Students of New Mexican educational history equate not only race but religion with the early denials of access to the concepts of Anglo learning. Jane C. Atkins, author of a 1982 prize-winning UNM dissertation, detected a Protestant bias against the predominantly Catholic faith of the Hispano population. William G. Ritch, a Wisconsin native appointed territorial secretary in 1873, told his superiors in Washington that Catholicism was rife with “superstition,” and that “the Church wanted to keep its communicants ignorant.” Ritch voiced the sentiments of the notorious “Santa Fe Ring” of merchants, lawyers, landowners, and federal officials of New Mexico’s Gilded Age who saw little value in uplifting the masses when the territory’s resources and labor provided the “Ring” with economic and political opportunity.

Not until the arrival in the 1880s of the transcontinental railroad did competing ideas of economic development touch New Mexico. Even then, the focus upon Anglo superiority would go unquestioned.

One example was the pronouncement of William Hazeldine, a judge in the small community of New Albuquerque, east of the heavily Hispano Old Town along the Rio Grande. He spoke at the ceremony in April 1880 honoring the completion of the rail line from Kansas City to central New Mexico, remarking that its presence meant that “knowledge, education, and advancement and progress shall be the right of our people.”

Hazeldine’s prediction came true within months of the opening of New Mexico to rapid transportation to and from the East. One of the earliest educators to step off the train was Charles E. Hodgin, a young Quaker from Indiana who would teach for twelve years (1885-1897) in the Albuquerque Public Schools (APS), and then serve UNM for the next 28 years (1897-1925) in a variety of capacities.

Retiring with the old UNM administration building [posthumously] named in his honor, Hodgin was painfully honest about the multicultural world revolving around Albuquerque. In a 1907 letter to a friend in Terre Haute, Indiana, he wrote that teaching in the New Mexican town was “the hardest work of my life.” While conditions were typical of most frontier locale’s (isolation, distance, a transient population, and poverty), Hodgin considered ethnicity to be his greatest challenge in New Mexico. He labored to “bring system out of a chaotic and cosmopolitan condition,” which he attributed to the amalgamation in his classes of “Mexicans, Indians, Negroes, Chinamen, etc., along with representatives of the more highly developed nationalities.”?, Without knowing it, the venerable Hodgin described one of the ironies of New Mexican ethnic history, and one which historians have yet to address in much detail: how modernization only exacerbated the class and ethnic differences in the territory. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the “Duke City” of the late nineteenth century. Since the days of the fur trappers and traders, the Hispano elite, known as “ricos,” had joined with Anglo newcomers to secure economic advantage from the growing urban-industrial society of the East. New Mexican scholars write often about tension between the races, but less so about the alliance of Hispano and Anglo in the making of the Gilded Age economy.

This led to an interesting debate in the territorial legislature in the winter of 1888-89, as the young Irish lawyer Bernard S. Rodey introduced legislation to create the first New Mexican network of higher education. Upon the official “reading” of the “Omnibus Bill,” several Hispano lawmakers realized that Anglo-dominated communities had secured the choice facilities: Las Cruces for the land-grant school (the future New Mexico State University) and Albuquerque for the liberal arts campus.

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