Socorro: Aid on the River Road

Socorro, New Mexico takes its name from the Spanish word for help or aid. When Don Juan de Oñate led the first Spanish colonizing expedition up the Rio Grande in fifteen ninety-eight, the Piro Pueblo people at this location provided the exhausted column with food and supplies. Oñate named the pueblo Nuestra Señora del Socorro, Our Lady of Aid, and the name has stayed ever since.

The Spanish established a mission here around sixteen twenty-six. During the Pueblo Revolt of sixteen eighty, the Piro people who had allied with the Spanish fled south to El Paso del Norte and never returned; their descendants live today near El Paso. Socorro was reoccupied by Spanish settlers after the reconquest, passed into American hands after the war with Mexico, and became a silver mining center in the eighteen eighties.

It is now home to the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, founded in eighteen eighty-nine.