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:: The Mesilla Valley
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General Ben Viljoen, a Boer immigrant to the Mesilla Valley, New Mexico. 1904.
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The Snymans, Boer farmers in the Mesilla Valley, rest on their alfalfa stack, ca. 1910.
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Once known as the "Garden" or "Eden" of New Mexico, the Mesilla Valley, located around present-day Las Cruces, has long attracted settlers and colonists to its fertile lands. Farmers irrigate their crops from the meandering Rio Grande by opening a channel (or, in the past, breaking the dirt banks of the irrigation ditch) to flood their fields. Today, the region is best known for its pecans and chile peppers, but immigrants and locals alike have raised a number of crops for more than 150 years.
Into this region, in 1905, came a number of destitute but enterprising Boers, or white South Africans of Dutch and French Huguenot descent. No longer citizens of their vanquished Boer Republics, after the Anglo-Boer War, they formed a colony in Chihuahua, Mexico, and upon its failure, then drifted into the Mesilla Valley.
They became known for their irrigation expertise and large alfalfa harvests, and some of them played important roles in the development of Elephant Butte Dam and in the Mexican Revolution. In short, their story fits well within the region's long history as a borderland. The valley, in the south of New Mexico, was a new homeland for colonists of every kind. Mexico once sought colonists to maintain a semblance of control on its northern frontier. The land itself became part of the United States only with the Gadsden Purchase (1853), and boosters soon proclaimed the region a farmer's paradise, especially with the coming of the railroad in 1881.
Long tied to the histories of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, the Mesilla Valley provides a wonderful case study for historians looking into U.S. empire, colonization, and state-making along the border.
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