New Mexico - Nancy Harbert

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. IHarbert, Nancy is the author of 'New Mexico - Nancy Harbert' with ISBN 9781878867063 and ISBN 1878867067.