State Plates
The New Mexico Income Plate
In New Mexico, income is where the atlas's population counts meet household economics. This plate places Black New Mexico in the national income geography: the benchmarks below are the published national figures for Black households, and New Mexico's own 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
In New Mexico, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table below. Median household income is the most widely used single measure of a population's economic position, and for Black households in the United States the Census Bureau's annual income report places the figure at $56,490. Against the national midpoint, the rows below say how New Mexico's households stand.
The income figures take their local meaning in New Mexico, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark describes. Household income counts the combined money income of everyone aged 15 and over living in the home — wages, salaries, self-employment income, Social Security, pensions, interest, and cash benefits — before taxes. An atlas benchmark earns its place by locating New Mexico, never by ranking it.
In New Mexico, that national income pattern is read against the state's own households, whose published share and count stand in the table below. The national median household income in the same report is $77,719. Against that benchmark, the Black median of $56,490 is about 73 cents on the dollar. New Mexico's rows, read against the national midpoint, state the standing of its households.
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 figures, labeled as benchmarks. In New Mexico, the plate makes no state income estimate of its own — it sets the state's population, counted exactly, beside the national income record, measured exactly, which is the honest first step of any income geography.
The Population Behind the Plate
The income figures take their local meaning in New Mexico, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark 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. The general record is background; the local one — New Mexico's, in the table — is the subject.
The income figures take their local meaning in New Mexico, where the table's state rows set the population this benchmark 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 states New Mexico's record plainly; the general record matters only as it sharpens that statement.
Residents moving between states — domestic migration — are the stream that built and rebuilt Black geographies across a century and a half, New Mexico's among them. Read against the population counted on the distribution plate, the national median describes the economic center of gravity of the community that New Mexico's 75,000 Black residents belong to. Holding the structure still while the numbers move is the gazetteer's work — the only way an atlas stays honest across editions, for New Mexico as for every entry.
An atlas is patient with its subjects. In New Mexico, the income geography of Black America changes at the speed of households — of graduations, hires, diagnoses, incorporations, and moves — and the federal surveys that measure it publish on their own calendars. What does not change between releases is the structure this plate records: a counted population in New Mexico, a measured national pattern, and the standing invitation to read the two together, state by state, until the whole country has been read that way. That is the work of this section of the atlas, and the New Mexico Income plate is one page of it.
| 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 median household income, Census Bureau annual report | $56,490 |
| United States benchmark — Black median household income per $1 of the national median | 73 Cents |
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Income in the United States (Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement); American Community 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.