A NEW MEXICO DIARY

BORDER COUNTRY | September 23rd 2008
Travelling from London to Albuquerque is a dreary ordeal, until "the dusty red earth" becomes visible from the airplane: "I am home", writes a correspondent for Economist.com ...

From ECONOMIST.COM

There are no direct flights from London to Albuquerque. New Mexicans tend to travel heavy, and my connecting flight from Houston stays grounded for 30 minutes while passengers bargain for overhead space. I silently regret venturing across the Atlantic and half of America with a baby on my lap until two hours into the flight, when the plane curves around and I lift my window shade.

Suddenly there it is: the dusty red earth of the high desert stretching into oblivion with only a few dirt tracks, like spider-veins, etched into it. The Rio Grande, fat from what New Mexicans optimistically call the "monsoon" rains of late summer snakes steel-blue across the earth in smooth wide curves, edged on either side by the tangle of trees that is the Bosque del Apache. The grid-lines of Albuquerque are dwarfed by Sandia Peak and appear tiny and lost in the vastness of the surrounding plateau. The plane descends and I watch truck headlights blink to life on Interstate 25, one of the state's only three freeways. Red-gold evening sunshine floods into the cabin. I am home.

At around 120,000 square miles, New Mexico is the fifth-largest state in the union (by way of comparison, Britain is about 94,500 square miles). Yet with just under 2m residents, New Mexicans have to spend a lot of time on the road if they want to get anywhere.

New Mexico is 43% Hispanic, the highest proportion of any state, and is home to 19 Native American pueblos and four major reservations. The Navajo Nation, America's biggest tribe by population and land ownership, straddles north-western New Mexico, north-eastern Arizona and south-eastern Utah. New Mexico parted from Spain in 1821 and then Mexico following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848, finally becoming the 47th American state in 1912. Nevertheless, responses to my place of origin include "I've been to Cancun" and "But your English is so good".

I admit with embarrassment that my Spanish is less good. Both languages feature prominently here, often mixing in conversation for convenience and succinctness. Damian Wilson, a linguist at the University of New Mexico, tells me that he was surprised to hear "Spanglish" labelled a derogatory term upon reaching university, as he and his peers considered it a competitive exercise to blend the two as cleverly as possible during his youth in northern New Mexico.

Mr Wilson believes that "code switching" and "morphological blending", are useful tools for the fluent and less fluent--often the older and younger generations respectively--to communicate. For example, you might say "ay te watcho", or "see you later", before going to get the brekas on your trucka checked out, que no? Que no, the quintessential New Mexican phrase, is roughly equivalent to the British "innit". The use of trucka, a word originally used to describe freight train cars, is also employed in northern Mexico, due to cross-border migration. Mr Wilson urges caution however, as a local once corrected his use of trucka--"Aqui se dice pickup", she said ("Here we say pickup").

Recently New Mexico has been under the spotlight as a battleground state in the upcoming presidential election. Bill Richardson, the state's governor and a former energy secretary and ambassador to the United Nations, made a brief run for the Democratic nomination earlier in the year, releasing campaign advertisements in both Spanish and English. Barack Obama has 24 offices here and John McCain recently held a rally in Albuquerque with his running mate Sarah Palin. New Mexico will likely return to its customary quiet after the excitement of the November election has died down.

In London, my adopted home, I propagated New Mexico-variety chilli seeds on my window sill in the early spring, and lovingly grew them to full size in my tiny greenhouse. I hoped, in vain, for that essential commodity in which New Mexico abounds, but which London rarely sees: sun. Fortunately, I have returned to the land of enchantment (or the land of entrapment as it is less fondly known) just in time for the annual chilli harvest.

Picture credit: James Gordon/flickr (top), Wolfgang Staudt/flickr

(This is the first instalment of a correspondent's diary in New Mexico, published on Economist.com.)