A Magical World of Make Believe

AKA New Mexico for second-graders.
By Zach Hively

More than once, I’ve been accused—to my face!—of coming from a fake, made-up, incomprehensible place called New Mexico.

“You live in a not-real part of the world,” someone has told me.

This was rich, considering the circumstances: we stood on a platform in a train station in Cologne, a very few steps from both a monstrously tall dark and handsome medieval cathedral and a Lego store. If any place belongs in a fantasy novel, it is this one. (Especially once you spell the city the proper local way, Köln; only fantasy realms have little eyes above their vowels.)

Kölner Dom, which does not mean “Cologne is dumb”

The accusations have truth to them, though.

I do come from New Mexico. It is incomprehensible. And a limited number of people have at least heard of it. This is usually enough to make a New Mexican like me feel a bit of validation.

So imagine my delight when a friend of a friend asked me if I, as a New Mexican, would write a letter to her friend’s friend’s second-grade classroom in New Jersey. The letter needed to be about—what else?—Arizona.

Kidding! That would be like me calling New Jersey “New York,” which no one can get away with unless one is an NFL team.

The class project, simply enough, is to collect interesting facts from different places around the world, thereby saving the teacher from a bit of lesson planning.

Now, you might think that writing to a roomful of eight-year-olds is easy for me, a professional writer. You might be wrong.

This classroom is not, in professional writer parlance, my target audience. Most of the students do not themselves have the purchasing power to make book-buying decisions for their households.

Also, they live in New Jersey, a place I have never been and thus is fake, made-up, and incomprehensible. I need them to write me a letter about New Jersey first, so that I know what will best stun them about New Mexico.

However, they—being students in the USA—may not yet know their alphabet well enough to draft such a letter. So I am left unguided to compile a set of Interesting Facts about my home state.

Come, enter this very New Mexican door, a portal to all things New Mexico…

These Interesting Facts are based on my actual responses to actual accusations I have received from possibly well-meaning ignoramuses around the world but especially around the country:

• Green chile is one of our state vegetables. It is a delicious member of the pepper family and not, in fact, a Dr. Seuss/St. Patrick lovechild chili stew that is colored green. You can put green chile in a bowl of chili, though, because you can put green chile in literally anything here. Green chile is our pumpkin spice.
• Red chile is green chile that grew up. You can also put this in literally anything. But not in any of the same ways as green chile. Like, at all. Except to put it in chili. (This makes it less Texan.)
• Our identity extends far beyond chile, I swear.
• For instance, we also have water. Not much of it, after we irrigate our chile crops! But yes, it is safe to drink.
• I mean, the ground water at my house specifically should not be used for drinking or cooking. But this is not because it’s New Mexican water! Even though it is New Mexican water. Generally speaking, though, you have less to fear from the water than from the chile.
• Not kidding about that. Green chile put my brother-in-law in the hospital.
• Granted, he comes from another made-up place named “Tennessee” after the famous playwright. Tennessee has an average humidity of 98%, an average elevation of five feet, and the cumulative spice level of Wonder Bread.
• New Mexico is none of those things.
• Our English is very good, thank you—almost as good as our Tiwa, Tewa, Keres, Towa, Zuni, Navajo, Mescalero Apache, Jicarilla Apache, and Spanish, all of which have been spoken here since long before New Jersey was even a colony.
• Yes, you can mail us packages at domestic rates from anywhere in the United States, no matter what your local postal employee says.
• In fact, we quite enjoy getting mail, ever since we began receiving postal service around 2011 or so.
• You can get on our good side if you send us products from IKEA or In-N-Out Burger, which we do not have here despite being, ostensibly, a United State.
• Nor will we ever get them, in case this influences your decision to attempt relocating here.
• But we will ship you some green chile in exchange.

A mild green chile sunset.

In summation, you second-graders and other people: we New Mexicans live in a very real, very non-made-up place, as actual and verifiable as roadrunners and jackalopes.
And no—as much as I wish I did, I don’t have a New Mexico passport to prove it.​