Anthony: The Border Town That Voted Itself Into Existence

Anthony, New Mexico sits on the Texas-New Mexico state line in the upper Mesilla Valley, twenty-one miles north of El Paso, on ground that the Camino Real trade route from Mexico City passed through for three centuries. The community reportedly takes its name from a chapel of Saint Anthony of Padua built by a Mexican-American woman sometime before eighteen eighty-four, and was long also known as La Tuna, after the federal correctional institution located nearby. Anthony did not become a legal municipality until January fifth, twenty ten, when residents voted four hundred ten to one hundred fifty-one to incorporate.

The new city officially came into existence on July first of that year. The Butterfield Overland Mail trail passed just north of the townsite, making Anthony part of a corridor that has been a passage for trade and travel between the interior of Mexico and the North American heartland for as long as people have moved across this desert.