I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
As it turns out, New Mexicans aren’t really descended from Spanish Conquistadores. Dr. Laura Gómez had a piece in The Albuquerque Journal this week that disputes what she calls the “myth” of Spanish Conquistadores coming to New Mexico and vanquishing the Indigenous population, in response to the recent controversy over remarks by then Bernalillo Republican Party Chair Fernando C de Baca that he was descended from Conquistadores while African-Americans came here as slaves.
She describes the first Spanish expeditions as racially diverse, with at least one person of African descent among them — the dark-skinned Estevan — and most of the settlers coming from racially mixed families from central and southern New Mexico.
When the state was re-settled in 1692, after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 forced out for a time those who identified as Spaniards, 90 percent of the settlers came from 15 regions in Mexico. After dispelling the myth that New Mexican Hispanics have a direct connection to Spain, Gomez looks at where the idea came from and concludes that it’s a result of the oppression suffered by “native sons and daughters” after the onset of American rule:
So where in the world did these racially mixed persons get the idea that they were “Spaniards” or the heirs to the Spanish conquest? I argue that claims to Spanish identity arose in New Mexico in the 1880s in direct response to the intense anti-Mexican racism experienced by native sons and daughters in the first decades of American rule. Suffice to say that C de Baca’s claim that Hispanics came as conquerors and African-Americans came as slaves is considerably more complex.
Dr. Gómez is a law professor at the University of New Mexico and the author of “Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race.” Her column in the Journal is well worth the read.
