By Joline Gutierrez Krueger
Tribune Reporter

In the cities and rural reaches of New Mexico, a child is born - about 74 a day, more than 27,000 a year.

They all get birth certificates with the Great Seal of New Mexico stamped on them.

They all get another welcome - to the Land of Poverty.

New Mexico is the nation's poorest state, with 19 percent of its households living below the poverty level, according to the most recent census figures.

In our far-flung and largely rural state of 1.8 million residents, poverty is not about ghettos and slums. But it's still a tough existence in nearly all of New Mexico's 33 counties - especially for children, many who are born poor and will die poor.

Before the tiny and precious infants born today draw their first breaths, a fifth of them already are at risk for a host of dysfunctions and societal ills that are as pervasive in New Mexico as the dust that rolls across its harsh and haunting countenance.

They are the next generation of New Mexicans born to families in poverty. And there are many of them - more poor children per capita in New Mexico than in any other state, according to both the Children's Defense Fund and Kids Count, two national organizations that measure the statistical well-being of children.

Even those children who are not born wanting reflect the shortcomings of a poor state, because poverty leaves a residue that touches nearly all reaches of society - including the middle class.

These are the children who languish on waiting lists for decent, affordable preschools, whose public schools can no longer afford a music teacher or a librarian, who slip through the cracks of sanity in a state that cannot afford to pay its psychiatrists enough to keep them from leaving.

But being poor is the single most influential risk factor when it comes to raising healthy, happy and safe kids, child experts say.

"Poverty is the underlying factor that can determine the probability that a child will experience one or more of the risk factors such as teen pregnancy, dropping out of high school, prison," said Kelly O'Donnell, research director for New Mexico Advocates for Children and Families.

It explains in some measure the reason why New Mexico ranks at the bottom in providing prenatal care and preventing deaths from drugs or alcohol.

Why New Mexico is among the worst for child care quality and safety, preschool programs, single-parent homes, health and mental health provisions.

Why New Mexico is abysmal in dropout rates, teen pregnancies, highway fatalities, abuse, teen homicide and teen suicide.

"We don't want to say that all poor children are in risky situations," said Victoria Parrill of the New Mexico Public Health's Maternal, Child, Adolescent and Family Health Section.

"Being poor does not necessarily mean being poor at parenting. But with poverty and in a poor state such as New Mexico, the truth is the less resources available, the more stress on the family. And that's why there is that link between poverty and at-risk indicators."

That link is found in the children Genevieve Sanchez sees in the Community Health Centers of McKinley County - third-poorest county in the nation when it comes to child poverty, according to the latest U.S. census figures.

One in four children in New Mexico are poor. In McKinley County, it's more like one in two.

Sanchez and her staff are kept busy with those families, those children - some who live in motels along Gallup's main drag; others whose living rooms are the back seats of old station wagons; still others whose families have no vehicle to travel the long, empty miles from the clinics to the mobile homes slung along the Continental Divide where there are no buses, no subways.

Jobs that pay a decent wage are hard to find in the northwestern county and in Gallup, its most populous city.

"Most of the jobs in Gallup are in the service industry and pay minimum wage or less," Sanchez said. "Fast food is the major industry in Gallup. There are those who are self-employed making jewelry, but they, too, make horribly low wages."

The U.S. Census Bureau considers a family of four with an income of $17,650 or less to be living in poverty. That translates to a job that pays $8.50 an hour on a 40-hour-a-week schedule.

Low wages are a major reason the state's overall economic picture remains gloomy, said Lawrence Waldman, senior economist with the University of New Mexico Bureau of Business and Economic Research.

"New Mexico is a low-wage state, and it's getting worse," Waldman said. "We have some good-paying jobs, but they hang out a lot in the more urban areas like Albuquerque, Santa Fe. They don't make it to the rural areas."

And in a state in which 31 of its 33 counties are considered rural or frontier, that makes a big difference in the total economic package, he said.

