State Plates
The New Mexico Health Plate
In New Mexico, health plates turn on coverage and prevalence — who is insured, and what conditions a population carries. This plate places Black New Mexico in the national health geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black Americans, and New Mexico's distribution figures — 75,000 Black residents, 2 percent of the state — give the scale of the community those national patterns describe within the state's borders.
The National Pattern
For New Mexico, the national health figures are the frame; the state's own distribution, tabled below, is the picture inside it. About one in ten Black Americans — roughly 9 to 10 percent in the Census Bureau's annual coverage report — has no health insurance at all, a rate above the national figure and above the White rate. In New Mexico, the comparison the plate invites is therefore two-sided: the national coverage pattern on one side, the state's system on the other.
The coverage figures take their local form in New Mexico, where the state rows below set the population behind the national pattern. Rates in this article are for the full population unless stated; nonelderly rates run higher than the all-ages figures because Medicare covers nearly everyone past 65 — one reason the Black uninsured problem is concentrated among working-age adults, as the age breakdown below shows. Not to rank New Mexico but to locate it — that, in an atlas, is the use of a benchmark.
In New Mexico, that national coverage pattern runs through the state's own insurance market and care system, and the table below fixes the population it describes. Employer-sponsored insurance is the largest single source, covering about half of Black Americans, through their own jobs or a family member's — a share below the White figure, reflecting the employment and occupational data of this reference: fewer Black workers in the large-firm, high-benefit sectors, more in service, temporary, and small-employer jobs where offers of coverage are thinner. Held against the national midpoint, New Mexico's own rows say how its households stand.
Reading This Plate
How to read this plate: the state rows are the published census figures for New Mexico; the benchmark rows are the published national health record, labeled as benchmarks. In New Mexico, health measures are survey-based, so the plate carries the survey sources on its face and treats the national pattern as the frame inside which state health agencies publish their own state-level readings.
The Population Behind the Plate
In New Mexico, that national coverage pattern runs through the state's own insurance market and care system, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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. Against the table, the national pattern sharpens into the particular numbers of New Mexico.
In New Mexico, that national coverage pattern runs through the state's own insurance market and care system, and the table below fixes the population it describes. 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 table is where the general pattern becomes New Mexico's own figures.
In New Mexico, coverage is the gateway measure: it decides whether the rest of the health system is reachable at ordinary cost. The national Black coverage record, carried here as the benchmark, is the product of federal and state policy layered over the population this atlas counts — and in New Mexico that population numbers 75,000. In New Mexico, prevalence measures, from hypertension to diabetes, sit downstream of coverage, which is why this plate leads with the insurance record.
How this plate is read, for New Mexico: begin with the map, whose shading bands the published Black share into the legend's five classes, then turn to the table, which states the measures in figures — Black share of the state population (alone): 2%; Black share, alone or in combination: 3.5%. In New Mexico, the two presentations are one record in two forms, and a reader who checks one against the other has the plate's whole method in hand.
| 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 |
| United States benchmark — Black Americans without health insurance coverage, approximately | 1 in 10 |
| United States benchmark — Black Americans covered by Medicaid, approximately — and about one in three Black children | 1 in 5 |
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System; U.S. Census Bureau, Health Insurance Coverage in the United States (Current Population Survey). 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.