Las Cruces: Gateway to the Southwest

Las Cruces sits at a crossroads that has been significant for thousands of years. The Rio Grande valley here is the only practical north-south corridor through the Chihuahuan Desert between El Paso and Albuquerque. Mountains close off the approaches from east and west, and the river, when it runs, provides the only reliable water in a landscape that averages fewer than nine inches of rain per year. Every human group that has moved through this part of North America has moved through this valley.

Jornada Mogollon farmers settled the valley benches roughly fifteen hundred years ago. They left behind pit houses, distinctive brown pottery, and rock art panels visible in the Organ Mountain foothills today. Later, Manso and Suma peoples occupied the area around the Rio Grande crossing. Apache bands controlled the surrounding mountains and desert from roughly the seventeen hundreds onward, making the valley a contested zone until the late nineteenth century.

Spanish missionaries and soldiers arrived in the fifteen nineties with the Oñate expedition, which planted the first European settlement in what is now New Mexico and used the Mesilla Valley ford as a critical river crossing. The valley remained part of New Spain, then Mexico, until eighteen forty-eight.

The American period transformed the valley rapidly. Military posts, then the Butterfield Overland Mail, then the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe railroad in eighteen eighty-one created the infrastructure for a commercial city. New Mexico achieved statehood on February fourteenth, nineteen twelve, the forty-seventh state admitted to the Union, and Las Cruces grew as the state's second city.

Today the metro area population is roughly two hundred thirty thousand, the economy blends agriculture, government, education, and military spending from White Sands Missile Range, and the city remains predominantly Hispanic. Roughly sixty percent of residents identify as Hispanic or Latino, making Las Cruces one of the most culturally Mexican-American cities in the United States, a continuity reaching back to the valley's pre-American past.