Admitted to the union in 1912 as the 47th state, New Mexico was inhabited by Native Americans for thousands of years before the first European explorers showed up. When the Europeans came in the late 1500s, it was the Spanish who arrived first. They named the territory Nuevo Mexico, after the Valley of Mexico in the Aztec civilization. This naming was done more than 250 years before the modern-day country of Mexico was founded, so the state is not named after that country.
Mexico was a Spanish colony until 1824 when Mexico declared independence and took the territory for its own. It then transferred to the ownership of the United States in 1848 after the Mexican-American War and remained a U.S. territory until it was made a state. It has a lot of folklore associated with its long and storied history. Here are some of the highlights of it.