The WPA Guide to New Mexico

The Colorful State

Federal Writers' Project

• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781595342294
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authors—many of whom would later become celebrated literary figures—were commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are among the more than 6,000 writers, editors, historians, and researchers who documented this celebration of local histories. Photographs, drawings, driving tours, detailed descriptions of towns, and rich cultural details exhibit each state’s unique flavor.The WPA Guide to New Mexico certainly shows how this Southwest state earned its nickname the "Colorful State.” The blended influence of Native American, Spanish, and Anglo-American cultures account for the Land of Enchantment’s distinct flavor, thoroughly captured in the guide’s stunning photography as well as in its many essays on art, folklore, and language.

PART I

Before and After Coronado

The State Today

NEW MEXICO today represents a blend of three cultures—Indian, Spanish, and American—each of which has had its time upon the stage and dominated the scene. The composite of culture which now, in the union of statehood, presents a harmonious picture upon casual inspection, is deceptive, for the veneer of Americanization in places runs thin indeed. It is difficult to think of a modern America in a village of the Pueblo Indians, while the inhabitants dance for rain. To be sure, a transcontinental train may thunder by, or an airplane soar overhead; but the prayers never stop, the dance goes on, and the fantastic juxtaposition seems to widen the gap between. Who could dream of the American Way in a mountain hamlet where the sound of the Penitente flute is heard above the thud of the scourges, and Spanish-American villagers perform medieval rites of redemption in Holy Week?

These are extremes of incongruity, but they are true. They diminish in the vicinity of the larger towns and cities and vanish altogether in some places; but their existence, strong or weak, colors the contemporary scene. New Mexico is a favorite camping-ground of the anthropologists because here they can study the living Indians in connection with their ancient, unbroken past and possible future. They can learn much about how people lived in medieval Spain by studying the ways of life in the remote Spanish-American villages of modern New Mexico; it has been said that if a Spaniard of those times should come to earth today, he could understand the Spanish spoken in New Mexico more readily than the modern language of his native land.

The interaction of the diverse elements of the population is slowly working towards homogeneity, dominated more and more by the irresistible middle current of Anglo-American civilization and the modern American tempo.

The mingling of the three racial elements early gave rise to the need of terms to differentiate them. Before the United States occupation the non-Indians of the region, as persons of Spanish descent and subjects of Mexico, were known as Mexicans, and proudly so. When the great influx of non-Spanish people occurred after 1848, the New Mexicans referred to them generally as “gringos.” In origin, this term was not one of opprobrium but simply meant any foreigner (not Spanish or Indian) who spoke the Spanish language without a good accent—unintelligibly. A Spanish dictionary published in 1787 shows that gringo (perversion of griego, Greek) was used in Spain long before Mexicans of the Southwest applied the term.

At the time of the annexation of the territory by the United States, the people of Spanish descent became United States citizens and were known thereafter as Spanish-speaking Americans to distinguish them from the Indians and the later immigrants from old Mexico. To distinguish the settlers from other parts of the United States, the prefix “Anglo” was added. Thus today the residents of the State are spoken of as Spanish-speaking Americans or Spanish-Americans, Anglo-Americans, and Indians. It is well to keep these distinctions in mind when thinking of New Mexico.

It must be remembered also that New Mexico’s position as a border State, with an international port of entry and a considerable mileage on the boundary line between the United States and Mexico, has always been a factor in the State’s life and character. Ties with Mexico are strong—one quite recent governor of the State was a Mexican gentleman born in Chihuahua. New Mexico—particularly the southern part—feels the effects of whatever diplomatic policies are current between the two nations at a given time, and always the State is faced with the familiar border problems of smuggling, illicit immigration, and the like. The exchange of spiritual and other influences is always in process—a condition which adds an interesting international flavor to the scene.

In the migratory annals of the United States, the direction of movement has been from east to west; in New Mexico (meaning in this instance all the southwestern states originally embraced in the old Spanish province of Nuevo Méjico) that direction did not hold. For three centuries preceding the United States occupation, the trend of settlement here was all from the south. Contact with the outside world was not from the east or from the Atlantic seaboard, but from Mexico City, and through Mexico from Spain. This difference in influences must be realized in order to appreciate the abrupt turn-about that came when the Spanish New Mexican frontier, with its face turned anxiously east, became a part of the last American frontier, with its face turned eagerly west, but it still has much of its habitual brooding introspection, induced by vast expanses of mountains and semiarid plateaus, by its shut-in valleys, and by the primitive mode of life that prevails everywhere outside of the towns—on ranches, in tiny settlements, in the Indians’ villages and nomadic solitudes.

Homogeneous, New Mexico is not. Its cultural, regional variations follow perhaps inevitably its topographical divisions. Spanish settlement, with its roots in Chihuahua, spread like a tree up the central Rio Grande Valley, branching east and west. In north central New Mexico today the Spanish element is still most prevalent, the only integral remnant of the northernmost fringe of Spanish empire in America.

