Settled in turn by Native Americans, Spaniards,
Mexicans and Yankees, NEW MEXICO is among the
most ethnically and culturally diverse of all the states in the
US. Each successive group has built upon the legacy of its predecessors;
their various histories and achievements are closely intertwined,
and in some ways the late-coming white Americans from the north
and east have had comparatively little impact. Signs of the region's
rich heritage are everywhere, from ancient pictographs and cliff
dwellings to the design of the state's license plates, taken from
a Zia Indian symbol for the sun - the one near-constant
fact of life in this arid land.
New Mexico's indigenous peoples - especially the
Pueblo Indians , as the name suggests clear descendants
of the Ancestral Puebloans - provide a sense
of cultural continuity. Despite the Pueblo Revolt
of 1680, which forced a temporary Spanish withdrawal into Mexico,
the missionary endeavor here was in general less brutal than elsewhere.
The proselytizing padres eventually co-opted the natives without
destroying their traditional ways of life, as local deities and
celebrations were incorporated into Catholic practice. Somewhat
bizarrely to outsiders, grand churches still stand at the center
of many Pueblo settlements, often adjacent to the underground
ceremonial chambers known as kivas , and almost always built in
the local adobe style.
The Americans who took over from the Mexicans in
1848 saw New Mexico as a useless wasteland. But for a few mining
booms and range wars - such as the Lincoln County War, which brought
Billy the Kid to fame - New Mexico was left relatively
undisturbed until it finally became a state in 1912. During World
War II, it was the base of operations for the top-secret Manhattan
Project , which built and detonated the first atomic
bomb, and since then it has been home to America's premier weapons
research outposts. By and large, people here work close to the
land - mining, farming and ranching - with tourism increasingly
underpinning the economy.
Northern New Mexico centers on
the magnificent landscapes of the Rio Grande Valley
, which contains its two finest cities: Santa Fe
, the adobe-fronted capital, and the artists' colony and winter
resort of Taos , with its nearby pueblo. More
than a dozen Pueblo villages can be found in
the mountainous area between the two, while to the west lie the
evocative ancient ruins at Bandelier and Puyé
. The broad swath of central New Mexico along
I-40 - the interstate highway that succeeded the old Route
66 - pivots around the state's biggest city,
Albuquerque , with the extraordinary mesa-top Pueblo
village of Àcoma ("Sky City")
an hour's drive to the west. In wild and wide-open southern
New Mexico , the deep Carlsbad Caverns
are the main attraction, while you can still stumble upon old
mining and cattle-ranching towns that have somehow hung on since
the end of the Wild West.
For many visitors, the defining feature of New Mexico
is its adobe architecture , as seen on homes,
churches, and even shopping malls and motels. Adobe bricks are
a sun-baked mixture of earth, sand, charcoal and chopped grass
or straw, set with a mortar of much the same composition, and
then plastered over with mud and straw. The color of the soil
used dictates the color of the final building, and thus subtle
variations can be seen all across the state. However, adobe is
a far from convenient material: it needs replastering every few
years and turns to mud when water seeps up from the ground, so
that many buildings have to be sporadically raised and bolstered
by the insertion of rocks at their base. These days, most of what
looks like adobe is actually painted cement or concrete, but even
this looks attractive enough in its own semi-kitsch way, and hunting
out such superb old adobes as the remote Santuario de
Chimay? on the " High Road "
between Taos and Santa Fe, the formidable church of San
Francisco de Asis in Ranchos de Taos, or the multitiered
dwellings of Taos Pueblo , can provide the focus
of an enjoyable New Mexico tour.
You'll also become familiar with another New Mexico
trademark, the bright-red ristras , or strings of dried chili
peppers , that adorn doorways throughout the state; festooned
on restaurant entrances, they serve as warnings of the fiery delights
that await within.
