Reimagining Albuquerque

Property values, planning codes, and the afterlife of colonization

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Every morning in schools across New Mexico, children recite a pledge unique to our state:

“I salute the flag of the state of New Mexico, the Zia symbol of perfect friendship among united cultures.”

The words are brief, melodic, and well-intentioned, and strike pride in our hearts. They affirm a civic ideal of the notion that the state’s triad of “cultures,” Anglo, Hispano, and Indigenous, coexist in harmony under a sun symbol drawn from Pueblo culture. The salute suggests that friendship is the state’s defining virtue, that cultural unity has been achieved, and that the lingering divisions of conquest, colonization, and racism are matters of the past.

Yet in Albuquerque’s council chambers and zoning hearings, a very different language circulates. It is the language of compatibility, R-1 zoning, character, and property values—seemingly neutral terms that, once unpacked, trace directly back to the hierarchies that the pledge pretends no longer exist.

At an August 13th, 2025 Land Use Planning and Zoning Committee meeting concerning controversial proposal R-25-167, a resolution that would have allowed property owners to opt-in to a one time, city-sponsored zone change to permit greater housing types, one longtime resident addressed the council:

“Good evening madam chair and councilors, my background has been as a real-estate residential appraiser in Albuquerque for the last 34 years. I consider this resolution to be an attack on single-family home owners… […] As an aside, I want to say I am insulted as a multi-generational Hispanic New Mexican to be called a racist for wanting to protect my home and the value in my home.”

It is a familiar refrain in contemporary Albuquerque: that to critique the system is to insult the person. When activists, planners, or historians point to the racist origins of R-1 zoning, its impact on the working class and people of color, or the Federal Housing Administration’s redlining and financing criteria, many residents, Anglo and Hispano alike, hear a moral accusation. Yet what is being named is not individual prejudice but a systemic inheritance: a legal and spatial order built on racial hierarchy, one that continues to determine who lives where, who owns what, and whose neighborhoods are seen as worth protecting.

To understand why these tensions persist, and why property values remain the moral language of exclusion, one must look backward to the intertwined histories of race, law, and land in New Mexico and in the United States.

Double Colonization: Whiteness, Land, and Law

Laura E. Gómez’s Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race offers perhaps the clearest framework for understanding how New Mexico’s unique racial structure took shape.

Before U.S. conquest, the seeds of dispossession had already been planted during Mexico’s brief rule over New Mexico. As Gómez recounts, early nineteenth-century reforms in Mexican law intended to liberalize racial hierarchies such as abolishing the caste system and promising equality for mestizos and Indians had paradoxical effects. In New Mexico, mestizo settlers used these new legal rights to challenge and encroach upon Pueblo land grants, transforming equality before the law into “the right for all equally to take Pueblo land.” At the same time, Mexico’s efforts to secularize the missions and liberalize immigration policy opened the northern frontier to Anglo-American settlers. The resulting collisions of law, religion, and race eroded communal land tenure and weakened Indigenous claims long before U.S. annexation. When American property law arrived after 1848, it did not create dispossession but formalized it.

Gómez describes the territory’s experience as one of double colonization; first under Spain and later under the United States. Each colonial order imposed its own hierarchy, with Europeans at the top, Indigenous peoples at the bottom, and mixed-race Mexicans occupying a precarious middle position. The American conquest did not erase this structure; it merely translated it into new legal and racial terms.

The American colonization of the region in the nineteenth century was grafted onto the Spanish colonization of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The Southwest developed in what I term a ‘double colonization’ context. Both the Spanish and American colonial regimes imposed a system of status inequality grounded in racial difference.

The United States’ annexation did not destroy this system; it re-inscribed it under a new language of citizenship and property. That new language was whiteness. The American racial order—organized less by a fluid caste spectrum than by a hard Black–white binary—translated older gradations into a new legal language of citizenship and property. In that schema, Mexican Americans, like other stigmatized European-leaning ethnic groups, were pressured to demonstrate proximity to whiteness to secure rights, land, and political standing.

