Ask flag designers to name the best state flag in America and most will give the same answer. New Mexico's flag is a single red sun symbol on a plain yellow field, with no seal, no lettering, and no date. A child can draw it from memory, which is the test its admirers always cite. But the flag's clean look sits on top of a complicated story: the symbol at its center is a sacred emblem of Zia Pueblo, adopted by the state in 1925 without asking the people it belongs to, and the argument over what that means is still going on a century later.
The flag nobody could read
New Mexico became a state in 1912, and its first flag tried to say everything at once. Designed around 1915 by Ralph E. Twitchell, a Santa Fe lawyer and historian, for the Panama-California Exposition in San Diego, it had a turquoise-blue field with a small U.S. flag in the canton, the state seal in the corner, the words "New Mexico" running diagonally across the middle, and the number 47, for the state's place in the order of admission. It was less a flag than a bulletin board.
Nobody much liked it. In 1920 the state's Daughters of the American Revolution called for a design that actually said something about New Mexico, and in 1923 a statewide contest was held. The winning entry came from Harry Mera, a Santa Fe physician and archaeologist who spent much of his career studying and cataloguing Southwestern pottery. Mera knew the region's ceramics, and he adapted his design from a sun symbol painted on a late nineteenth-century water jar made at Zia Pueblo. His wife Reba sewed the first physical flag. Governor Arthur T. Hannett signed the adoption bill on March 19, 1925, and the design has not been altered since.
Reading the sun
The statute defines the flag as "the ancient Zia sun symbol of red in the center of a field of yellow." The symbol is a circle with four groups of rays at right angles to one another, four rays in each group. To the people of Zia, four is a sacred number: the four cardinal directions, the four seasons, the four times of day, and the four stages of life, with the circle binding them together. The specification is exact. The symbol's width is one third of the flag's length, and the flag's proportions are 2:3.
The colors look backward to a different chapter of New Mexico's past. Red and yellow are the colors of the Spanish crown, the banner that flew over the region for about 250 years after the Spanish entradas of the sixteenth century. The combination produces a statistical oddity: New Mexico's is the only state flag with neither blue nor white on it. It also produces legibility. At any distance, in any wind, the flag is unmistakable.
In 2001 the North American Vexillological Association surveyed its members and the public on 72 state, territorial, and provincial flags. New Mexico finished first, scoring 8.61 out of 10, well clear of the field. The flags at the bottom of that survey are crowded seals on blue; the flag at the top is two colors and one idea.
The symbol's owners
The Zia sun is not a generic Southwestern motif. It is a religious symbol belonging to Zia Pueblo, a small community on the Jemez River northwest of Albuquerque whose people have lived in the region for centuries. The sun figures in ceremonies the pueblo does not share with outsiders, and the pot Mera copied was never intended as source material for a state emblem. Nobody asked. Neither Mera, the DAR, nor the legislature consulted the pueblo in 1925.
For decades the state treated the symbol as public property, and it spread far beyond the flag: onto license plates, the state highway marker, business logos, tattoos, and product packaging of every kind. Zia Pueblo began pushing back publicly in the 1990s. The tribe has sought legal protection for the symbol, testified in federal trademark proceedings, objected to uses it considers degrading (a portable toilet company's logo is the example its leaders have cited), and asked that businesses seek the pueblo's permission before putting the sun on commercial products. The pueblo's position is not that the flag should change; tribal officials have generally said they accept the symbol's place on the flag and take pride in it, while insisting that its origin be acknowledged and its religious character respected.
The state has slowly come around. In 2012 the legislature passed a joint memorial acknowledging that New Mexico had appropriated the image without permission, and the state now points those who want to use the symbol toward guidance developed with the pueblo. It is an unusual arrangement: the best-regarded flag in the country flies a symbol its state does not, in any meaningful sense, own.
A century on
The flag turned one hundred in March 2025, and it is everywhere in New Mexican life: on murals in Albuquerque, gas station signs in Gallup, and the state quarter. The official salute, adopted in English and Spanish, calls the Zia "the symbol of perfect friendship among united cultures," a phrase that reads differently depending on how much of the history you know. The design itself has needed no defenders and attracted no redesign campaigns, which among American state flags makes it nearly unique. What remains unsettled is not the flag but the terms of the borrowing at its heart, and that conversation belongs to Zia Pueblo as much as to the state that flies its sun.
References
[1] "Flag of New Mexico," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_New_Mexico
[2] New Mexico Statutes, Chapter 12, Article 3, Section 12-3-2 (state flag).
[3] New Mexico Secretary of State, "State Flag," official symbols pages. https://www.sos.nm.gov
[4] Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, "Zia Pueblo," on the sun symbol and its significance. https://indianpueblo.org
[5] North American Vexillological Association, "State and Provincial Flags Survey" (2001). https://nava.org
[6] "Flag of New Mexico," Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/flag-of-New-Mexico