15 Facts About New Mexico

1. New Mexico is home to several baseball teams of the Pecos League: the Santa Fe Fuego, the Roswell Invaders and the White Sands Pupfish.

2. The City of Las Cruces, in southern New Mexico, has a museum system that is affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution Affiliations Program.

3. New Mexico is one of eight states that funds college scholarships through the state lottery.

4. New Mexico had been considered a swing state, whose population has favored both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, but it became more of a Democratic stronghold after the presidential election of 2008.

5. New Mexico has had a problem with drunk driving, but that has lessened.

6. New Mexico has long been an important corridor for trade and migration.

7. New Mexico is one of the largest tax havens in the US, offering numerous economic incentives and tax breaks on personal and corporate income.

8. New Mexico is the third-largest crude oil and ninth-largest natural gas producer in the United States.

9. New Mexico has three dioceses, one of which is an archdiocese: Archdiocese of Santa Fe, Diocese of Gallup, Diocese of Las Cruces.

10. In 1989, New Mexico became the first state to officially adopt the English Plus resolution, and in 2008, the first to officially adopt a Navajo textbook for use in public schools.

11. New Mexico dropped its claims to the Permian in a bid to gain statehood in 1911.

12. New Mexico received its name long before the present-day nation of Mexico won independence from Spain and adopted that name in 1821.

13. New Mexico is home to part of the Navajo Nation, nineteen federally-recognized Pueblo communities of Puebloan peoples and three different federally recognized Apache tribes.

14. Economy of New Mexico is dependent on oil drilling, mineral extraction, dryland farming, cattle ranching, lumber milling, and retail trade.

15. New Mexico is a state in the Southwestern Region of the United States of America.