As Gomez explains, the United States allowed Mexican men to enfranchise themselves “as ‘white’ rights-holders,” yet refused to accept them as “true Americans.” In response, many elite families emphasized their Spanish rather than Mexican or Indigenous ancestry, claiming descent from European forebears to distance themselves from the racialized “Mexican masses.” This performance of whiteness—what Gómez calls a “double colonization” identity, inherited from both Spanish and American racial orders—translated into political power and property security. The ideology of limpieza de sangre, or purity of blood, was not merely cultural memory; it became a social strategy for belonging within the new American hierarchy.

As Gómez and John Nieto-Phillips both show, this “Spanish-American” identity, anchored in the language of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood), offered a route to partial inclusion in the Anglo-dominated order. This concept was revived in territorial New Mexico as both a whitening strategy as well as a claim to belonging. For Hispano elites, asserting “Spanish” rather than Mexican or Indigenous ancestry signaled proximity to whiteness under American rule, but it also tied identity to land and historical legitimacy and was a way of proving rootedness in the very soil of New Mexico. In this sense, limpieza de sangre served simultaneously as racial performance and cultural geography: an effort to survive colonization by transforming ancestry into both property and patrimony. But that inclusion came at a cost: it required adopting and perpetuating a racial hierarchy that subordinated Indigenous and mixed-race people, and later, African Americans who migrated to the state.

Property was the mechanism through which this hierarchy became material. Gómez examines how citizenship and property rights were fused: to be white was to be a landowner, and to be a landowner was to be white. In the Southwest, law transformed racial identity into real estate. Amid widespread dispossession following U.S. annexation, a small class of Mexican elites, descendants of colonial landholders, retained or regained portions of their estates under American law, using property ownership as a means to assert whiteness and social respectability within the new racial order.

By aligning themselves with Anglo norms through landholding, education, and participation in territorial governance, these elites sought proximity to power while distancing themselves from Indigenous and poorer mestizo communities. Yet this strategy reinforced the very hierarchy that excluded most Mexicans: it legitimized conquest as a civilizing mission in which only “industrious” property owners merited citizenship, while the loss of communal land reduced others to dependency. In Gómez’s account, this transformation of land tenure was not merely legal or economic but a racial project, one that tied possession of land to belonging and turned whiteness itself into a form of property—sustaining the colonial logic of Manifest Destiny through the geography of ownership.

The process was circular: racial identity secured property, and property confirmed whiteness. For Hispano elites, defending their land titles after the U.S. annexation became synonymous with defending their racial status. As Gómez observes, “The more tenuous their property claims, the more fervently they proclaimed their Spanish ancestry.”

This racialized property regime which featured the conversion of bloodlines into deeds would become the foundation upon which Albuquerque’s (and much of New Mexico’s) twentieth-century zoning and land-use systems were built.

The Santa Fe Ring and the Racial Economy of Land

If the U.S. annexation re-inscribed colonial hierarchy through law, the late-nineteenth-century Santa Fe Ring translated that hierarchy into a machinery of land theft. A cartel of Anglo politicians, lawyers, and businessmen who dominated territorial government before statehood, the Ring operated New Mexico “as an overseas colony rather than a U.S. territory.” They enriched themselves through patronage, graft, and, above all, land speculation—stripping Hispano and Indigenous communities of thousands of acres through fraudulent claims and legal manipulation.

As historian Oliver Horn recounts in El Palacio magazine’s “The Cause of Every American Artist” (2021), members of the Ring justified their seizures by portraying communal landholding as backward and un-American. “By appropriating and breaking up community-owned land,” Horn writes, “they argued they were promoting private property ownership.” The destruction of Hispano ranchitos and Pueblo lands, communities that were often compact, mixed-use, and communal in nature, was framed as a civilizing act, an early expression of what would later become the moral economy of zoning: that private ownership equals progress, and that communal or collective use of land signals disorder. Early court cases involving land law in New Mexico found American judges incredibly confused by the concept of communal lands, leading to tense courtroom proceedings where judges demanded explanations as to how someone could own a home but not the property beneath it. Judgments after the conquest supported the formalization of private land ownership at the expense of Pueblo and Ranchito forms and ways of life.

