Albuquerque

Albuquerque, city of 448,607 inhabitants and metropolitan region of 712,000 (2000) at the foot of the Sandia Mountains in the Middle Rio Grande Valley of central New Mexico. Francisco Cuervo y Valdés, then governor of New Mexico, founded Albuquerque in the spring of 1706, naming the new villa for Francisco Fernández de la Cueva Enríquez, duke of Alburquerque, then viceroy of New Spain. (The extra r in the city's original spelling gradually disappeared with the arrival of Anglo settlers in the mid-nineteenth century.) The first settlers were 35 families, totaling 252 people, from the capital of Santa Fe about 60 miles to the north. In 1752 the population was 476, and it had reached only 763 by 1776.

Like the other villas in New Mexico, Albuquerque was a farming and ranching settlement on the far northern frontier of the Spanish Empire. Their distance from the viceregal administration and culture in Mexico City obliged them to forge a tightly knit, self-sufficient traditional culture, elements of which grace the New Mexican cultural landscape to this day. Following the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), the city became a part of the United States and began to establish commercial relations with the eastern United States. The arrival of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway (which bypassed the rival city of Santa Fe) in 1880 solidified Albuquerque's position as the most important Borderlands city of the region. Between 1890 and 1900, the population nearly doubled, reaching 6,326.

See alsoNew Mexico .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Richard E. Greenleaf, "The Founding of Albuquerque, 1706: An Historical-Legal Problem," in New Mexico Historical Review 39, no. 1 (1964): 1-15.

Oakah L. Jones, Jr., Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlements on the Northern Frontier of New Spain (1979), esp. pp. 109-167.

Marc Simmons, Albuquerque: A Narrative History (1982).

Additional Bibliography

Casado Fuente, Ovidio. Don Francisco Cuerbo y Valdés, gobernador de Nuevo México, fundador de la ciudad de Albuquerque. Oviedo: Principado de Asturias, Instituto de Estudios Asturianos del C.S.I.C., 1983.

Cutter, Donald C. España en Nuevo México. Trans. Andrea Cutter. Madrid: Editorial MAPFRE, 1992.

Montgomery, Charles H. Spanish Redemption: Heritage, Power and Loss on New Mexico's Upper Rio Grande. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Reséndez, Andrés. Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800–1850. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Simmons, Marc. Hispanic Albuquerque, 1706–1846. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003.

                                   J. David Dressing