What Was Here Before: Rio Rancho

The mesa west of the Rio Grande has been Tiwa-speaking Pueblo country for at least seven hundred years. Sandia Pueblo, whose lands border this ground, was home to thousands of people when Francisco Vasquez de Coronado arrived in fifteen forty. Spanish colonizers imposed a land grant system here in the centuries that followed; the mesa itself was ranched for sheep and cattle through the Mexican and American territorial eras, dry and dramatic, overlooking the Rio Grande valley.

In nineteen sixty-one, a New York company called AMREP Corporation bought fifty-five thousand acres of that rangeland for pennies on the dollar and began selling quarter-acre desert lots through the mail to retirees in the Midwest and Northeast. The pitch came with a free dinner and a film called Your Golden Future. Federal prosecutors called it fraud. Most buyers never built on their lots and lost their investment entirely. Yet people did come, slowly, then fast. Rio Rancho incorporated in nineteen eighty-one and is now New Mexico's third-largest city. The development was called Rio Rancho Estates, and the land came from Snow Homes. Intel's large chip fabrication plant here, opened in two thousand two, is one of the biggest semiconductor plants in the world. The twenty twenty census counted just over one hundred four thousand residents, mostly in Sandoval County, with Albuquerque to the south and Santa Ana Pueblo to the north.