When territorial rule gave way to statehood in 1912, the Ring’s formal power waned, but its worldview persisted. Its members resurfaced in 1921 around the notorious Bursum Bill, which sought to legalize Anglo and Hispano encroachments on Pueblo lands by granting titles to any non-Pueblo resident who could prove ten years’ occupancy. The bill was drafted by Senator Holm Bursum in collusion with former Ring leaders, Interior Secretary Albert Fall and attorneys Ralph Twitchell and A.B. Renehan, and backed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

The Bursum Bill’s supporters framed it as a matter of “regularizing property,” but its intent was unmistakable: to complete the project the Ring had begun. They hoped to unite Anglo ranchers and newly empowered Hispano voters in a shared claim to Pueblo territory. This was a cynical alliance of former colonizer and former colonized against the Indigenous.

“The privatization of Pueblo lands,” Horn notes, *“would benefit encroaching Anglo ranchers and corporate interests as well as roughly 5,000 Hispano families… The bill’s instigators cynically hoped that granting these people title to the land would garner support among the state’s newly empowered Hispano voters.”*

The backlash was swift. Pueblo leaders, joined by the Santa Fe and Taos artist colonies, mobilized a national campaign that ultimately defeated the bill. Their success marked a turning point and the beginning of federal retreat from overt assimilationist policy but it also birthed a new hierarchy. The same coalition that defended Pueblo culture simultaneously commodified it, transforming Santa Fe’s “Pueblo Revival” architecture and tourism industry into the economic engine of the new state. As Horn observes, “It marked the beginning of the tourism industry in New Mexico,” yet one that distilled Indigenous and Hispano culture into marketable aesthetics while the underlying inequalities remained.

The Bursum Bill fight prefigured the contradictions of modern zoning: a politics that celebrates cultural heritage while circumscribing who may inhabit it. The Ring’s moral language: private property as civilization, communal land as regression, survived into the twentieth century, reappearing in planning codes and “character” overlays that reward ownership and homogeneity. The dispossession that began with forged land grants found its bureaucratic afterlife in lot-size minimums and compatibility reviews. This new aesthetic order, as architectural historian Chris Wilson later chronicled in The Myth of Santa Fe, was as much an act of appreciation as of appropriation. Pueblo forms were adopted, but only on white terms: stylized for hotels, civic buildings, and single-family homes. The social architecture— the multi-family courtyards, shared workspaces, and adaptive, communal typologies that defined Pueblo life and life in the ranchitos— was left behind. What endured was not the substance of Indigenous urbanism but its façade, a transformation that recast local identity into a picturesque version of white America. The irony endures: the same forces of stasis that today decry any proposal not wrapped in Pueblo or Spanish façades will also protest anything that revives their actual forms, those shared courtyards, clustered dwellings, and flexible, human-scaled density. Style is celebrated; structure is suppressed.

The defeat of the Bursum Bill did not end the mythology of harmony; it helped invent it. By the 1920s, the state’s political and cultural elites were already marketing New Mexico as a land of “united cultures,” even as its land regime remained deeply unequal.

The Myth of Harmony and the Tri-Ethnic Trap

The myth that New Mexico escaped the racial brutality of the rest of the United States is nearly as old as the state itself. Anglos wrote of a “bloodless conquest”; Hispanos spoke of “perfect friendship.” Yet as Gómez insists,

“Over the course of the early twentieth century, the progressive view of race became entrenched as New Mexico’s official racial mythology and still resonates in today’s public discourse. As cultural anthropologist Sylvia Rodríguez aptly puts it, ‘The enduring and endearing cliché of New Mexico as a tourist mecca is tricultural harmony.’ … The theme of racial harmony is featured prominently, displacing the long complex history of intergroup conflict.”

The mythology of New Mexico as a region of peaceful racial harmony, the ‘bloodless conquest,’ conceals a violent and ongoing struggle over land and belonging. Anglo historians and Hispano elites alike have perpetuated this fiction to naturalize conquest and to mark whiteness as the invisible norm.

