New Mexico

New Mexico, a colony of Spain (1598–1821), province of Mexico (1822–1846), territory (1846–1912), and state (1912) in the southwestern United States. The colony, or kingdom and provinces of New Mexico, with its capital at Santa Fe (1610), represented Spain's grandiose but ill-defined claim to the far north of New Spain. Founded in 1598 by Juan de Oñate under contract with the Spanish crown, New Mexico offered no easily exploitable resource, so Oñate resigned as governor in 1607. Its status changed from proprietary to royal colony in 1609 when it became, in effect, a government-subsidized Franciscan ministry to the Pueblo nation. A momentous event, the Pueblo Rebellion (1680–1696), caused a readjustment of human relations, as crusading intolerance gave way to practical military cooperation against common enemies. The purpose of the colony, which was still subsidized, shifted from missionary to military, when it began serving as buffer against Frenchmen and Englishmen, Apaches and Comanches.

About 1750 the Hispanic population surpassed that of the Pueblos for the first time and by 1800 stood at about 20,000. A series of alliances with non-Pueblo groups negotiated by Governor Juan Bautista de Anza, the most important of which was that with the Comanches in 1786, permitted a century of unprecedented expansion. In 1821, Mexican independence and encouragement of foreign commerce gave rise to the Santa Fe trade and to the economic reorientation of New Mexico from Chihuahua to Missouri. As a result, the United States faced only sporadic resistance when its Army of the West occupied New Mexico in 1846 during the Mexican-American War. Although it was the most populous of the Mexican provinces that fell to the United States, New Mexico was long considered by Congress a wasteland between the great states of Texas and California. Given their familiar boundaries in the 1850s and 1860s, New Mexico and Arizona did not achieve statehood until 1912. As of 2006, New Mexico's population was estimated at 1,954,599. As of 2000, it was 42 percent Hispanic, and 9.5 percent Native American.

See alsoAnza, Juan Bautista de; Comanches; Missions: Spanish America; Oñate, Juan de; Pueblo Rebellion; Santa Fe, New Mexico.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

See Handbook of North American Indians, vols. 9 and 10, Southwest, edited by Alfonso Ortiz (1979; 1983); Marc Simmons, New Mexico: An Interpretive History (1988); Jerry L. Williams, ed., New Mexico in Maps, 2d ed. (1986); and Charles L. Briggs and John R. Van Ness, eds., Land, Water, and Culture: New Perspectives on Hispanic Land Grants (1987).

Additional Bibliography

Chavez, Thomas E. An Illustrated History of New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002.

Chavez, Thomas E. New Mexico Past and Future. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.

Will de Chaparro, Martina. Death and Dying in New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007.

                                      John L. Kessell