumn of 1821 Becknell followed the Arkansas River west from Franklin, Missouri, with twenty men and a pack train of horses loaded with trade goods. As Becknell's group crossed Raton Pass north of Santa Fe to trade with Indians, they by chance encountered Mexican soldiers, who told them of Mexican independence and predicted that Santa Feans would gladly welcome the Missouri traders. To Becknell's delight the Mexican soldiers were correct. From trading with the New Mexicans, Becknell earned a healthy profit in silver. New Mexicans were pleased as well, for Becknell sold them higher-quality goods than what they received from the Chihuahua, Mexico, merchants, who had been their only legitimate source of trade goods prior to Becknell's visit to Santa Fe.

Becknell returned to Santa Fe in June 1822 with even more goods and men, including three wagons loaded with trade items worth$5,000. Seeking a shorter and easier route for wagon travel than the long and arduous trip across Raton Pass, Becknell forged the alternate Cimarron route, crossing the Cimarron River west of modern Dodge City, Kansas. This route, despite its heat and lack of water, became the Santa Fe Trail. By 1824 a well-established highway marked the route between Independence, Missouri, and Santa Fe.

Under Mexican Rule

American fur trappers also made their way into New Mexico in the 1820s, and Taos became the focus of the western American fur trade. By 1826 more than one hundred mountain men trapped beaver along the Rio Grande and the Gila. While Mexican authorities saw these mountain men as a threat, presciently recognizing them as the advance wave of American movement into the Southwest, they were not willing to interrupt the lucrative trade the trappers ushered into New Mexico. For the most part Mexican authorities left New Mexico to its own devices. Accustomed to benign neglect, New Mexicans reacted strongly to Mexican dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna's attempts to centralize Mexico. Heavy-handed attempts at imposing order on the province by Governor Albino Pérez, the only nonlocal governor of New Mexico during the Mexican period, ended in chaos in 1837 as rebellion swept through the province. The fleeing Pérez lost his life to a rabble and was replaced by the native New Mexican Manuel Armijo, who restored order. In 1844 Governor Armijo successfully warded off attempts by land-hungry Texans to claim all the land east of the Rio Grande to its source, an episode that engendered a long-held antipathy toward Texans.

The U.S.–Mexican War

Texas's bid to join the United States launched a war between Mexico and the United States in 1846. U.S. general Stephen Kearney took New Mexico without a fight. Rather than organizing a defense, Governor Armijo departed for Chihuahua after meeting with the trader James Magoffin, who somehow negotiated a peaceful conquest, although no one knows for certain what happened. All did not remain peaceful, however. Discontented New Mexicans planned an uprising for 24 December 1846, but rumors reached officials, who managed to squelch the opposition's plans. On 19 January 1847 a rebel mob scalped the appointed U.S. governor Charles Bent and twelve others sympathetic to the American cause. Rebellion spread throughout northern New Mexico. In February 1847 Colonel Sterling Price marched on Taos Pueblo, where the rebels had gathered. After a bloody battle the ringleaders were hanged, bringing an end to the armed resistance to the American occupation of New Mexico.

In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which officially ended the war in 1848, New Mexico became part of the United States, and its people became American citizens. New Mexico had the necessary population for statehood, sixty-one thousand Hispanics and thirty thousand Indians in the 1850 census, and the support of Presidents James K. Polk and Zachary Taylor, but circumstances changed as gold was discovered in California. The Compromise of 1850 declared New Mexico a territory without restrictions on the issue of slavery and adjusted the long-contested boundary between New Mexico and Texas. New Mexico lost its bid for statehood to the politics of slavery and remained a territory for sixty-two years, until 1912.

The Civil War

During the 1850s the U.S. military built an elaborate defense system in New Mexico consisting of six military posts designed to keep hostile Indian tribes under control. The military thereby became the mainstay of the territory's economy and allowed the population to spread out from the Rio Grande valley. In 1861, however, Federal troops returned home to fight the Civil War, abandoning the defense system protecting those settlers and disrupting the orderly development of New Mexico. The territory sided with the Union, mostly out of hatred for the Confederate Texans. The few Civil War battles, including Valverde and Glorieta Pass (1862), that took place in New Mexico were more a reassertion of Texas imperialism than an integral part of Confederate strategy. Indeed most of the fighting in New Mexico during the Civil War years was against Indians. Colonel James H. Carleton ordered Colonel Christopher "Kit" Carson, a former mountain man, to campaign against the Mescalero Apaches (1863) and then the Navajos (1864). Carson prevailed against both tribes. Survivors were marched to Bosque Redondo, the first experiment in Indian reservations, which failed utterly. An 1868 treaty allowed the Navajos to return to their much-reduced homeland. The U.S. military confronted the Comanches and the Apaches in the 1870s and 1880s and confined both groups to reservations by the end of the 1880s.

