New Mexico as a Historical Laboratory of the Good Neighbor Policy: With Special Reference to the Hispano-American Cultural Contribution

Abstract

Much has been written about New Mexico, but few of those who have described its unique heritage and character have fully understood its true spirit and appreciated what it represents as a part of the present-day United States.New Mexico has a personality all of its own. Three cultural groups have been most important in forming the American way of life to be found there: the Pueblo Indians, who were the first permanent settlers of the region; the Spanish, who made it a part of Western civilization; and the Anglo-Americans, who have brought it into the current of modern American life. Today, New Mexico is neither Indian, nor Spanish, nor Anglo, but a harmonious combination of all three; and in the persistance and, generally speaking, local appreciation of the permanent values of each of the dominant cultural heritages, it has been for the past one hundred years a significant laboratory of the Good-Neighbor Policy. I speak as one whose ancestors were among the pioneers of both the Anglo and Hispano-American frontiers of settlement who, advancing from northeast and southwest, met and joined hands in what is now the state of New Mexico during the first half of the nineteenth century.