“Completely honest and highly informative. To look at a legislative body is to observe democracy in the raw—with all its diverse characters and influences and its many conflicts, compromises, and achievements. Dede Feldman, a first-rate observer and chronicler, shows us the insides of the New Mexico State Senate.”—Fred Harris, former U.S. Senator and professor emeritus of political science, University of New Mexico Elected to New Mexico’s state senate in 1996, Dede Feldman faced the challenges that confront state legislators around the country along with some that are uniquely New Mexican. In this forthright account of the workings of New Mexico’s legislature, she reveals how the work of governing is actually accomplished. In New Mexico’s part-time citizen legislature, Spanish may be spoken in the halls of the capitol as often as English, and Native American issues are often pivotal. But each year the Land of Enchantment’s legislators, like those in other states, must balance revenues and expenditures, tangle with lobbyists, and struggle with redistricting and campaign finance reform. State legislatures’ approaches to air pollution, drunk driving, and chronic disease, Feldman’s book reveals, find their way into national law after they’ve been road tested on the highways of various states.

A lively, engaging ethnography that demonstrates how a volatile politics of race, class, and nation animates the infamously violent struggles over forests in the U.S. Southwest.

This book provides a comprehensive and penetrating investigation of the governmental and political processes of New Mexico. It combines a view of how the social and political history have shaped contemporary New Mexico political culture and the nature of governmental and political affairs. Formal governmental institutions and political processes provide a descriptive narrative of New Mexico government and politics. Contents: PART I: The Function of State Government; The Land of Enchantment; Paso por aqui; Powers Not Delegated; Any Amendment or Amendments to this Constitution; PART II: The Form of Government; The Executive Department Shall Consist of...; The Legislative Power Shall Be Vested In; The Judicial Power of the State Shall Be Vested In; All Elections Shall be Free and Open: Parties and Politics in New Mexico; From Bernalillo to Valencia: County Government; From Aztec to Wagon Mound: Municipal Government; Pueblos, Acequias and Land Grants: Other Political Units Mexico; PART III: The Future of State Government; Public Policymaking in New Mexico

New Mexico was ceded to the United States in 1848, at the end of the war with Mexico, but not until 1912 did President William Howard Taft sign the proclamation that promoted New Mexico from territory to state. Why did New Mexico’s push for statehood last sixty-four years? Conventional wisdom has it that racism was solely to blame. But this fresh look at the history finds a more complex set of obstacles, tied primarily to self-serving politicians. Forty-Seventh Star, published in New Mexico’s centennial year, is the first book on its quest for statehood in more than forty years. David V. Holtby closely examines the final stretch of New Mexico’s tortuous road to statehood, beginning in the 1890s. His deeply researched narrative juxtaposes events in Washington, D.C., and in the territory to present the repeated collisions between New Mexicans seeking to control their destiny and politicians opposing them, including Republican U.S. senators Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana and Nelson W. Aldrich of Rhode Island. Holtby places the quest for statehood in national perspective while examining the territory’s political, economic, and social development. He shows how a few powerful men brewed a concoction of racism, cronyism, corruption, and partisan politics that poisoned New Mexicans’ efforts to join the Union. Drawing on extensive Spanish-language and archival sources, the author also explores the consequences that the drive to become a state had for New Mexico’s Euro-American, Nuevomexicano, American Indian, African American, and Asian communities. Holtby offers a compelling story that shows why and how home rule mattered—then and now—for New Mexicans and for all Americans.