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Compass American Guides: New Mexico

By Nancy Harbert

Compass America Guides

Copyright © 1998 Nancy Harbert
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780679000310
INTRODUCTION


New Mexico's magic has been intriguing visitors for centuries. Its natural beauty immediately
captivates those who see it, and its elusive, indefinable character enriches all those who let it in.
Spacious skies and vistas, magical light, and the sense of this place's purity have all been named as
the latent quality that has attracted travelers and settlers, artists and scientists, who've come in
search of treasure, tangible and intangible.



In prehistoric times, Native Americans hunted game in New Mexico's mountains and farmed along its
river banks. Pueblo Indians expressed their reverential relationship with the land through flat-roofed
earthen architecture, drawings on rock faces, and rhythmic chants and dances. Spanish explorers
followed, first in search of gold, then souls. The two cultures clashed, often violently. But
eventually they came to tolerate each other and even to share their traditions. Pueblo Indians passed
on their innovative uses for chile, beans, and corn, the main ingredients of what ironically has come
to be known as Mexican food. The Spanish passed on their skill at metal work, which the Indians
incorporated into intricate jewelry.



In the later half of the nineteenth century, determined groups of "Anglo" settlers began arriving
via the Santa Fe Trail, bringing to New Mexico a third culture -- Victorian, technologically emerging.
In the early twentieth century, a new wave of immigrants of Italian, Lebanese, German, Irish, and
Russian descent -- also "Anglos" in New Mexican parlance -- came to set up shops or work in coal,
silver, and gold mines across the state. The Anglos may have been the last of the three main cultural groups
to arrive, but they became the most influential. They mined the mountains for gold and precious metals,
and uncovered vast deposits of coal, oil, and natural gas. They brought the railroad, the highway, and
the atomic bomb. They came to capture the state's magic -- on canvas, in photographs, in their souls.



The state's Spanish community, once comprised mainly of descendants of the original settlers who
came via Mexico, has expanded to include thousands of new Hispanic, or Spanish-speaking, immigrants
from Central and South America. Today's Hispanics are responsible for a vitality and sensuality that
has become part of New Mexico's mystique. Religion still permeates this culture and nearly every town
honors its patron saint once a year in an exuberant fiesta. This sensitivity carries through in the
imperfect sloping walls of adobe buildings, hand-punched tinwork, and strains of melodic corridas
(love songs) that waft from open doorways. Carved bultos and intricately painted retablos once adorned
only church altars and walls, but now are found in gift shops and galleries.



Today, New Mexico's Indians often straddle two worlds: teaching math to fifth graders or arguing
the First Amendment before a federal judge during the week, then returning to the reservation on
weekends to participate in traditional dances where they exchange their button-down clothes for
feathered headdresses and beaded moccasins.



The state's landscape is as varied as its cultures. The Rio Grande is the lifeblood for much of
this arid land, and it serves as the natural east-west dividing line as it snakes through the mountainous
north, skirting Albuquerque and providing the lifeline for the agricultural southwest before flowing
into Texas at El Paso. Away from the river, pine and spruce forests blanket much of northern New
Mexico. There you'll find pristine trout streams, bountiful hunting grounds, and world-class ski
slopes. A small section of the vast Navajo Reservation covers the northwestern corner of the state,
and continues into neighboring Arizona. In the southwest is the 3.3-million-acre Gila National Forest,
once home to the Mimbres Indians, known for their distinctive black-on-white pottery. East of the
mountains lies the irrigated Mesilla Valley, with acres of green chile, cotton, and onions.



On the vast plains of eastern New Mexico, lumbering herds of cattle and bands of sheep share
windswept grasslands. Dryland farming has prospered in pockets of the Llano Estacado (Staked Plain),
a western extension of the Great Plains that covers much of eastern New Mexico. To the west rise the
Sacramento Mountains, home to the Mescalero Apaches. One of the world's greatest natural wonders
spreads out in massive rooms beneath a limestone ridge at Carlsbad Caverns.



New Mexico's cities are small, with the exception of Albuquerque, which holds one-third of the
state's people and serves as its economic and education center. A cursory glance might fail to
distinguish it from any other spread-out Western metropolis, but most residents agree it's an
unusually congenial place to live:  traffic jams are few, winters are mild and summers dry, and
friendly smiles abound.



Sixty miles (96 km) north of Albuquerque, the state capital of Santa Fe huddles in the shelter of
the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Here, narrow streets wind among centuries-old adobe buildings, and
dirt roads are considered assets in the city's nicer neighborhoods. Students of acupuncture, massage,
and natural healing live among longtime Hispanic residents and Indian artisans.



It's not a coincidence that New Mexico is known as the Land of Enchantment. The spells it casts
are many and varied. For those who haven't yet experienced it, all it takes is to cross its borders
to enter New Mexico's magical embrace.

Continues...

Excerpted from Compass American Guides: New Mexico by Nancy Harbert Copyright © 1998 by Nancy Harbert. Excerpted by permission.
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