BorderWest

Still Kicking and Las Cruces’ Downtown Planning

By Rebecca Powell, 8-06-08

	Farmer's Market Downtown

We have returned from Oklahoma.

We have moved to a new neighborhood.

We have realized that having cut our possessions in half just one short year ago we could still stand another halving.

And the world of Las Cruces turns. Urban planning specialists led Las Cruces residents through a series of workshops, designed to create a plan for continuing the downtown revival. On a bright, warm Monday night, we stopped by the Rio Grande Theater to attend the first meeting. The foyer was packed. Exquisitely dressed and bejeweled women age forty and above sampled wines, cheese and conversation. The men wore standard issue khakis and buttoned shirts. In true New Mexico fashion, a few men sported shorts and tan legs. Two or three couples appeared to be in their twenties.  The crowd was overwhelmingly white.

The last sentence would not be a revelation in our last home, Kalispell, Montana, where my white husband and child were often asked their ethnicity because they have brown eyes and some tint to their skin, but this is Las Cruces, New Mexico. Hispanics are fifty percent of the population. Go downtown to the Farmer’s Market Saturday morning and languages collide, mix, and make a kind of music as speakers seamlessly switch from Spanish to English and back again.  The mix of cultures is one of Las Cruces’ great strengths. So where is it when it comes to planning the future of downtown?

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