In practice, this “tri-cultural” narrative functioned less as inclusion than as containment. By naming three official groups—Anglo, Hispano, and Indian—it erased others (notably Black New Mexicans and East Asian New Mexicans) and obscured power differentials within the triad. Gómez calls this the tri-ethnic trap:

“New Mexico’s so-called tri-ethnic harmony—Anglo, Hispano, and Indian—was never an equilibrium but a hierarchy. It allowed Hispano elites to mediate between domination and subordination, appearing as victims of conquest while exercising privilege within it.”

Thomas Guthrie, in Recognizing Heritage: The Politics of Multiculturalism in New Mexico, extends this critique, arguing that the state’s multicultural branding—fiestas, heritage tourism, and preservationist policy—operates as a form of “managed diversity.” It celebrates cultural coexistence while maintaining existing hierarchies of land and power. Guthrie shows that this system not only reinforces Anglo dominance but also demands continuous cultural performance from Pueblo and Hispano communities as the price of political and social recognition. In the heritage economy, authenticity becomes a form of currency: Indigenous and Nuevomexicano people are expected to embody tradition to affirm New Mexico’s exceptional myth of harmony, while Anglos position themselves as patrons or curators of that culture.

These demands for authenticity, Guthrie writes, “constrain Hispanos and Indians, who benefit when they orient their lives to the past rather than the present or future.” The maintenance of visible tradition reassures New Mexicans that colonization has not been wholly destructive and contributes to the tri-cultural myth of harmony, but it also casts doubt on all cultural expression, generating anxieties about loss and purity that fall most heavily on subaltern groups. “They must convince others and themselves of their cultural integrity.” In this way, authenticity becomes both a survival strategy and a trap: it restricts participation in defining the state’s future and excludes those who do not fit its aesthetic of heritage: Black, Asian, mixed, working-class, and recently immigrated people (particularly immigrants from Mexico, who bear the racism of not being Spanish within the context of New Mexico’s racial hierarchy).

In Guthrie’s terms, multiculturalism in New Mexico has produced a paradoxical citizenship: one that celebrates diversity only insofar as it is legible through performance and nostalgia. This dynamic binds identity to the past while diverting attention from structural inequities in land, wealth, and governance: the very colonial hierarchies that persist beneath the surface of celebration.

This mythology continues to shape political discourse today. The 2021 New Mexico In Depth feature “Black Leaders Challenge Tri-Cultural Myth” notes that Black and Afro-Indigenous New Mexicans remain largely excluded from policy conversations about equity, housing, and heritage, precisely because the tri-cultural framework leaves no room for them.

When modern opponents of zoning reform preface their comments with “as a multigenerational New Mexican,” they invoke this same exceptionalism—the belief that local rootedness confers moral immunity from systemic critique. As Guthrie identifies, there is a cost to this as well to those within the community that look to different future ways of being. We’ve seen this pattern surface repeatedly in our Anatomy of NIMBYism series, particularly in our discussion of “Left-NIMBYism” in Barelas. There, appeals to authenticity and belonging played out within the community itself: Bareleñ@s who supported projects such as the Downtown stadium proposal, new housing near the railyards, or broader upzonings were accused of betraying the neighborhood. Their membership in the community, sometimes their very identity as Bareleñ@s, was questioned. As in Guthrie’s account of heritage politics, the demand to perform cultural purity became a mechanism of exclusion, turning “authenticity” into a test of loyalty rather than a basis for collective progress. Yet, on the basis of opposing reforms as a “multigenerational New Mexican,” as Gómez’s analysis makes clear, the endurance of racialized structures in New Mexico depends precisely on this confusion between identity and innocence.

From Segregation to “Character”: Albuquerque’s Zoning Regime

To trace how these older racial hierarchies became encoded in the built environment, one can turn to our “Abbreviated History of Land Use and Zoning” series. Across our three essays so far, the series reconstructs how national patterns of exclusion were localized in Albuquerque’s planning code.

Part I shows how the city’s early zoning ordinances of the 1920s and 1930s imported the language of the Federal Housing Administration’s underwriting manuals, which equated “order” and “compatibility” with property-value stability. Those manuals explicitly warned lenders against “inharmonious racial groups” and recommended “natural or artificial barriers” between racial classes. In Albuquerque, such phrasing became embedded in seemingly neutral zoning categories.

