THE TIMES’ FOREIGN BUREAU
It’s been a banner season for epic “50s.” First, The Bachelor visited Santa Fe and bachelorette Megan Bell was recorded on camera saying, “I’m so excited! I’ve never been out of the country. It’s gonna be awesome.” Then the venerable New York Times Magazine featured a globe on one of its February 22 covers that labeled the land between Texas and Arizona “Mexico.” (So many readers mailed us their copies of the covers that we could wallpaper an office with them.)

The cover was created by two Italian artists. The Times has averred that their foreign perspective played a role in the goof, but as Sandy Partridge wrote on Facebook, “Funny that they blame Italians. Various friends from around the world have never thought NM was part of Mexico. I have always been amazed that they knew more about our country than many of our own citizens.”

Zingers started pinging our Facebook page and the state tourism department’s, where the meme in the upper right corner of this page first appeared.

“So ... How many people think New England is actually a part of England?”

“NEW York: We are NEW Mexico.”

“I guess the country of Mexico annexed part of the USA when we weren’t looking.”

“Heck. Maybe we aren’t so new anymore. We’ve been a state since 1912.”

We understand that this cover gaffe was an honest mistake—artistic license, even— but a March 7 New York Times travel story on the Mora Valley did little to convince us that the paper is very familiar with our state’s geography. A piece on the Mora River Valley referred to it as “a surprisingly lush region that during summer looks more like the foothills of the Swiss Alps than the mesas and deserts you’d expect in New Mexico.”

¡Ay, caramba!

SEND US YOUR STORY—PLEASE!
Send your “Missing” anecdotes to fifty@nmmagazine. com or Fifty, New Mexico Magazine, 495 Old Santa Fe Trail, Santa Fe, NM 87501. Include your name, home-town, and state. Thanks!