"Unlike other states, rural here means poor," researcher O'Donnell said. "More than half of our poor people live outside one of the state's three metropolitan statistical areas. That compares with about 23 percent nationally. Their poverty cycle is perpetuated by their limited access to jobs, to health care, schools and social service programs."

Well-paying mining and military jobs that once supported rural communities such as Questa, Silver City and Fort Wingate have disappeared in large measure, Waldman said.

"Look at the jobs we've lost since the 1990s in the federal, civil service and defense sector," he said. "We've lost a lot of mining jobs, some manufacturing jobs and high-tech jobs. We've seen a slight resurgence in high-tech jobs. But most of them, especially the mining jobs, aren't coming back."

The federal government, which once signed the paychecks for a large portion of New Mexicans, has pulled out significantly. From 1990 to 1997, New Mexico lost 8,500 of those jobs, Waldman said.

When those pink slips come, all that remains for workers are lower-paying jobs, many of which are in the service industry - the biggest employer in the state, contributing to 27.7 percent of New Mexico's earnings, according to the UNM Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Lower-paying jobs mean longer hours, longer time away from the children, who are often shipped to relatives, watched by questionable boyfriends, warehoused in substandard day care centers or left to their own devices.

"People get the mistaken notion that poor families are all on welfare - that they're lazy," McKinley County's Sanchez said. "And that's not what we see. We see parents trying to get by on minimum-wage jobs that just don't pay enough. If they want better jobs they have to move. And they either can't afford that or don't want to move away from their family support."

Call centers that have sprung up in rural towns in the past few years and the ever-fluctuating oil and gas industry of southeastern New Mexico have added better-paying jobs to the mix, Waldman said.

"But, still, you're talking $8 or $9 an hour and topping out at $12," he said. "That's better than minimum wage but not by much."

New Mexico's scenic beauty, good weather and richness of culture in its rural regions are simply not enough of an economic incentive for businesses to relocate there, Waldman said.

"Nobody wants to relocate in the rural areas where the population is poor, often without higher education levels, few services and infrastructure problems," he said. "People move there for the quality of life, but they do so by accepting the fact that they will take a cut in pay."

Other factors in New Mexico's poverty status include its higher percentage of non-English speaking residents, larger families and its lack of an educated work force, according to the 1997 UNM study "Poverty in New Mexico - Who Are the Poor."

"The correlation between poverty and that lack of education is especially significant," Waldman said. "And what we do see is even if they do get an education they leave. It's four years in college, and they're out. There's just not enough places in New Mexico to hang your hat if you are educated."

In our state, poverty is self-perpetuating, often spanning several generations.

"In New Mexico we face a lack of services for our children that could help break the cycle of poverty," said David Broudy of Social Vision, an epidemiological consulting service in Albuquerque.

"Without adequate health care, a child can't learn. Without adequate funding for education, a child can't grow up to earn enough money to pay for health care either for himself or to help fund services for others who can't. It is all connected."

Few believe, however, that New Mexico will find that hidden pot of gold to fund all the proposed antidotes to poverty and the hazards of being a child in New Mexico.

Indeed, as states cut spending to balance their budgets in the current national recession, family and child workers such as Parrill and Sanchez stand ready to protect those programs serving low-income populations that are often targeted for reduction.

"What's interesting now with the state's projected shortfall is there seems to be a movement to target the safety net programs that attempt at least in some measure to catch those children and their families who are at risk," Parrill said. "Why when things get bad are we so willing to let the safety net go when it seems like they are most needed?"

Many of those children don't have far to fall. But it is a fall from which they may never recover.

"New Mexico's children pay a far higher price than they should," said Sharon Waggoner, executive director of the New Mexico Graduation Reality and Dual-role Skills, or GRADS, program that works with pregnant and parenting teens. "In the end, however, it's all of us in the state who pay. It's a matter of our priorities."

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