As Richard Rothstein documents in The Color of Law, the Federal Housing Administration institutionalized a new moral economy of property. The agency’s 1938 Underwriting Manual required appraisers to evaluate not only a home’s construction quality but the “social composition” of its neighborhood, warning that “incompatible racial and social groups” would inevitably lead to declining property values. Neighborhoods that were racially mixed or adjacent to minority areas were marked as “hazardous” on the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation’s redlining maps, effectively cutting them off from mortgage insurance.

Terms like “neighborhood character,” “protection of property values,” “contextual appropriateness,” and “compatible uses” emerged as sanitized proxies for racial exclusion. What had once been openly stated in racial terms—“inharmonious racial groups”—was rearticulated as a question of economic prudence and urban design. In Rothstein’s words, “government promoted the myth that the free market was responsible for segregation, when in fact segregation was created by explicit public policy.”

The new apparatus of neighborhood associations extended this logic into civic life. These organizations, often founded in the twentieth century to defend single-family zoning and property values, became the grassroots enforcement arms of segregation. They petitioned city governments to block “contextually inappropriate” developments, challenged apartment projects as “non-conforming uses,” and demanded “buffer zones” between “stable” single-family areas and “transitional” ones. The FHA Underwriting Manual itself codified this logic, declaring that neighborhoods zoned exclusively for single-family homes were “probably safe” investments—but only if they were reinforced by racial and land-use covenants administered through neighborhood associations. The language was professional and procedural, yet its function was unmistakable: to protect whiteness and middle-class property from perceived encroachment.

Albuquerque’s postwar zoning code mirrored these national patterns. As Reimagining Albuquerque’s Part II observes, renewal projects in South Broadway and Barelas displaced working-class and minority families while the FHA and VA underwrote mortgages in new suburbs like the Heights. The federal underwriting logic, that neighborhood stability equals racial homogeneity, became the city’s planning common sense.

The fusion of public policy and private enforcement took its most influential form in the neighborhood association. As Rothstein recounts, Kansas City developer J.C. Nichols pioneered the model in the early twentieth century, creating homeowner associations that required the consent of a supermajority of residents before any deed restriction could be altered. The purpose was explicit: to ensure that no individual homeowner could sell or rent to a Black family without collective approval. “The restriction,” Nichols wrote, “is effective only if it binds all owners equally.” By transforming racial exclusion into a community rule, Nichols helped naturalize segregation as civic responsibility.

This model spread nationwide during the 1930s and 1940s, reinforced by the FHA’s underwriting standards, which praised neighborhoods with “protective restrictions” and warned against those “without community control.” Across the country, associations and civic leagues used lawsuits and covenant enforcement to keep Black and other minority families out, often under the rhetoric of “maintaining stability” or “protecting investment.” Neighborhood Association and Civic League led lawsuits enforcing racial covenants was one of the primary enforcement mechanisms of segregation in the new racialized politics where overt segregation was no longer tolerated by the courts.

Albuquerque inherited this logic in subtler form. Today’s neighborhood associations and coalitions, though legally distinct, operate through a comparable grammar of control: demanding notification of every proposed change, public hearing, or new housing typology; mobilizing around “character,” “scale,” “compatibility”; and framing procedural vigilance as the essence of civic virtue. The goal is no longer explicitly racial, but the structure—the requirement that a clear majority consent before any change occurs—remains. The effect is the same: to give existing property owners veto power over newcomers (And, as heard frequently in zoning discussions in Albuquerque, the coded term “existing property owners” is used extensively). The form changed, from racially explicit covenants to procedurally framed veto points, but the function remained: give incumbent property owners collective control over who and what could enter.

What began as J.C. Nichols’s segregation covenant has become, through zoning procedure, a culture of permanent permission. The racial logic that once said “you may not live here” now says “we were not properly notified.” Today it echoes through calls that “residents should have input” and questions of “what about existing neighborhoods?” phrases that sound democratic but carry a massive social cost. This procedural veto locks out opportunity, treats newcomers as threats, and turns community participation into a form of defensiveness. In the name of stability, it freezes vitality; in the name of inclusion, it perpetuates exclusion. The result is a civic culture that mistakes vigilance for virtue and confuses fear with stewardship.