The Civil War was a watershed in New Mexico history, bending the territory toward the United States and away from Mexico. After the war New Mexico shared much of the history of the rest of the American West, range wars, mining booms, railroad construction, Indian wars, nationalized forests, and military bases. As Anglo-Americans moved into the territory, Hispanic New Mexicans found it more difficult to hold onto their ancestral lands. The 1878–1879 Lincoln County War reflected the tensions among New Mexico's various populations, especially Hispanic sheepherders and Anglo cattle ranchers.

Statehood

New Mexico finally achieved statehood in 1912, beginning a new era. Statehood meant that a satisfactory level of Americanization had been reached, and participation in the twentieth century's major military efforts continued the process. Some 50,000 New Mexicans served their country in World War II, including Navajo Code Talkers. The state had the highest volunteer rate of any state. Many of these volunteers died in the Bataan death march. Northern New Mexico's mountains hid the secret Los Alamos labs and the Manhattan Project during World War II, and the first atomic bomb was detonated at the Trinity Test Site at White Sands on 16 July 1945, establishing the state as a major location for federal defense projects. Investments reached $100 billion by the end of the Cold War. Military defense continued to boost New

Mexico's economy in the early twenty-first century along with tourism and some manufacturing. The legendary Route 66 bisected the state, passing through Albuquerque and bringing tourists who sampled the state's blend of cultures and drank in the romanticized Spanish and Indian past provided by boosters.

Indians maintained a significant presence in New Mexico. Unlike most Native Americans, the Pueblos, Navajos, and Apaches remained on a portion of their ancestral homelands, while many other Native Americans settled in Albuquerque. India agent John Collier and the General Federation of Women's Clubs helped New Mexican Pueblos successfully overturn the 1922 Bursum bill, which would have given squatters land ownership and water rights in traditional Pueblo lands. The Pueblo Lands Act of 1924 protected Pueblo lands from squatters and recognized the land rights Pueblos had enjoyed under Spanish and Mexican rule. In recent years, Indian gaming brought an influx of cash to some of New Mexico's tribes and added punch to their political presence.

After 1848 Hispanics sought redress for the loss of their ancestral lands, mostly through the U.S. court system. In the last half of the twentieth century the issue of land grants generated some isolated violence, namely the July 1967 takeover of the county courthouse at Tierra Amarilla by the activist Reies Lopes Tijerina and his followers. New Mexican Indians also fought the loss of their lands, particularly sacred sites such as Taos Pueblo's Blue Lake, which had been swallowed by the Carson National Forest. President Richard M. Nixon returned Blue Lake to them in the 1970s. The twentieth century also put New Mexico on the map as a center for the arts. Early in the century Taos became an arts colony, attracting artists, writers, and other intellectuals. In 1914, artists Ernest L. Blumenschein and Bert Philips founded the Taos Society of Artists, prompting the development of a distinctive New Mexican style. Santa Fe, the state capital, also draws artists and the tourists who support them. The mix of three cultures, Indian, Hispanic, and Anglo, makes the forty-seventh state a vibrant laboratory for race relations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Boyle, Susan Calafate. Los Capitalistas: Hispano Merchants and the Santa Fe Trade. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997.

DeBuys, William. Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985.

DeMark, Judith Boyce, ed. Essays in Twentieth-Century New Mexico History. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.

Deutsch, Sarah. No Separate Refuge: Culture, Class, and Gender on an Anglo-Hispanic Frontier in the American Southwest, 1880–1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Gutiérrez, Ramón A. When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991.

Jensen, Joan M., and Darlis A. Miller, eds. New Mexico Women: Intercultural Perspectives. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986.

Kessell, John L. Kiva, Cross, and Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico, 1540–1840. Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 1979.

Simmons, Marc. New Mexico: An Interpretive History. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988.

