Race And Your Community
...lived for the past 12 years. Alamogordo is a city in Otero County, New Mexico, United States of America. The population was 35,582 at the 2000 census. The city name is a Spanish word meaning “fat cottonwood”.
New Mexico has the highest percentage of Hispanic Americans (some recent immigrants and others descendants of Spanish colonists) and the second-highest percentage of Native Americans, mostly Navajo and Pueblo peoples. As a result, the demographics and culture of the state are unique for their strong Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. Amerindian cultural influences.
The first known inhabitants of New Mexico were members of the Clovis culture of Paleo-Indians. The culture is named for the New Mexico city where the first artifacts of this culture were discovered. Later inhabitants include Native Americans of the Anasazi and the Mogollon cultures. By the time of European contact in the 1500’s, the region was settled by the villages of the Pueblo peoples and groups of Navajo, Apache and Ute.
With a Native American population of 134,000 in 1990, New Mexico still ranks as an important center of American Indian culture. Both the Navajo and Apache share Athabaskan origin. The Apache and some Ute live on federal reservations within the
Race and Your Community 2
state. With 16 million acres, mostly in neighboring Arizona, the reservation of the Navajo Nation ranks as the largest in the United States. The prehistorically agricultural Pueblo Indians live in pueblos scattered throughout the state, many older than any European settlement.
More than one-third of New Mexican claim Hispanic origin, the vast majority of whom descend from the original Spanish colonists in the northern portion of the state. Most of the considerably fewer recent Mexican immigrants reside in the southern part of the state.
The presence of various indigenous Native American...
View Full Essay