We often ask how the Trump era produced such suspicion, polarization, and fear of the other. But the groundwork was laid long before. It was poured into our streets, parcel maps, and zoning codes. We built physical environments that trained us to fear change and to equate safety with sameness. Long before politics turned openly xenophobic, our neighborhoods already had. We detailed in Part III how this logic has already led to neighborhood-led violence, when an apartment project led by a Black developer was the target of arson in Taylor Ranch. It is in Part III of our series that examines the late-century layering of procedural devices—“character protection overlays,” “areas of consistency,” and endless public appeals—that rebranded exclusion as “neighborhood stewardship.” These tools, still wielded today, translate social homogeneity into civic virtue.

As Rothstein documents in his book the federal roots of these practices showing how the FHA, Veterans Administration, and local zoning boards together constructed a nationwide architecture of segregation. Albuquerque was no exception. Its single-family zoning districts—R-1 and R-A—function as moral boundaries, preserving “character” in ways that mirrored earlier segregationist logic, even as they were defended as colorblind.

When residents today invoke “property values” or “compatibility,” they are not citing timeless economic truths. They are echoing a racial-financial equation written into law a century ago.

“Racial conflict in New Mexico was never absent, only obscured by polite language and the illusion of tri-cultural harmony. The legal system and the distribution of land grants performed the work of race even as public rhetoric denied its existence.” (Manifest Destinies)

The politeness of zoning hearings—the procedural civility, the language of “orderly growth”—is itself part of this longer tradition of polite exclusion.

Property, Race, and the Contemporary NIMBY

The 2025 zoning debates in Albuquerque offer a living case study of how these legacies persist. As the city considers lifting its ban on duplexes, cottage courts, and courtyard apartments, opponents argue that such reforms would “destroy neighborhood character” or “attack single-family homeowners.” These objections are framed as practical—about traffic, parking, and aesthetics—but their emotional force lies elsewhere: in the fear of property devaluation, the erosion of stability, the loss of control.

The real-estate appraiser’s testimony, “I’m insulted to be called a racist for wanting to protect my home,” captures the paradox of structural racism in New Mexico. A person may genuinely reject racial prejudice and yet defend a system whose very foundations are racialized. The bias is not an intruder; it’s built into the house itself. You can love your home, your block, your history and still help change rules built in another era for another purpose. Repair starts by telling the truth about the structure, not by indicting the people living inside it.

This dynamic reflects what scholars call structural or systemic racism: the persistence of inequality through institutions that no longer rely on overt discrimination. In zoning, the structure does the work. The exclusionary outcome does not depend on individual animus but on inherited design: large lots, single-family restrictions, bans on three and four floor homes, setbacks, the ban on multiple uses, and the conflation of neighborhood stability with homogeneity.

These dynamics are not confined to Albuquerque. When Las Cruces approved its new land-use code earlier this year, replacing exclusionary zoning with more flexible, inclusionary rules, Mayor Pro Tem Johana Bencomo addressed residents who had signed a petition opposing the reform. Her words cut directly to the heart of New Mexico’s ongoing reckoning with its spatial hierarchies:

“If you signed this petition because you are inherently against multifamily housing and diverse housing [types] going up in good neighborhoods with access to parks, I would ask you to consider where your segregationist tendencies come from.”

Bencomo’s statement echoed the very logic that Gómez, Rothstein, and Albuquerque’s own history reveal: that opposition to housing diversity is rarely about design alone. It is about protecting inherited advantages, be they racialized, spatial, and economic that masquerade as neighborhood character. In New Mexico, that reckoning carries particular weight, for it exposes how the myths of cultural harmony and “perfect friendship” can coexist with deeply segregated landscapes.

In Albuquerque, the racial implications of these patterns remain visible. According to housing assessments and point in time counts, Native American and Black residents are disproportionately rent-burdened and unhoused. Meanwhile, most neighborhoods zoned exclusively for single-family homes remain majority-white or Hispano middle class. The city’s supposed diversity coexists with rigid spatial segregation.