Szasz, Ferenc Morton. The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion, July 16, 1945. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.

Vargas, Diego de. Remote beyond Compare: Letters of Don Diego de Vargas to His Family from New Spain and New Mexico, 1675–1706. Edited by John L. Kessell. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989.

Weber, David J. The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest under Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982.

———. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992.

Dedra S.McDonald

See alsoExploration and Expeditions: Spanish ; Mexican War ; Mexico, Relations with ; andvol. 9:Glimpse of New Mexico .

New Mexico state in the SW United States. At its northwestern corner are the so-called Four Corners, where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah meet at right angles; New Mexico is also bordered by Oklahoma (NE), Texas (E, S), and Mexico (S).

Facts and Figures

Area, 121,666 sq mi (315,115 sq km). Pop. (2000) 1,819,046, a 20.1% increase since the 1990 census. Capital, Santa Fe. Largest city, Albuquerque. Statehood, Jan. 6, 1912 (47th state). Highest pt., Wheeler Peak, 13,161 ft (4,014 m); lowest pt., Red Bluff Reservoir, 2,817 ft (859 m). Nickname, Land of Enchantment. Motto,Crescit Eundo [It Grows as It Goes], State bird, chaparral ( "roadrunner" ). State flower, yucca. State tree, piñon. Abbr., N.Mex.; NM

Geography

New Mexico is roughly bisected by the Rio Grande and has an approximate mean altitude of 5,700 ft (1,737 m). The topography of the state is marked by broken mesas, wide deserts, heavily forested mountain wildernesses, and high, bare peaks. The mountain ranges, part of the Rocky Mts., rising to their greatest height (more than 13,000 ft/3,962 m) in the Sangre de Cristo Mts., are in broken groups, running north to south through central New Mexico and flanking the Rio Grande. In the southwest is the Gila Wilderness.

Broad, semiarid plains, particularly prominent in S New Mexico, are covered with cactus, yucca, creosote bush, sagebrush, and desert grasses. Water is rare in these regions, and the scanty rainfall is subject to rapid evaporation. The two notable rivers besides the Rio Grande—the Pecos and the San Juan—are used for some irrigation; the Carlsbad and Fort Sumner reclamation projects are on the Pecos, and the Tucumcari project is nearby. Other projects utilize the Colorado River basin; however, the Rio Grande, harnessed by the Elephant Butte Dam, remains the major irrigation source for the area of most extensive farming. The capital of New Mexico is Santa Fe , and the largest city is Albuquerque .

Economy

Because irrigation opportunities are few, most of the arable land is given over to grazing. There are many large ranches, with cattle and sheep on the open range year round. In the dry farming regions, the major crops are hay and sorghum grains. Onions, potatoes, and dairy products are also important. In addition, piñon nuts, pinto beans, and chilis are crops particularly characteristic of New Mexico. Pinewood is the chief commercial wood.

Much of the state's income is derived from its considerable mineral wealth. New Mexico is a leading producer of uranium ore, manganese ore, potash, salt, perlite, copper ore, natural gas, beryllium, and tin concentrates. Petroleum and coal are also found in smaller quantities. Silver and turquoise have been used in making jewelry since long before European exploration.

The federal government is the largest employer in the state, accounting for over one quarter of New Mexico's jobs. A large percentage of government jobs in the state are related to the military; there are several air force bases, along with national observatories and the Los Alamos and Sandia laboratories. Climate and increasing population have aided New Mexico's effort to attract new industries; manufacturing, centered especially around Albuquerque, includes food and mineral processing and the production of chemicals, electrical equipment, and ordnance. High-technology manufacturing is increasingly important, much of it in the defense industry.

Millions of acres of the wild and beautiful country of New Mexico are under federal control as national forests and monuments and help to make tourism a chief source of income. Best known of the state's attractions are the Carlsbad Caverns National Park and the Aztec Ruins National Monument . Thousands of tourists annually visit the White Sands, Bandelier, Capulin Volcano, El Morro, Fort Union, Gila Cliff Dwellings, and Salinas Pueblo Missions national monuments and Chaco Culture National Historical Park (see National Parks and Monuments , table). Several of New Mexico's surviving native pueblos are also much visited.

