Jeff Bingaman United States Senator from New Mexico

For sixty-four years, New Mexicans sought to achieve full union with the American Republic by securing statehood. Many in the Territory believed a speedy entry had been pledged in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, which transferred much of the Southwest from Mexico to the United States in the agreement ending the Mexican-American War (1846-48). But such an interpretation was not shared by the U.S. Congress. While New Mexico remained a Territory, and decade after decade passed, seventeen states were created between 1848 and 1911.

New Mexicans persevered and waited because statehood mattered deeply to them. The people wanted to become a state to fulfill certain expectations, of which three were held in varying degrees of intensity. First and foremost was a desire for home rule, which really meant no more appointed federal officials overseeing them. They sought to elect the governor and other key administrators in Santa Fe and to be represented in the House and Senate in Washington, D.C. In tandem with home rule was a second, closely related desire for the full exercise of popular sovereignty, which meant government of, for, and by the people. In practice this involved control over the finances of New Mexico, including creating annual budgets that set tax revenues and allocated how the public's money would be spent.

Besides the very real political and economic benefits conferred by statehood, the third advantage was basic to the self-image of New Mexicans—citizenship. As residents of a territory, they were incomplete citizens, a condition that opponents of statehood seized upon to argue they were unfit. During the decades New Mexico pushed its case to enter the Union, the nation absorbed tens of millions of immigrants. Beginning in the late 1840s and continuing for more than sixty years, a backlash developed in which the languages, family customs, religious beliefs, and even the diets of immigrants came under attack as threats to the nation's well-being. Many New Mexicans came to feel like "foreigners in their native land" because they, too, faced the same prejudices held against immigrants. Statehood helped ease such biases, although another six decades would pass before they were guaranteed rights co-equal to other American citizens.

--David Holtby