Cultures of New Mexico

The Cultures of New Mexico: African American, Hispanic, Native American, Western

African American Culture in New Mexico

Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now, includes exhibits that portray the African American contribution to New Mexico from the first explorers to the present. For more information please visit the New Mexico History Museum Site at http://www.nmhistorymuseum.org/

Early explorers

The 1536 exploration of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was accompanied by Estevan Dorantes, a black Moor who was the first non-Indian to visit the pueblo lands of the American Southwest, and two other men, they survived an ill-fated expedition that was shipwrecked off the Florida and then the Texas Coast. They journeyed across what is today northern Mexico and the Southwestern US for eight years. Their account was one of the first published reports of the peoples and geography of the American Southwest and northern Mexico.

In 1539, while guiding the Fray Marcos de Niza expedition into Pueblo territory, Estevan was killed at the Zuni Pueblo of Hawkuh.

George McJunkin

An African-American foreman of the Crawford Ranch in Colfax County, McJunkin discovered the artifacts and bones that helped archaeologists identify “Folsom Man.”

In 1908, while riding in Wild Horse Arroyo with a friend, Bill Gordon, McJunkin noticed a large deposit of bones protruding from the bank of the Dry Cimarron River. McJunkin, an amateur archaeologist, was convinced the bones were unusual, believing them to be of an extinct animal. McJunkin did not live to know the magnitude of his discovery. In 1927, a full excavation of the site uncovered a Folsom Point. Radiocarbon dating of the artifact placed the date of the earliest Native peoples to 10,000-11,000 years earlier – at the time, the earliest known date of human habitation. Scientists deemed McJunkin’s discovered one of the most important archaeological finds ever made in North America.

Buffalo Soldiers

Between the late 1860s and 1900, roughly 3,500 African-American infantrymen and cavalry troopers served in army posts across New Mexico. Native people nicknamed the men “buffalo soldiers” for their courage in battle. The soldiers accepted the name as a compliment, and the 10th cavalry included an image of a buffalo on its regimental crest. Buffalo soldiers played a crucial role in the onflicts of the late 1800s.

The Army rarely promoted African Americans to the rank of lieutenant or above. Even in African American units, almost all officers were white.

Oral histories

Landjur Abukusumo, pastor of Roswell’s Washington Chapel Christian Worship Center and founder and chairman of the Blackdom Memorial Foundation, which oversees development of the proposed four-acre memorial to the African-American town near Roswell that was founded in 1901 and briefly flourished before a persistent drought forced residents to abandon it in the mid-1920s.

More information can be found at http://www.oaaa.state.nm.us/