State Plates
The Black Population of New Mexico
About 75,000 Black New Mexicans — one in twenty-eight residents — between Albuquerque and a frontier history of Black towns and regiments. The census profile.
Distribution Across the State
New Mexico holds about 75,000 Black residents — Black alone or in combination — roughly one in twenty-eight of its people, with Black alone at about 44,000, or 2.1 percent. The population is small in one of the nation's most distinctly composed states (majority Hispanic and Native in its overall data), and its history is the frontier West's: Buffalo Soldier regiments on the border forts, an all-Black town on the Pecos plains, and a modern community centered in Albuquerque and the military cities of the south.
Albuquerque holds roughly half of Black New Mexico: the city is about 3 to 4 percent Black (some 18,000 to 20,000 residents), centered historically in the South Broadway and Martineztown districts and now spread through the Northeast Heights and the west side, employed by Kirtland Air Force Base, the national laboratories' service economy, the university, and the state government. The military south holds the second layer: Alamogordo (Holloman AFB) and Clovis (Cannon AFB) record Black shares in the high single digits on their bases' workforces; Las Cruces, the second city, is roughly 3 to 4 percent Black with New Mexico State's community; Roswell records a small share with the Blackdom legacy in its county; Santa Fe's Black population is small and professional in composition. The tribal and Hispanic majorities of the state's northern counties leave Black shares under 1 percent nearly everywhere else.
The State on the National Plate
On the national plate, New Mexico sits in the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent. Its Black alone share of 2 percent — 44 of the fifty-one geographies mapped — stands against a national figure of 13.5 percent, and its Black population, 75,000 alone or in combination, is one of the building blocks of the national total of 52.8 million. An atlas reads New Mexico two ways at once: by the size of its community, and by that community's weight inside the whole population. New Mexico is legible on both readings, and this section of the atlas holds the two side by side.
Where the general meets the particular is the table of New Mexico; read the two together. In New Mexico's band — the lightest band on the plate, under 6 percent — the shaded peers include Alaska, Arizona, Colorado and Hawaii. In New Mexico, banding is a cartographer's compromise: it trades precision for pattern, letting the eye take in the geography of a whole country at once. The table restores the precision the shading rounds away, carrying the published share and count for New Mexico exactly as the source agency releases them.
In New Mexico, every figure on this plate descends from the federal count of the whole population — the decennial census and the American Community Survey that updates it between census years. Those instruments count everyone, which is what makes a share meaningful: 2 percent is not a sample of Black New Mexico, it is Black New Mexico measured against all of New Mexico. In New Mexico, the atlas's other plates return to this population again and again, because income, schooling, health, and ownership are all attributes of the people counted here, in this place, first.
The heritage layer is formally recognized: the state's Black history sites — the Blackdom townsite marker, the Buffalo Soldier memorials at the fort cemeteries, Albuquerque's Fairview Cemetery Black section, and the state museum's African American programs — anchor a heritage trail proportionate to the frontier record, and the state's centennial-era scholarship has made New Mexico's Black frontier one of the better-documented small populations in the western literature.
New Mexico's 75,000 Black residents are the frontier profile complete: regiments, a Black town, and bases — a population whose history is written in the state's most distinctive chapters and whose present is Albuquerque's modest share. In a state defined demographically by its Hispanic and Native majorities, Black New Mexico is the third strand, oldest in uniform and smallest in number.
Reading This Plate
In New Mexico, read the table from the top: the share first, because the share is what the map shades; then the count, because the count is what the share is made of. Shares and counts answer different questions. The share says how present Black life is in the everyday population of New Mexico; the count says how much of Black America lives there. Both are published figures, rounded as the source agency publishes them, and both are the ground every other New Mexico plate in this atlas stands on.
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| Black share of the state population (alone) | 2% |
| Black share, alone or in combination | 3.5% |
| Black residents, alone or in combination | 75,000 |
| Black residents of the United States, alone or in combination (Census Bureau population estimates) | 52.8 million |
| Black share of the United States population, alone (population estimates) | 13.5% |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 Census; American Community Survey; Population Estimates Program. Method: Figures are drawn from the published federal sources named on this page, for the geography named; tile shading bands the published Black population share into the five legend classes. Counts are rounded as published by the source agency, and national benchmark rows are labeled with the basis they are published on.