by Mike Smith
Daily Lobo
Exceeded in size by Alaska, Texas, California and Montana, New Mexico is America's fifth largest state. Within New Mexico's 121,365 square miles, you could fit more than 78 Rhode Islands, 62 Delawares, 21 Connecticuts or 13 New Jerseys. All of America's 10 smallest states could fit inside New Mexico's borders with room to spare, as could all five states of New England. On a global scale, New Mexico could easily hold the entireties of the United Kingdom, Italy, New Zealand, the Philippines or Poland. This state could hold three Icelands, seven Denmarks or nearly 2,000 Lichtensteins.
The point is New Mexico is big.
It is a monster of an area - and home to only about 16 people per square mile. It's so huge it needs the entire Midwest just to keep it from hurting all those tiny eastern states. And it is so vast that making generalizations about its terrain, its people or its culture is nearly impossible. There are deserts and mountains and prairies. There are rivers, salt beds and flatlands, canyons and valleys and cities and parking lots. There are dusty, twisted-wire ranches along the New Mexico-Texas border. There are towns where the predominant language is Navajo or other native languages. There are villages where Spanish is primarily spoken and small cities where nearly everyone works for the Air Force or a top-secret government lab.
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New Mexico is so big, and contains such a variety of people and places, that many parts of the state can barely even relate to many others. Residents of southern New Mexico often dismiss northern New Mexico as not much different from Colorado. Many northern New Mexicans write off eastern New Mexico as somehow tainted by its proximity to Texas. Many ranching communities in eastern New Mexico consider Albuquerque a crime-ridden ghetto, decry its traffic and sprawl, fear its drivers and accuse it of being entirely void of culture and beauty. Numerous Albuquerque residents - along with much of the rest of the state - jokingly refer to Santa Fe as Santa Fake, Santa Fey or Santa Gay, dismissing it too quickly as an inland island of eastern culture - full of pesco-vegetarianism and turquoise-and-silver-wearing, Georgia O'Keeffe-loving Californians.
"[Every Santa Fe] street is filled with looky-loos walking up and down ... typically white folks in their late 50s," wrote Pinworm, a New Mexico blogger, in a 2004 post about his dislike of the City Different. "You cannot swing your arms without hitting a dirty Subaru."
New Mexico could easily be compared to a country, with its various regions all distinct states or provinces - all with distinct histories of their own. The reservation towns of northwest New Mexico's Navajo Nation have governments that are independent of the state. Taos and Santa Fe are famed for their historic art colonies. The eastern edge of the state was on the fringe of the 1930s Dust Bowl. Many towns along the state's southern border were part of Mexico up until 1853 - and some still seem like they are.
And just as the histories of the various parts of the state are eclectic, so is their lore. Northern New Mexicans tell of enormous flightless owls, the insidious Taos hum and one-eyed feathered worms that can kill a person with a single glance. On the reservations, people talk of flying snakes, native gods and skinwalkers - demonic medicine men that can change into animals. Ghost stories of dead Civil War soldiers are told from Albuquerque to Santa Fe. Rumors of secret underground bases and tunnel networks are shared about Los Alamos and Dulce. UFOs, aliens and mutilated cows are reported from Socorro to Roswell. Many southern New Mexicans talk of the lost treasures of the Organ Mountains, sightings of living pterosaurs, enormous "thunderbirds" with 50-foot wingspans and the Lordsburg Door - an alleged portal into another dimension.
New Mexico contains such an eclectic variety of cultures and places, one of the only generalizations that could honestly be said about it or its people is that it is strange - across-the-board, without-regard-to-race-or-background, north-to-south, east-to-west strange. Twenty-one times the size of Connecticut, and at least 21 times as weird, New Mexico is unlike anywhere else - and maybe, in part, because we like it that way.
"My Strange New Mexico" celebrates and explores New Mexico's strangeness in the Daily Lobo. Mike Smith is the author of "Towns of the Sandia Mountains." E-mail him with suggestions for future columns at AntarcticSuburbs@yahoo.com.
