New Mexico

C

Government and Politics

New Mexico is governed under its original constitution, adopted in 1911 and put into effect in 1912, as amended. The chief executive of New Mexico is a governor, who is popularly elected to a four-year term and who, since 1994, may serve no more than two successive terms. The other elected state officials include the lieutenant-governor, secretary of state, attorney-general, treasurer, auditor, and commissioner of public lands.

Legislative authority is vested in a bicameral New Mexico legislature composed of a Senate and a House of Representatives. The 42 members of the Senate are elected to four-year terms, and the 70 members of the House are elected to two-year terms. At a national level, New Mexico elects two senators and three representatives to the US Congress. The state has five electoral votes in presidential elections (Electoral College).

Since 1912, in both state and national politics, Democrats and Republicans have been elected in relatively equal numbers.

In the 2006 elections, one Democrat and two Republicans were returned to represent the state. Senators Pete V. Domenici (Republican) and Jeff Bingaman (Democrat) represent New Mexico and face re-election in 2008 and 2012 respectively. Incumbent Democrat Bill Richardson was re-elected state governor in 2006, beating Republican challenger John Dendahl.

IV

History

Stone Age remains found near Clovis, in the eastern part of the state, show that human beings first entered the area of New Mexico more than 10,000 years ago. Later Native American cultures practised farming and irrigation. The Anasazi culture flourished in the San Juan River Basin in the 1st millennium ad. By 1300 thousands of Pueblo people, descendants of the Anasazi, lived in 18 towns along the Rio Grande from Taos south to Isleta (below present-day Albuquerque). The Pueblos were advanced in domestic arts and crafts—pottery, weaving, and home decoration. Some of their adobe dwellings were five storeys high. In the 15th century the serenity of their lives was shattered by the arrival of the nomadic Navajo and Apache tribes. The newcomers raided the prosperous Pueblo settlements for food, clothing, tools, and Pueblo children, whom they enslaved, initiating four centuries of warfare between the two groups.

A

Spanish and Mexican Rule

In 1539 a Spanish expedition under a Franciscan priest, Marcos de Niza, explored present New Mexico, visiting the Zuñi Pueblo. The following year Francisco Coronado ascended the Rio Grande. Spanish colonization of the area began in 1598, and Santa Fe was founded in 1610. The Spanish authorities imposed their rule on the Pueblos and converted many of them to Christianity, but the missionaries’ attempts to suppress the Native Americans’ traditional religious customs caused resentment. In 1680 the Pueblos rose in revolt, killing many of the settlers and forcing the rest to flee.

The Spanish reoccupied Santa Fe in 1692. By 1696 they had reconquered the whole area, and the Spanish Crown thereafter recognized the Pueblos’ title to their ancestral lands. New towns were established in the 18th century. In 1821, Spain gave up all of its American mainland possessions, and New Mexico became a province of the new nation of Mexico.

Mexican rule brought many changes, as Spain had always excluded foreigners from New Mexico. Under Mexico, trade with the United States was permitted, and pack trains began to move back and forth along the Santa Fe Trail from St Louis, Missouri. American merchants and trappers flocked to Santa Fe and Taos. The cultural clash thus began between the Anglos (Americans of European origin) on the one hand and the Hispanos (New Mexicans of mixed Spanish and Native American ancestry) and Native Americans on the other. Relations between Hispanos and Anglos became tense when the new Texas republic tried to seize New Mexico in 1841. Meanwhile, expansionists in the United States were demanding the annexation of all the Southwest and California. President James K. Polk declared war on Mexico in 1846 and sent General Stephen Watts Kearny and the Army of the West to invade New Mexico. Kearny took Santa Fe without firing a shot and proclaimed New Mexico part of the United States on August 18, 1846.

B

New Mexico as a US Territory

Some Hispano New Mexicans welcomed the victorious Americans, but Native Americans at Taos Pueblo revolted and murdered Charles Bent, the governor appointed by Kearny. All Hispano New Mexicans and Pueblo became US citizens by terms of the 1848 treaty ending the war between the United States and Mexico, but Congress denied the area statehood and created the territory of New Mexico (including present New Mexico and Arizona) as part of the Compromise of 1850 that brought California into the Union as a state.

Decades of unrest followed between native New Mexicans and Anglos. In 1863, Congress carved the territory of Arizona out of western New Mexico. The Navajos, Apaches, and Comanches were subdued by US Army units, but the forced removal of the Navajos—their tragic “Long Walk” to a reservation at Bosque Redondo—was a failure; the starving people were returned in 1868 to their San Juan River homeland. Meanwhile, the economy of the territory was stimulated by the coming of the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific Railroads, by mineral finds, and by the growth of tourism. Nevertheless, most Americans before 1900 thought of New Mexico as an exotic foreign country with a strange language and strange foods and dress, known for lawlessness, cattle wars, and land-grant skulduggery, and as the home of outlaws such as Billy the Kid, who was killed in a gunfight at Fort Sumner in 1881. A more attractive notion of New Mexico began to emerge at the turn of the century, when artists from the East began describing the romantic charms of Taos and Santa Fe, and health-seekers began moving to Albuquerque to take advantage of its sunny climate.

C

The 20th Century

New Mexico remained a territory for 62 years, partly because its residents feared the higher taxes that would come with statehood, and partly because Congress feared that democracy would not work in a Spanish-speaking community. The state schools began teaching English in 1898, however, and New Mexico was admitted to the Union on January 6, 1912, as the 47th state.

The nation’s oldest society found itself plunged into modernity when the secret city of Los Alamos, near Santa Fe, became the birthplace of the atomic bomb in 1943. Two years later the world’s first atomic bomb was exploded near Alamogordo, south of Santa Fe. The state’s economy then boomed with the coming of the White Sands Missile Range, Kirtland Air Force Base, and nuclear research installations at Albuquerque. The state’s empty desert areas came to life with the discovery of oil and gas and, near Grants, of uranium. The modest tourism of the early 1900s became a major industry. While sharing in the rapid economic growth common throughout America’s Sun Belt during much of the 1980s, New Mexico continued to attach great important to its characteristic cultural heritage.

The state, however, remains one of the poorest in the country, and funding is particularly weak in areas such as health and education. Agriculture, ranching, mining, and timbering continue to be displaced by high-tech manufacturing and tourism. The rapid fall of oil prices in 1986 hurt the state's petroleum industry, causing unemployment and a sharp fall in oil and gas tax revenues, to the detriment of state funding for education.

New Mexico's Native Americans, facing cuts in funding from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Indian Health Service, continue to diversify their economies, through buying shopping centres, building resorts and gambling casinos, and investing in property.