THREE YEARS AGO, JUAN ALBERT AND Claudia Gonzalez were scouting locations for a coffee shop and artisan market when they found an 1850s adobe along Calle de Guadalupe. A half block south of Mesilla Plaza, the property offered more than a place to serve a cortado and a house-made guava-and-cheese pastry—it created a connection to Mesilla’s rich past.
“It’s a beautiful, historical building,” Albert says of the structure that was once part of Mesilla’s transportation block. From 1858 to 1861, stagecoaches traveling from St. Louis to San Francisco along the Butterfield Overland Trail stopped there to exchange mail and travelers. Today, their restaurant Rincón de Mesilla—located at the block’s southern corner, or rincón, in Spanish—embraces that history.
“Mesilla is one of the most unique towns in the entire country,” says Albert. “Very few towns can talk about having that Mexican historical flavor. It’s the overall historical context of what Mesilla was and what Mesilla is.”
“Mesilla is one of the most unique towns in the entire country. Very few towns can talk about having that Mexican historical flavor.”
—JUAN ALBERT, RINCÓN DE MESILLA
When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican–American War in 1848, Mexico ceded most of the land from California to southwestern Wyoming and through the New Mexico Territory to the United States. Some families, determined to remain in Mexico, packed up and headed across the new border to a mesilla (a little mesa, or table) and established a settlement out of the floodplain. The little mesa and its people remained a part of Mexico until the Gadsden Purchase of 1854, when the
