New Mexico Isn't New

Raised in the northeast, I am used to place names starting with "New" -- New England, New Hampshire, New London, New York. Much of my world was named after the places European settlers had just come from.

Not so in New Mexico. This part of the country was not settled by anyone from Mexico and simply called a "new" version of where they had come from.

The name for New Mexico pre-dates the country of Mexico by hundreds of years. There was no country of Mexico in the 1500s, 1600s, or 1700s and beyond. People who settled this territory were not coming from an older land and tacking "new" onto place names they had left .

The Spanish who explored this area in the 1500s were looking for the riches that they had discovered in the Aztec empire. Surely there should be more such golden cities they thought, so conquistadors came north looking for new Aztec sites, new undiscovered cities of Mexica people, the name of the population in the Aztec world. 

They looked and looked for new Mexica people up here but despite completely fabricated rumors and expensive expeditions they didn't find them. There were impressive towns ("Pueblos" in Spanish), and beautiful mountains and scenery but no gold, no empire, no new Mexica people to plunder.

They went home, riding south in failure and complete bankruptcy, but the description of what they were seeking stuck: New Mexico, even though technically it was called the colony of New Spain for hundreds more years. 

In 1821 the colonies of Spain gained independence including all the way up here to the southern Rockies, and the rebels named their new country Mexico even though that meant incorporating a large portion of territory already named "New" Mexico. 

They should have called the recently liberated country Mas Neuvo Mexico -- Newer Mexico. That would have made more sense. I'm just saying.

Being an official part of the recently liberated country of Mexico didn't last long. This far northern part became a US territory 25 years later and a state in 1912.

So New Mexico was not a settler's name for a place they left to start over. It was its own designation long, long before an independent country to the south used the name Mexico politically. 

It took me a while to absorb that, given my New England assumption that places were named by colonists remembering or honoring the old world homes they left. 

New Mexico was named long before newer Mexico was.