Before we delve into New Mexico, a US state in the Southwest region of the country, I would like to clear up a common misconception. Sometimes people think that the name New Mexico comes from Mexico the country, as in – a piece of Mexico that the United States acquired from the Mexicans, and called it “the New” Mexico, to differentiate it from Mexico itself. However, the term Nuevo México in Spanish has been in use for more than 250 years before the birth of the modern country of Mexico. Mexica (pronounced meh-SHE-kuh) was the name the Aztecs used for themselves, so when the Spanish arrived to Central America, they started calling them Mexicanos and the area – México. The name Nuevo México was born, when the Spaniards extended their colonial conquest farther north, beyond the river of Rio Grande. Technically, the new territory was called Santa Fe de Nuevo México (we will discuss this name a little later), and it included the current State of New Mexico and some extra land around it. That happened in 1563.
In 1821, the country of Mexico gained its independence from Spain after an 11-year war. The newly-coined country controlled a massive territory half the size of the modern United States. It wasn’t called the Mexican Empire for nothing. To the north, it included present-day California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, half of the modern New Mexico, Texas, and parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, and Wyoming. So, basically, if nothing had changed, Mexico today would start at the southern borders of Oregon and Idaho. All that, excluding a little piece in the southern Arizona and New Mexico, Mexico lost to the US in the Mexican–American War of 1846-1848. The names of 3 of these newly-acquired US territories (California, New Mexico, and Texas) came from the names of the original Mexican provinces – Alta California (Upper California), Nuevo México, and Coahuila y Tejas. And then, in 1854, the Americans bought from the Mexicans a little more – that long swath of land along the southern borders of Arizona and New Mexico, which was still in the possession of Mexico. That, finally, concluded the formation of the New Mexico Territory, which eventually became the State of New Mexico.