Government and Higher Education

New Mexico is governed under the constitution of 1912. The legislature has a senate of 42 members and a house of representatives with 70 members. The governor is elected for four years and may be reelected. The state elects two U.S. senators and three representatives and has five electoral votes. New Mexico has been generally Democratic in politics, although it joined the national trend toward conservatism in the 1980s. Gary Johnson, a Republican, was elected governor in 1994 and reelected in 1998, but a Democrat, Bill Richardson, won the governorship in 2002 and 2006. In 2010 Republican Susana Martinez was elected to the post; she is the first woman to serve in the office.

The most prominent educational institutions in the state are the Univ. of New Mexico, at Albuquerque; New Mexico State Univ., at Las Cruces; and St. John's College, at Santa Fe.

History

Native Americans and the Spanish

Use of the land and minerals of New Mexico goes back to the prehistoric time of the early cultures in the Southwest that long preceded the flourishing sedentary civilization of the Pueblos that the Spanish found along the Rio Grande and its tributaries. Many of the Native American pueblos exist today much as they were in the 13th cent. Word of the pueblos reached the Spanish through Cabeza de Vaca, who may have wandered across S New Mexico between 1528 and 1536; they were enthusiastically identified by Fray Marcos de Niza as the fabulously rich Seven Cities of Cibola.

A full-scale expedition (1540–42) to find the cities was dispatched from New Spain, under the leadership of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado . The treatment of the Pueblo people by Coronado and his men led to the long-standing hostility between the Native Americans and the Spanish and slowed Spanish conquest. The first regular colony at San Juan was founded by Juan de Oñate in 1598. The Native Americans of Acoma revolted against the Spanish encroachment and were severely suppressed.

In 1609 Pedro de Peralta was made governor of the "Kingdom and Provinces of New Mexico," and a year later he founded his capital at Santa Fe. The little colony did not prosper greatly, although some of the missions flourished and haciendas were founded. The subjection of Native Americans to forced labor and attempts by missionaries to convert them resulted in violent revolt by the Apache in 1676 and the Pueblo in 1680. These uprisings drove the Spanish entirely out of New Mexico.

The Spanish did not return until the campaign of Diego de Vargas Zapata reestablished their control in 1692. In the 18th cent. the development of ranching and of some farming and mining was more thorough, laying the foundations for the Spanish culture in New Mexico that still persists. Over one third of the population today is of Hispanic origin (and few are recent immigrants from Mexico) and roughly the same percentage speak Spanish fluently.

When Mexico achieved its independence from Spain in 1821, New Mexico became a province of Mexico, and trade was opened with the United States. By the following year the Santa Fe Trail was being traveled by the wagon trains of American traders. In 1841 a group of Texans embarked on an expedition to assert Texan claims to part of New Mexico and were captured.

The Anglo Influence

The Mexican War marked the coming of the Anglo-American culture to New Mexico. Stephen W. Kearny entered (1846) Santa Fe without opposition, and two years later the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded New Mexico to the United States. The territory, which included Arizona and other territories, was enlarged by the Gadsden Purchase (1853).

A bid for statehood with an antislavery constitution was halted by the Compromise of 1850 , which settled the Texas boundary question in New Mexico's favor and organized New Mexico as a territory without restriction on slavery. In the Civil War, New Mexico was at first occupied by Confederate troops from Texas, but was taken over by Union forces early in 1862. After the war and the withdrawal of the troops, the territory was plagued by conflict with the Apache and Navajo . The surrender of Apache chief Geronimo in 1886 ended conflict in New Mexico and Arizona (which had been made a separate territory in 1863). However, there were local troubles even after that time.

Already the ranchers had taken over much of the grasslands. The coming of the Santa Fe RR in 1879 encouraged the great cattle boom of the 80s. There were typical cow towns, feuds among cattlemen as well as between cattlemen and the authorities (notably the Lincoln County War), and the activities of such outlaws as Billy the Kid. The cattlemen were unable to keep out the sheepherders and were overwhelmed by the homesteaders and squatters, who fenced in and plowed under the "sea of grass." Land claims gave rise to bitter quarrels among the homesteaders, the ranchers, and the old Spanish families, who made claims under the original grants. Despite overgrazing and reduction of lands, ranching survived and continues to be important together with the limited but scientifically controlled irrigated and dry farming. Statehood was granted in 1912.