The defense of property values, then, is not racially neutral but the defense of an economic and moral order that has always been racialized. It is the language of what Gómez called the “legal transformation of racial identity into real estate.” When “protecting home value” becomes a civic duty, racial hierarchy no longer needs to speak its name.

The appropriation of Pueblo form in the literal shape of our homes thus mirrors the broader pattern that runs through New Mexico’s history, from the Santa Fe Ring’s legal “regularization” of land, to the tri-cultural myth’s moral “harmonization” of race. Each replaces conflict and plurality with an aesthetic of order. What cannot be assimilated (communal landholding, multi-family life, mixed neighborhoods) is translated into symbols that preserve hierarchy while appearing inclusive. In both Albuquerque and Santa Fe, even appeals to “agricultural character” perform this work: idealizing a vanished pastoral past to justify low-density zoning and resist change. It is a politics of façade that continues to shape our built environment today, fueling displacement and accelerating suburban sprawl overtop cultural lands.

This aesthetic politics takes its most local form in Albuquerque’s historic neighborhoods, where appeals to “agricultural character” and “historic integrity” often serve as a shield for exclusion. In areas once defined by Hispano ranchitos and Pueblo commons—shared, adaptive, and intergenerational landscapes—R-1 (and R-A) zoning has come to signify cultural stewardship. Yet this veneration of low-density, single-family form defies the very histories it claims to protect. What began as a language of preservation has hardened into a defensive localism: a protective NIMBYism that, out of legitimate fear of displacement, leans unknowingly into the aesthetics of whiteness.

The same debate plays out in distinct but connected ways across the city. In the North Valley, appeals to ranchito heritage now underpin opposition to new housing, even as once-rural parcels sell for well over a million dollars and are occupied by what some popularly decry as “McMansions.” In Barelas, by contrast, residents face the opposite danger: the neighborhood’s rich cultural identity and urban form, celebrated yet under-zoned, has become a likely magnet for speculative investment and displacement. In both cases, the rhetoric of preservation masks a deeper pattern: invoking history to resist the forms of density and diversity that could actually sustain these communities. In the North Valley, “heritage” defends exclusivity; in Barelas, “heritage” without upzoning could invite displacement.

The irony is devastating. By invoking heritage to resist even gentle density, residents reproduce the same scarcity and segregation that accelerate gentrification itself. The result is a mythologized landscape—one that confuses memory with exclusion, culture with property & form, and belonging with control, and continues to make housing hard to access for the indigenous residents that we claim to honor with pueblo revival and colonial architecture.

The Call from Inside the House: Systemic Racism and Local Innocence

If systemic racism operates through structures rather than slurs, confronting it requires a different kind of honesty. The question is not who is racist but how our systems (zoning codes, property regimes, and planning procedures) continue to distribute opportunity along racial lines.

In New Mexico, this is especially difficult because racial hierarchy has long been misrecognized as cultural heritage. As Gómez and Guthrie both note, the state’s pride in its “tri-cultural harmony” functions as an alibi for inequality. It allows residents to imagine that racism happens elsewhere—“back East,” “in the South,” “in big cities”—while ignoring the hierarchies embedded in their own institutions.

To acknowledge that these structures are racist is not to accuse individuals of malice. It is to recognize that we have inherited systems built on racialized foundations. The work of dismantling them is not moral indictment but civic repair. This is the meaning of structural reckoning: to understand that the violence of exclusion resides not in people’s hearts but in the blueprints of their neighborhoods, in the property lines drawn decades before they were born.

The sociologist’s lexicon calls this structural racism, but Hannah Arendt’s political vocabulary offers another lens: the banality of evil. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt observed that great harm is often carried out not by fanatics or ideologues, but by ordinary bureaucrats—people whose chief failure is not cruelty, but a lack of imagination and moral reflection. Adolf Eichmann, she wrote, was not a monster so much as “terrifyingly normal,” a man whose only talent was procedural obedience.

