Flag of New Mexico
New Mexico’s flag is a red Zia sun symbol, a circle with four groups of rays, on a yellow field. The New Mexico Secretary of State says the red and yellow are the colours of Isabel of Castile brought by the Spanish, and that the symbol comes from a sun design on a late 19th-century water jar from Zia Pueblo, whose sacred number is four.
How to read it
The design is Dr. Harry Mera’s. The Secretary of State says the New Mexico chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution held a design competition in 1923, won by Mera, a Santa Fe physician and archaeologist, whose wife Reba made the winning flag; Governor Arthur T. Hannett signed the law adopting it in March 1925. The law fixes the symbol’s proportions: the four groups of rays are set at right angles, the two inner rays of each group are one-fifth longer than the outer two, and the circle in the centre is one-third as wide as the whole symbol. It replaced the first state flag, authorized in 1915 and designed by the historian Ralph Emerson Twitchell: a blue field with a small US flag in the upper corner by the pole, the state seal in the lower corner at the fly and “New Mexico” embroidered diagonally across. A 2014 Senate memorial says Mera’s flag was meant to celebrate the state’s cultural diversity and to stand for “perfect friendship among united cultures”.
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The Zia sun symbol
The sun symbol comes from Zia Pueblo. The New Mexico Senate’s Memorial 1 of 2014 says Mera adapted a sun symbol found on a Zia pot and joined it to the red and gold of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, and that in 2012 both houses of the legislature passed memorials acknowledging it as an “ancient and sacred symbol of the Zia people”. The Secretary of State gives the meaning of four as the state describes Zia teaching: the four directions, the four seasons, sunrise, noon, evening and night, and childhood, youth, adulthood and old age, with four sacred obligations, a strong body, a clear mind, a pure spirit and devotion to the welfare of one’s people.
Who may use the symbol has been a legal question. The 2014 memorial says lawsuits, legislation, governors’ actions and the efforts of the Pueblo of Zia had raised it, and asked the Department of Cultural Affairs for a report. That report found that no law stops anyone using the symbol, but that trademark law bars registering it as a mark because it is on the state flag, and that the Pueblo had begun asking companies to request permission to use it, out of respect for the Pueblo.
Read next
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- The same shape in African flagsFlag of EthiopiaEthiopia’s flag is green, yellow and red in equal horizontal stripes with a blue disc in the centre holding a yellow star of equal lines with yellow rays. Ethiopia’s Flag Proclamation makes the green labour, fertility and development, the yellow hope, justice and equality, and the red sacrifice and heroism for freedom and equality; the blue disc is peace and the star the unity of Ethiopia’s nations, nationalities and peoples.
More US state flags
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols drawn with circles, lines or squares and rectangles.
Sources
- State Flag (New Mexico Secretary of State), New Mexico Secretary of State, “State Flag”, New Mexico Secretary of State, Whole page
- New Mexico Senate Memorial 1 (2014), the Zia sun symbol on the state flag, N.M. S.M. 1, 51st Legislature, 2nd Session (2014), New Mexico Legislature, Pages 1–3
- Report to the Indian Affairs Committee on the Zia sun symbol (New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, 2014), Erin McSherry, General Counsel, New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, report to the Indian Affairs Committee of the New Mexico Legislature, Zia Pueblo, 30 August 2014, New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs (published by the New Mexico Legislature), Pages 3–6
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 14, 2026. How we research
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