Towards Statehood Part One
In two years New Mexico will mark a major milestone, one hundred years of statehood. On January 6, 1912 – after more than sixty years of petitioning – New Mexico was finally admitted into the union that is the United States of America. The story of how we got to be New Mexico and the forty-seventh state in the Union is an interesting one.
History has lost to us what this land was called by its early residents but Coronado, who visited the area in the 1540’s referred to the land as Tiguex, from the Tiwa speaking Pueblo Indians he met near what is now Bernalillo.
After Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztecs and destroyed their capital of Tenochtitlán in 1521, he rebuilt the city and named it after the Aztec, or as they called themselves Mexica people. The country was initially called New Spain, but its capital was Mexico City. Most of the emerging provinces north of Mexico City were given regional names from Spain, such as Nuevo Leon and Nuevo Galicia. As ship after ship of gold and jewels from the New World reached Europe, the word Mexico became synonymous with fabulous riches.
Francisco de Ibarra, a gold seeking adventurer who came northward some twenty years after Coronado chasing the legendary cities of Cíbola, is credited by some historians as being the first to refer to the lands north of the Rio del Norte as Nuevo Mexico.
It is said that Ibarra got the idea after being told by his scouts that Indians in a large village he encountered were dressed in colored clothing like the Aztecs. Thinking that he had discovered another land of fabulous wealth, he told people on his return that he had discovered a “new” Mexico.
Others credit Antonio Espejo whose visit in 1583 was featured in a chapter entitled “Of New Mexico and how it was discovered” in Padre Juan Gonzales de Mendoza’s book The Great Kingdom of China. Whatever the truth, the name stuck for good in 1610 after it was published in Gaspar Perez de Villagrá’s classic chronicling of the Oñate Expedition, the History of New Mexico.
Stopping in Santa Fe in 1846 on his way to California during the Mexican American War, U.S. Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearney proclaimed that the land was now the United States Territory of New Mexico. This proclamation by occupation was later ratified under the Article IX of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican American War.
Next: Establishing a New Government
Claude Stephenson is the New Mexico State Folklorist
What surprises you about how long it took New Mexico to become a state? Let us know on the NM Centennial Facebook Fan Page.
