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This year, Route 66 turns 100 years old, and the state is all atwitter about it. I, myself, am something of a Route 66 enthusiast. From 2013 to 2017, I co-produced a large, multi-day rockabilly music festival and car show in Tucumcari called Rockabilly on the Route. I also self-published a magazine around that time called La Loca, which focused heavily on Americana and nostalgia.
While Socorro is not positioned along Route 66, its centennial got me thinking about trails, in general, especially last week when I got to witness the installation of the first Camino Real marker in Socorro County.
Long before Route 66 earned its nickname as the “Mother Road,” New Mexico was already a land shaped by trails. For centuries, Indigenous peoples established roads and trade routes that didn’t all disappear with time; they became the foundation for the roadways that followed. These routes connected the continent and crossed what would eventually become borders. Archaeologists have found evidence of cacao (raw chocolate) in the Southwest, and parrot feathers are still prominently used by many Pueblos during dances and ceremony.
The Camino Real, the Santa Fe Trail, and the Old Spanish Trail all layered new purposes onto ancient routes, carrying people, animals, religions, governments, and economies into the region. In a recent discussion with New Mexico State Historian Robert Martinez, he told me that Route 66, established in 1926, was simply the twentieth-century version of a much older story.
As Route 66 traced these historic corridors, it brought dramatic change to Pueblo, Navajo, and Hispanic communities along the way. For Indigenous communities, the highway opened access to national markets for pottery, jewelry, and art, while also inviting tourism that sometimes intruded on cultural privacy. For Hispanic towns such as Tucumcari, Santa Rosa, Albuquerque, and Gallup, Route 66 created roadside economies and accelerated cultural blending. Martinez described these trails as the “life’s blood of New Mexico,” places where cultures met, adapted, and reshaped one another.
Route 66 also left its mark on the landscape itself, cutting through farmland, pueblos, and villages, often without local consent. Yet Martinez framed this disruption within a deeper historical truth: “People have been coming here and changing us for centuries.” Roads, like ideas, move in both directions. Those who arrive are changed as much as the places they enter.
Seen this way, Route 66 is not an outlier but a continuation—a modern trail laid atop ancient ones. Together, these paths tell the story of New Mexico: a place defined not by isolation, but by connection, resilience, and the enduring power of movement across land.
