New Mexico was named long before Mexico itself existed as a country
Spanish explorers were calling this land Nuevo Mexico in the 1500s, centuries before Mexico adopted its name on independence in 1821. They hoped to find another rich empire like the Aztecs. They never did, but the name stuck, and its capital, Santa Fe, founded in 1610, is the oldest state capital in the US.
People were here very early. Footprints found in 2017 hint at a human presence as far back as 21,000 to 23,000 BC, and later the Mogollon and Ancestral Pueblo cultures built large settlements such as those at Chaco, Acoma and Taos. Their far-reaching trade spawned Aztec tales of a wealthy northern realm, a new Mexico, and those stories fed the Spanish legend of the Seven Cities of Gold. Coronado arrived in 1540, and colonisation began under Juan de Onate in 1598, marked by brutal violence against Acoma Pueblo.
In 1680 the Pueblo leader Po'pay, organising from Taos, drove the Spanish out entirely, the first successful revolt against colonial rule in the Americas. When Diego de Vargas led the Spanish back in 1692, at the invitation of some Pueblo leaders after Po'pay's death, colonial officials offered more religious and cultural room to avoid another uprising. Albuquerque was founded in 1706 as a trading post and named after a Spanish viceroy. Later, peace treaties with the Comanche in 1785 and 1786 left the colony effectively under Comanche protection, and it even refused orders from Madrid to fight them.
Mexico gained the province at independence in 1821. When Texas tried to seize the land east of the Rio Grande, the entire Texan Santa Fe Expedition was captured by the New Mexico militia. The United States annexed the region after the Mexican-American War in 1848, and it waited 64 years as a territory before becoming the 47th state on January 6, 1912. During the Second World War it hosted key Manhattan Project sites and, in 1945, the Trinity test, the first nuclear explosion.
Those layers show everywhere. New Mexico has the highest share of Hispanic and Latino residents in the country and the second-highest share of Native Americans after Alaska, with 19 Pueblo communities, three Apache tribes and a third of the Navajo Nation. It is the fifth-largest state by area but has just over 2.1 million people. Santa Fe also sits higher than any other state capital, at 7,000 feet, and New Mexico holds three UNESCO World Heritage Sites entirely within its borders, more than any other state.
Source: New Mexico
