November at UNM

November was a quieter period, as university work became more concerted. The period between San Francisco and the end of the month marked the longest stretch of time I spent without leaving New Mexico. Consequently, this post will focus more closely on life at UNM, an important piece of my time in the USA that I have largely neglected to mention thus far.

The beginning of November marked the start of the basketball season, something which really excited me. It is worth noting that despite my negative comments about American Football, I am not critical of American sport in general. Basketball in particular attracted me because I appreciate the near-constant, flowing action of the sport, as opposed to the fragmented gameplay of American Football. Secondly, as someone who endeavoured to witness as much of London 2012 as possible, I was already well aware that basketball is great to watch. In addition, UNM's Lobo team is one of the top teams in the USA and therefore their games promised a high level of skill and a strong likelihood of a home victory.

The first game I attended was a friendly against Eastern New Mexico, which resulted in an 87-68 win for the Lobos, and the consistently dramatic play was coupled with a great atmosphere in the Lobos' stadium, The Pit. With the court sunk into the ground, the stands literally occupied a pit, and the whole arena was a sea of red, all chanting for the home side and performing distracting hand gestures to put off the other team during free throws. As a Brit, I couldn't help but feel that some of the gamesmanship of the spectators was a little unsporting, and the 'who's that?', 'who cares?' chant when the opposition team players were announced was also pretty rude. Nevertheless, I fully entered into the spirit of things and found the experience wholly more enjoyable than the American Football game earlier in the term.

UNM (in white) v. Eastern New Mexico

A Pepsi-endorsed airship circled The Pit during breaks in play

UNM (in grey) v. Alabama A&M

I returned to The Pit the following week for the proper season opener, against Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University. I had thought the atmosphere in the previous game was as good as it got, especially as the match was against another New Mexican team. I was definitely mistaken, though, for the start of the competitive season meant that the crowd was even noisier and more supportive than before. Thankfully the game lived up to this hype and UNM romped home to an 88-52 victory, with very strong indication for much of the contest that the hosts would score twice as many points as the visitors. I was able to attend the next game as well, a far closer contest but once more, The Pit lived up to its advertised reputation as the best sporting venue in New Mexico. Charleston Southern University gave UNM a much closer run for their money, but a period in which UNM scored several unanswered baskets proved decisive, as they won again with a 109-93 scoreline. At the time of writing, the UNM Lobos have a 5:1 win:loss record and an average of 85 points per game. Having witnessed firsthand the basketball team's skill and the unique setting in The Pit, I wholeheartedly hope that UNM will win tournaments this season!

The week after this third basketball game heralded the arrival of proper winter weather with a cold snap that saw temperatures below zero punctuated with snow and ice, and I found myself wearing thermals under my trousers and at least five layers at all times! In an attempt to warm up, my friends and I went karting one evening. I had only really done this once before, aged fourteen in a Belgian car park entirely uninfluenced by health and safety. Growing up watching Formula One for as long as I can remember, my sporting idol was always Mika Häkkinen, but when I received my stat sheet after the race I had not quite emulated my hero. My lap times were either fast and error-free or very slow owing to a number of spins on the same section of track due to my being over-zealous with the accelerator in the run-up to one corner. Despite this, I was awarded the winning position in my heat due to the fact that I posted the fastest lap time, achieved on my final circuit. This was definitely a worthy accolade although the lack of consistency would certainly hamper my racing career and I am sceptical that I am ever likely to progress to an F1 car!

International karting exhibition!

A marshal rushes over to intervene once more in my fast but incident-filled race!

The majority of November, however, was taken up by classwork with the final assignments prior to the exam period in December. I took four classes at UNM, all history, and all of which related to North America as I felt that to be geographically most relevant. (There were some interesting classes about Europe on offer but it seemed counter-intuitive to travel 5,000 miles and then study the Renaissance or similar!)

One class was entitled 'History of Early Mexico' and involved studying Central America over the course of about a thousand years, from the pre-colonial period through to Mexican independence in the early nineteenth century. Special focus was given to the period of the Spanish Conquest, from 1519 onwards, and also to colonial Mexico. The course was very interesting in terms of how society in medieval Spain was reflected in Mesoamerica and in how race relations were presented, with colonial Mexico being a largely tolerant and inclusive multi-cultural place. Meanwhile, this was relevant to my location in New Mexico because although the main focus was in the region of Central Mexico, where Mexico City (formerly Tenochtitlán) is situated, New Mexico was a part of New Spain and then Mexico until its 1848 takeover by the USA.

This event marked the temporal starting point of another of my classes, 'New Mexico since 1848', which detailed the complex federal and state processes that have shaped New Mexico during the 165 years it has been a part of the USA and the 101 years it has been a state. Much of this involved disputes over land; New Mexico has a land area one-and-a-half times the size of the UK but with only two million people, with white Anglo-Americans, Spanish- and Mexican-Americans and indigenous groups (such as the Navajo) being the main ethnic claimants to this land. This course involved a research project, for which I studied the left-wing Hispanic nationalist movement based in northern New Mexico during the 1960s and 1970s.

This again connected with a third class, 'the 20th Century American West', due to the emergence of various civil rights movements in the West during the 1960s, like the Black Power movement, much of which came from Oakland in California. This class detailed a wide range of events and processes in the American West, including the birth of national parks, construction of the railroads, Asian emigration to California, the development of the atomic bomb, the oil industries of Texas and California, relations with indigenous communities and a host of other factors that have shaped the USA as it is today. The sheer interconnectedness of all these events was extremely absorbing, made all the more applicable to me by the fact that I visited a number of the places mentioned during the course of my travels.

Finally, I took a class called 'US Military History to 1900'. This had a background in Ancient Greece and Rome but predominantly revolved around the American Revolution, the War of 1812 and the American Civil War. Whilst much of this was based on the east of the country, New Mexico cropped up as well in the context of the Texas Revolution and the Mexican-American War. This war led to the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, a set of terms imposed by the powerful USA against the defeated Mexico, by which Mexico ceded 55% of its land area to the USA, including California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Wyoming and Colorado, thus linking this class back to my study of the history of New Mexico.

Having taken all these classes for the best part of four months, I can honestly say that I fully enjoyed every one of them, but also that the format of these classes differed greatly from my experience at Exeter last year. I am used to the British lecture/seminar system of university, but the classes here were organised more like school classrooms. The secondary readings that supplemented the courses were discussed to some degree, but with far less scrutiny than in seminars at home and the regular group presentations that were a key element of my first year at university were non-existent. There was some level of analysis but on the whole, the format of the classes involved learning and reciting historical information, rather than really challenging historical sources and closely considering the manner in which history is conducted. This is not to suggest that classes here were somehow easier or less stimulating than at Exeter, but rather to highlight that the study of history at UNM is far more different to Exeter than I was expecting.