A BRIEF HISTORY OF MEXICAN IMMIGRATION IN NEW MEXICO
Many Mexican immigrants made their way to New Mexico in the late 19th and early 20th century. During the Mexican American War period, New Mexico possessed a unique culture that considered itself “Spanish” rather than “Mexico” to distinguish itself from the “North Americans.” Individuals emphasized their own religion, customs, and language, creating their own rural colonies and urban barrios. After the United States took control of New Mexico in 1848, immigrants from Mexico settled in the north central part of the state. Between 1900 and 1930, Mexicans were referred to as second-class by the socio-economically dominant non-Hispanic population, which often deprecated Mexican culture and questioned the people’s fitness for democracy, claiming they had constructed a “Spanish American” identity rather than assimilate.
Between 1850 and 1880, the expansion of cattle ranches in New Mexico, created a need for a large amounts of manual labor. To resolve this, ranchers resorted to importing foreign manual labor from Mexico and elsewhere. After the coming of the railroads in the 1880s, the southwestern corner of New Mexico attracted Mexican miners and railroad workers from other states. WWI provided Mexicans the opportunity to prove their American citizenship. The new members of the Mexican middle class (known as Nuevomexicanos) enthusiastically participated in the war effort, meshing images of their heritage with American patriotic symbols. Nuevomexicano politicians and community leaders recruited rural masses into the war cause. While these efforts improved the conditions of minority citizenship for Nuevomexicanos, they did not eliminate social inequality completely. Today, issues over Mexican immigration are being contested in New Mexico.
CHARACTERIZING IMMIGRATION IN NEW MEXICO
Population
Mexican immigrants accounted for more than half (71.8 percent) of all immigrants in New Mexico in 2010. Estimates also indicated that New Mexico had the highest percentage of Hispanics of any state—45 percent—in 2010. Between 2009 and 2013, the Mexican immigrant population in New Mexico totaled 145,000. The top counties for Mexican immigration included Bernalillo (45,100), Dona Ana (31,600), Santa Fe (12,500), and Lea (9,500). The number of Mexican born individuals increased to 153,076 in 2013.
Labor
New Mexico’s 37,195 Latino-owned businesses had sales and receipts of $6.5 billion and employed 50,021 people in 2007. The unemployment of Hispanics in New Mexico was 8.2 percent in 2013, more than one and a half times that of non-Hispanic whites. This means that roughly one in twelve Hispanic workers in the state continues to be unemployed. In 2014, the purchasing power of Latinos in New Mexico totaled $23.4 billion, representing an increase of 374 percent since 1990.
LINKS TO CULTURE