Old Mesilla and the Gadsden Purchase

The little plaza at Old Mesilla looks almost unchanged from the eighteen fifties, and in some ways it is not. Adobe buildings ring the square, a church anchors one end, and the surrounding fields still smell of green chile in late summer. But this quiet village once stood at the center of an international boundary dispute that reshaped the American Southwest.

After the Mexican-American War ended in eighteen forty-eight, the new border left the Mesilla Valley's status ambiguous. Mexico and the United States both claimed the fertile strip along the Rio Grande. Settlers who had lived here under Mexican rule and preferred it that way moved south of what they believed to be the border and founded the village of Mesilla in eighteen fifty. They thought they were on Mexican soil.

They were wrong, or rather, they were about to be renegotiated. In December eighteen fifty-three, American diplomat James Gadsden sat down in Mexico City with President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. The United States wanted a southern railroad route to the Pacific. Mexico needed cash. For ten million dollars, Mexico sold approximately twenty-nine thousand square miles of desert territory encompassing what is now southern Arizona and a slice of southern New Mexico. The Gadsden Purchase was ratified in June eighteen fifty-four.

The formal transfer ceremony took place right here in the Mesilla plaza on November sixteenth, eighteen fifty-four. Mexican officials handed the territory to American commissioners. The settlers who had fled north of the old border to stay Mexican now found themselves American anyway.

Messilla became a prosperous Butterfield Overland Mail stop by eighteen fifty-eight, a Confederate territorial capital briefly in eighteen sixty-one, and then a rough crossroads town where Billy the Kid would face justice two decades later. The plaza today is a National Historic Landmark, and the church of San Albino has stood at its edge since eighteen fifty-one, the oldest continuously operating parish in the Mesilla Valley.