In a recent article, Dr Natasha Howard, a lecturer in Africana Studies at the University of New Mexico, cited the campus’s “Three Peoples” mural as exemplifying the state’s historical exclusion of Blacks. The mural celebrates Anglo whites, Hispanics, and Native Americans, but rejects Black people as components of the “Tricultural State.” At one point, said Dr. Howard, Hispanic elites, who once enslaved Native Americans, supported taking New Mexico into the Union as a slave state so that Blacks would constitute an “absolute bottom” beneath which no other group could fall.