That insight applies beyond the extremity of genocide to the moral quietness of municipal governance. Zoning hearings, appeals boards, and planning commissions function through the same habits of proceduralism Arendt diagnosed: rules are followed, forms are filled, “character” is preserved while injustice continues unexamined. People die on the street, shocked by cold or heat, murdered by others, or simply forgotten and ignored by society. The duplex, cottage court, three-story 8-plex, or five-over-one simply didn’t comply with the zoning code or didn’t respect the “scale” of the area. The evil is banal precisely because it hides behind bureaucracy.

In Albuquerque, as in much of America, the harm of exclusion rarely comes with malice; it comes with a smile, a process, and a checklist. And it is in this code and bureaucracy that the violence of segregation has quietly continued as we slowly work to deconstruct and replace it with a system based on open access to capital and equity in outcomes.

When multigenerational New Mexicans, or any garden-variety opponent of zoning, housing, and land use reform say, “We just want to protect our homes,” they are often protecting a system that once excluded others from homeownership altogether. The path forward lies not in shame but in responsibility—in seeing that the very tools once used to protect “stability” can now be repurposed to create belonging.

Toward a Politics of Healing and Inclusion

Returning to the state pledge, the aspiration of “perfect friendship among united cultures” need not be dismissed as hypocrisy. It can be reimagined as a promise still waiting to be fulfilled. But realizing it requires more than symbolic unity; it demands structural honesty.

A city that builds only for some will never belong to all. When we legalize duplexes, cottage courts, and courtyard apartments, when we move beyond arbitrary lot sizes, setbacks, and height limits, we are not erasing heritage—we are expanding it and celebrating the very pueblo typologies we already claim to honor. We are making room for the generations who have been excluded, for renters, newcomers, and those for whom the myth of perfect friendship was never real.

Gómez reminds us that the work of race is often done by law and policy even as “public rhetoric denies its existence.” To undo that work, we must be willing to name it and to see how systems that appear neutral continue to distribute privilege.

Charles Marohn, founder of Strong Towns, often says that local resilience begins with humility, with admitting that the systems we built are not working and must change. In Albuquerque, that humility begins with history: with recognizing that our zoning code is not merely a technical document but a living record of our racial past pre-dating the United States itself.

As Rothstein reminds us in The Color of Law, segregation was not an accident of private prejudice or market forces; it was made by law and policy, which means it can be unmade by law and policy. The point of recovering this history is not to assign personal shame or wallow in victimhood, but to create the civic will to repair what government intentionally built. The point isn’t to prove who is or isn’t a racist; it’s to decide whether our rules still do racist work. If they do (and they do), we change the rules. When we treat “property values” and “neighborhood character” as neutral, we mistake the effects of past choices for natural facts. Naming those choices is how communities move from denial to design and away from inherited horror and toward public commitments that widen belonging. As Las Cruces Mayor Pro Tem Bencomo implied, the question is less “Do you like apartments?” than “Who deserves access to good neighborhoods?”

A repair agenda in land use is therefore not punitive; it is restorative. It looks like legalizing gentle density, compact development, and lifting height and parking restrictions in high-opportunity places; ending procedural vetoes that resegregate by delay; targeting infrastructure and housing investments to communities long excluded from mortgage credit; and measuring success not only in units and assessments, but in who gets to live near parks, schools, transit, and jobs. None of this erases heritage. It fulfills it.

Las Cruces has quietly drawn a roadmap for what baseline zoning justice can look like in New Mexico. A multicultural, multilingual, and gender-diverse council in our second largest city said it would no longer be complicit in exclusionary zoning and rejected the acceptability of exclusionary zoning practices. The stakes aren’t abstract: under today’s rules, working-class residents, hispanos, and Pueblo citizens are pushed farther from jobs and schools; Santa Fe’s service workers commute from Española, and Los Alamos relies on long daily drives from as far as Rio Rancho; displacement shows up as overcrowding, homelessness, and sprawl. Justice means moving beyond the frameworks that produced those outcomes.

If we can hold both truths, the harm that was done and the friendship we still aspire to, we might yet create a city worthy of our state’s pledge: one where the friendship among cultures is not perfect, but real.

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