Politics doesn't define state, people

Every time I go back to my home country, I pine for the good old days of my youth.

I was born in Ozark, Ark., where the Arkansas River Valley meets the Ozark Mountains, and graduated high school upstream in Fort Smith. In between, I also grew up in other small Arkansas cities and towns, as the son of an itinerant minister.

In the mid-1970s, I left Arkansas, and started bouncing around, mostly between Tennessee, Kentucky and Arkansas. By the 1980s, I “settled down” in my native state, back to be close to family, and started a family of my own.

I left again not long after the turn of a new millennia. In 2004, I was offered a job to run the Las Vegas Optic and that’s what brought me out here. I fell in love with the diversity of the landscape and its people and quickly became captivated by the stark differences between the South and the Southwest.

One huge difference, from my perspective, goes back to America’s “original sin” of slavery. Arkansas was a slave state, New Mexico wasn’t. In fact, New Mexico wasn’t even a state at the time of the Civil War.

The Civil War was mostly a “war between the states” back east, but it did spread into the Southwest. The Battle of Glorieta Pass in 1862, in which Confederate Texans were beaten back by Colorado and New Mexico Union forces, kept New Mexico as a “free” territory, and that, in my opinion, was a major defining point for New Mexico and its future.

Still, for New Mexico, the Civil War itself is little more than a footnote in history. Instead, battles with indigenous Native Americans, range wars and land grabs and, of course, the Mexican-American war turned New Mexico into what it is today — a majority-minority state that’s unique to the American landscape.

Arkansas and the rest of the American South were part of the slaveholding Confederacy and were ultimately defeated by Union forces. That left an indelible mark on the region and its people that can be seen and felt to this day.

Perhaps that’s why, when people speak of their difference, “race” comes up in the South, while “culture” tends to define the differences in the Southwest.

Another stark difference is in the climate. In the South, a combination of heat and humidity can be debilitating. In the Southwest, it’s so dry that water, and who has the rights to that water, defines rural life as we know it.

In New Mexico, farming and ranching are restricted to water availability, but Arkansas, which gets plenty of rain year-round, is filled with fertile farmland and fat cattle.

And the politics? Perhaps the most telling comparison is found in Arkansas’ and New Mexico’s governors. Out here, we just re-elected Michelle Lujan Grisham, a multicultural Democrat who is about as aggressively progressive as they come. In Arkansas, they just elected Republican Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a holdover from the Trump years who is about as anti-progressive as you’ll find.

With those two women in charge of their respective states, it’ll be interesting to see which one moves forward and which one moves backward.

But politics by itself doesn’t define a state or its people. In Arkansas, humor and Southern hospitality can transcend race, culture and politics, while in New Mexico, some very liberal people hold to their traditions and some pretty conservative values.

Maybe that’s why, whether I’m here or there, I feel at home. On the surface, people can be so different, but deep down, we’re all basically the same.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

[email protected]