ERA II ESSAY
Growing with New Mexico, 1952–1984
The New Mexico that emerged after World War II was vastly changed. The war brought a huge demographic and economic transformation that reinvented Albuquerque. The boom in the city was so pronounced in the early 1950s that the city experienced a housing shortage. Married students, most of them veterans with a GI Bill allocation, jammed the University of New Mexico. They lived in motels, hotels, garages, travel trailers, and, in some cases, cars. Some even lived in barracks at Kirtland Air Force Base after military officials converted hospital wards to tiny apartments to cope with the city’s postwar housing shortage.
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