edelsont | I'm back from New Mexico

Actually, I've been back a while -- almost as long as I was away, but not quite. (The time that I was away from home was a little over three weeks.)

I spent time in three towns in New Mexico: Santa Fe, Las Vegas, and Taos. (Yes, there's a Las Vegas in New Mexico, not to be confused with the one in Nevada. New Mexico's is smaller, but considerably older.) My number-one purpose for making this trip was to help me decide whether I want to live in one of those places.

So what's the verdict? Well, in brief, there isn't one yet. I still like the idea of living in the "Land of Enchantment," as New Mexico calls itself, but there are other alternatives which won't let themselves be ruled out yet. There are a lot of factors to be considered. Weather is one, but also cultural and even political factors.

Under "culture," you could include my sense of whether I would be able to make friends in a particular place. But once I start thinking about that, then I also have to consider that it would be better if there were some people there -- or not too far away -- whom I already knew. Friends or relatives, either or both.

Now as for politics ... well. I have the impression that the political landscape in New Mexico is rather distinctive. I don't mean more to the left, or more to the right, than the rest of the country; it's more a matter of the fault lines being different. People's politics depend to a considerable degree on what group they identify themselves with.

Lately, it's become fashionable to use the word "tribe" instead of "group" in discussions of American politics. That already points to one of the ways that New Mexico is atypical; "tribe" probably suggests something different in a New Mexican context, because of the relatively large Native American population of the state. The 2010 census reported that 9.4% of New Mexicans were Native American, more than any other state except Alaska.

(To translate the previous paragraph into Canadian, substitute "First Nations" for "Native American[s]".)

That's only one small example of how the social landscape, and therefore the political landscape, of New Mexico is distinctive. For now, I shall let it stand for the whole.

And for the moment, the distinctiveness of New Mexican society will, in turn, stand in for a larger whole: the mass of issues that so far have prevented me from making a real decision about where I want to live.