I still hear people speaking in the old way — saying, for instance, No je instead of No sé (I don’t know). But despite all the political rancor over the languages we speak, and the fears of admonition or even deportation that might be associated with speaking Spanish in public, I still marvel at how immigrants are injecting new vitality into the language.

This might alarm purists who cling to the romanticized myth that the Spanish of northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado, enduring in geographic isolation for centuries, remains strikingly similar to the Golden Age Spanish of 16th-century Spain.

As the scholars Garland Bills and Neddy Vigil point out, the reality of New Mexican Spanish is far more complex, reflecting various important phases of influence from Mexico. In 1680, for instance, Pueblo indigenous peoples in what was then called the province of Santa Fe de Nuevo México rose up against the terrorizing rule of their colonial overlords, killing hundreds and forcing 2,000 settlers to leave.

Historians note that most of those taking part in the Reconquista of 1692 were born in the New World, and spoke the Spanish of Mexico. With such contact and immigration unfolding over the centuries, words like tecolote (owl) or cuates (twins) with origins in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs in central Mexico, are still used in New Mexico.

Despite such replenishment from Mexico, New Mexican Spanish has faced one threat after another. In 1848, at the end of the Mexican-American War, the United States took control of the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, asserting the English language in these lands.

Nevertheless, Spanish flourished into the 20th century in New Mexico as the language of the Hispanic intelligentsia. But a century ago, another threat came during the nativist push to promote the English language and limit immigration, especially from Asia.

New Mexicans were well aware of the threats to Spanish when Teddy Roosevelt declared that the United States could not become a “polyglot boardinghouse,” writing protections for Spanish into the state constitution of 1912 that are still debated today.