Northeastern New Mexico, first penetrated from the east by trappers and traders and later developed by way of the Santa Fe Trail, is preponderantly Anglo-American. With the coming of the United States Army in 1846, the introduction of wagon and stagecoach roads over the Gila Trail to southern California, and the later advent of railroads and mining developments turned the Anglo-American trek down the Rio Grande Valley and into the southwestern part of the State and the mines of the Silver City area. East central and southeastern New Mexico, the western extension of the Great Plains and the Llano Estacado, was first developed as a cattle country soon after the Civil War; it is peopled largely by ranchers from Texas, and is still markedly Texan in character. South central New Mexico likewise received a large influx of Anglo-American immigration soon after the Civil War, when, as Eugene Manlove Rhodes has said, “the Mississippi valley moved in.” The saints’ names of many small Spanish villages were changed to the Scotch, Irish, or English cognomens of the later settlers. Across the middle of the State, too, the trek followed the railroad from Santa Fe and Albuquerque to the western border. In the far northwest the fertile San Juan Valley attracted Mormon homesteaders who, migrating southward from Utah, established themselves in the region bordering the great Rocky Mountain plateau country which was then and is today inhabited by the Navaho Indians, and which was in ancient times the cradle of the highest development of Pueblo Indian culture.

These general regional variations, following cultural development, are complicated by the many variations within any one region. Suddenly and without forewarning, from almost any point in the State, one may step from modern America into Old Spain, or into aboriginal Indian territory, within the space of a few miles, just as one passes from an almost tropic climate into an arctic one, due to the many abrupt transitions from plain to plateau, up mountains and down again.

With an average of only about four persons to the square mile, New Mexico is a sparsely settled State. The commerce required for the needs of such a population is conducted largely by Anglo-Americans or people of foreign descent, the native Spanish-Americans remaining the farmers and not infrequently the politicians. Due to the bilingual character of the population, a section was placed in the constitution of the State, when it was drawn up in 1910, to the effect that all laws passed by the legislature should be published in both English and Spanish for the following twenty years, and after that such publication should be made as the legislature provided. It is interesting to note that state court and legislative procedure is still to some extent bilingual, and interpreters stand ready in the legislature to translate from English into Spanish and vice versa. Some interpreters deliver a better and more eloquent speech in translation than the original. The fate of many a bill has rested in the hands of the interpreter.

New Mexico as a whole has been subjected to every boom that has swept the western land, but has emerged singularly unaffected by them. From the days of Coronado, who sought fantastic wealth, to the boom times of the Comstock Lode and Cripple Creek, search for treasure in the earth has been a fever in New Mexicans. The finds, though not permanent, have been spectacular in many instances; but the gold boom died just as the land boom and the cattle boom died. Today mining remains a lesser industry, confined to a few proved areas of coal and mineral deposits. Mining operations are scattered throughout the State, but the early promise of the industry has never been fulfilled. Oil, natural gas, and “dry ice” are the latest developments in the field, and they have prospered, especially in the southeastern part of the State, where Hobbs has mushroomed from a shanty oil town to the fifth largest city in New Mexico.

The patriarchal feudal system of Old Spain has left its stamp upon the land. It was the custom in Spanish times to portion out the land in vast grants for colonization to favored individuals, who had the right to collect tribute from the Indians living upon them; for more than two centuries this was the economic picture of the region. As these old grants contained the best farming and grazing lands in the territory, their withdrawal from the arable and productive domain greatly retarded the normal development of the region. Many of the original grants remain intact today, having changed hands after the United States annexation opened the country to speculators of the land grabbing era. Most of those robust and adventurous men anticipated the coming of the railroads and the boom in the cattle industry, and for some years they fared well indeed; but, as the land had done so often before, it overwhelmed the land grabbers and left them staggering with too much acreage and in some cases an insupportable load of taxes. Some of the old grants have been purchased by the Federal government and returned to the Indians, their original claimants; others have been broken up and sold in parcels; still others stand as they did in the beginning, idle, waiting for development by people with money enough to finance the task.

Huge areas also have been set apart as national forests and parks under Federal control. The timbered mountains, in addition to holding lumber reserves for the future, offer unlimited recreational facilities, camping, hunting, and fishing to the nation-at-large. These great primitive areas coupled with many national and state parks and monuments are among today’s major attractions in New Mexico.

The fate of the vast cattle empire of the late nineteenth century, which spread from the southeast along the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, has been similar to that of the old Spanish grants. The empire has receded, leaving the great ranches of the early days broken up and sold, or languishing under burdens of delinquent taxes. The livestock industry is still of great importance in all parts of the State, although dry farming and irrigation projects have broken up the public range in many sections.

New Mexico remains, then, an agricultural State primarily. The country people of Spanish descent in the central sections are all small farmers, fighting fatalistically the reluctant earth with ancient irrigation systems and inadequate tools. Rich farming lands there are, but they form a minor part of the whole. Wherever a stream ventures out of the mountains, there, for as far as it remains above the surface, will be found little farms using the precious water. Often they are hidden in the folds of the hills, where the people, forming tiny hamlets, live now much as their forebears have lived for the past two or three centuries.

To a great extent, these are the people, too, who have guided the political destiny of New Mexico, for they still hold the balance of power between the two major parties. The political complexion of the State is not, however, so predictable as it used to be. Up to 1916, the Spanish-American population could be expected with fair reliability to vote Republican, but the old party lines are b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Preface
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Maps
• General Information
• Calendar of Annual Events
• Part I. Before and After Coronado
• Part II. A City, a Capital, and an Art Center
• Part III. The Most Accessible Places
• Part IV. Appendices