Flag Waving Print Share
During the sixty-two years of New Mexico’s Territorial Period, the flag of the United States added fifteen new stars as the thirty-second through the forty-sixth states entered the Union. Finally New Mexico became a state on 6 January 1912, but its citizens endured one last waiting period. Not until Independence Day, the Fourth of July, did the federal government unfurl the new official flag and its forty-seventh star (and also a forty-eighth for Arizona, which became a state on 14 February). But the festivities of that July Fourth actually ended a thirty-month outpouring of patriotic celebrations, complete with hoisting and waving homemade forty-seven-star flags.
In mid-afternoon on Monday 20 June 1910 President William Howard Taft signed legislation the Congress had passed the previous Saturday night authorizing New Mexico and Arizona to become states. That night in towns throughout New Mexico citizens rejoiced, and,as one newspaper headline noted, “YELL[ED] THEMSELVES HORSE FOR THE FLAG’S NEW STAR.” In Albuquerque, an electrical company placed a string of lights across Central Avenue near Fourth Street, which featured a large star in lights with the words “Is Added” beside it. Two weeks later, Independence Day in New Mexico brought out innumerable displays of homemade flags with the forty-seventh star either sewed on or pinned.
Over the next two years New Mexicans marked significant milestones in the march toward statehood with displays of their own statehood flags. Many were cloth creations made and sold by enterprising patriots, others were paper banners, and some were decorated cakes and even a few floral arrangements on floats appeared, such as at a Fourth of July celebration in Las Vegas in 1910. On 21 August 1911 Territorial Governor William J. Mills received a telephone call informing him President Taft had signed legislation accepting the constitutions of New Mexico and Arizona after a long, contentious fight lasting six months. He immediately took from his desk drawer a forty-eight star flag and ordered it flown over the capitol building.
Thus did New Mexicans in gestures small and large, spontaneous and planned, embrace the symbol of statehood well before the official flag added their star.
--David Holtby