Modern New Mexico

In 1943 the U.S. government built Los Alamos as a center for atomic research. The first atom bomb was exploded at the White Sands Proving Grounds in July, 1945. The growth and use of military and nuclear facilities continued after World War II. High-altitude experiments were apparently responsible for a 1947 incident near Roswell that led to persistent claims that the government was concealing captured extraterrestrial corpses and equipment. In the 1990s the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, deep in salt formations near Carlsbad, was readied for storage of nuclear wastes, amid controversy.

New Mexico's climate, tranquillity, and startling panoramas have made the state a place of winter or year-round residence for those seeking health or a place of retirement. Many writers and artists have made their homes in communities such as Taos and Santa Fe, including D. H. Lawrence and Georgia O'Keeffe. The Apache, Navajo, and Pueblo, and some Ute, live on federal reservations within the state—the Navajo Nation, with over 16 million acres (6.5 million hectares), is the largest in the country—and the Pueblo, a settled agricultural people, live in pueblos scattered throughout the state. At the beginning of the 1990s the Native American population of New Mexico was more than 134,000.

Bibliography

See W. A. Beck, New Mexico: A History of Four Centuries (1962, repr. 1982); A. K. Gregg, New Mexico in the Nineteenth Century (1968); R. W. Larson, New Mexico's Quest for Statehood (1968); W. W. Davis, El Gringo: New Mexico and Her People (1982); R. V. Jackson, New Mexico Historical and Biographical Index (1984); J. L. Williams, ed., New Mexico in Maps (2d ed. 1986); N. H. Warren, Villages of Hispanic New Mexico (1987).

NEW MEXICO

Albuquerque . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 423

Las Cruces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435

Santa Fe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447

The State in Brief

Nickname: Land of Enchantment

Motto: Crescit eundo (It grows as it goes)

Flower: Yucca

Bird: Roadrunner

Area: 121,589 square miles (2000; U.S. rank: 5th)

Elevation: Ranges from 2,842 feet to 13,161 feet above sea level

Climate: Semi arid and sunny, with temperatures varying according to elevation

Admitted to Union: January 6, 1912

Capital: Santa Fe

Head Official: Governor Bill Richardson (D) (until 2007)

Population

1980: 1,302,894

1990: 1,515,069

2000: 1,819,046

2004 estimate: 1,903,289

Percent change, 1990–2000: 20.1%

U.S. rank in 2004: 36th

Percent of residents born in state: 51.5% (2000)

Density: 15.0 people per square mile (2000)

2002 FBI Crime Index Total: 94,196

Racial and Ethnic Characteristics (2000)

White: 1,214,253

Black or African American: 34,343

American Indian and Alaska Native: 173,483

Asian: 19,255

Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander: 1,503

Hispanic or Latino (may be of any race): 765,386

Other: 309,882

Age Characteristics (2000)

Population under 5 years old: 130,628

Population 5 to 19 years old: 434,231

Percent of population 65 years and over: 11.7%

Median age: 34.6 years (2000)

Vital Statistics

Total number of births (2003): 27,672

Total number of deaths (2003): 14,636 (infant deaths, 157)

AIDS cases reported through 2003: 1,182

Economy

Major industries: Government; manufacturing; services; finance, insurance, and real estate; trade

Unemployment rate: 5.6% (February 2005)

Per capita income: $25,502 (2003; U.S. rank: 47th)

Median household income: $35,265 (3-year average, 2001-2003)

Percentage of persons below poverty level: 18.4% (1999)

Income tax rate: Ranges from 1.7% to 6.8%

Sales tax rate: 5.0%

New Mexico State in sw USA, on the Mexican border; the capital is Santa Fe. The largest city is Albuquerque. The Spanish established the first permanent settlement at Santa Fe in 1610. The USA acquired the region in 1848, at the end of the Mexican War. In 1912, it entered the Union as the 47th state. The first atomic bomb exploded at Alamogordo in 1945. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains in the n flank the Rio Grande, which runs n to s through the state. The terrain includes desert, forested mountains, and stark mesa. In the s and sw are semi-arid plains. The s Pecos and Rio Grande rivers irrigate cotton crops; hay, wheat, dairy produce and chilli peppers are also important. A large proportion of the state's wealth comes from mineral deposits, including uranium, manganese, copper, silver, turquoise, oil, coal, and natural gas. Area: 314,334sq km (121,335sq mi). Pop. (2000) 1,819,406.