You’ve just moved to New Mexico and with you has come Aunt Miranda’s beautiful walnut sideboard, your Uncle Al’s oriental rug, and your mother’s complete teaspoon collection, with decorative rack. Perhaps you despair that your mishmash accumulation will never fit into your adobe style home. Not to worry, help is on its way. You can make it work just by doing what New Mexicans do best—live and let live. There is a place for everything in the Land of Enchantment. Call it the Land of Eclecticism.

Fortunately, there is enormous historic precedent for dragging possessions halfway around the world and right into a New Mexican home. Life at the western end of the old Santa Fe Trail and at the northern reaches of the Camino Real—two of the West’s great historic trails—implies not only an ancient travel destination and a significant crossroads, but also a hub for trade and commerce. Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, Las Cruces—New Mexico’s major communities are also important and historic centers of transportation. They have seen everything from ox carts to jets being used to haul goods across, up, over, and through an often difficult landscape. Add to this the fact that New Mexicans are famous for their peripatetic ways, from prehistory to the present, and you have joined the company of folks who love to travel and are not at all shy about bringing things back home with them. The fact that you have just added to this eclectic mix means that you have joined a long tradition, a nonexclusive club, a bunch of adventurous pack rats, and a style of living in which anything and everything goes. But you might want to lose the teaspoon rack. We do have standards, after all.

 

 

To read the complete story, please find Su Casa at your local newsstand or order it online here or by phone at 505-344-1783 or toll-free 866-256-4925.