About New Mexico

New Mexico is one of the most genuinely distinctive states in America: a place where three centuries of Spanish colonial history overlay thousands of years of Pueblo civilization, where the world's first atomic bomb was built and detonated in the desert, where Georgia O'Keeffe painted her greatest work from an adobe house in the high desert, and where the Zia sun symbol of an ancient Pueblo community became the emblem of a modern American state. Its landscapes, from the white gypsum dunes of the Tularosa Basin to the volcanic mesas of the northwest to the 13,000-foot peaks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, are among the most spectacular in the continent.

The state lives with deep paradox. It is home to two of the world's most important scientific laboratories and has more PhD scientists per capita than any other state, yet consistently ranks near the bottom of national measures of educational attainment and near the top of poverty rates. Its oil and gas revenues fund ambitious clean energy mandates; its Indigenous communities exercise genuine sovereignty while fighting persistent economic marginalization; its art market is world-class while its rural villages struggle with generational poverty. The enchantment in "The Land of Enchantment" is real, but it coexists with urgent challenges that the state has not yet fully answered.

New Mexico's three cultures, Pueblo and Navajo Indigenous, Hispanic descendants of 400 years of Spanish colonial and Mexican settlement, and Anglo Americans who arrived mostly in the 19th and 20th centuries, shape every dimension of life here. The food (green chile on everything, bizcochito at Christmas, posole at feast days), the architecture (flat-roofed adobe forms mandated by ordinance in Santa Fe), the language (New Mexico Spanish retains vocabulary from 17th-century Castilian), and the art all reflect this layered inheritance in ways that make New Mexico unlike any other place in the country.