of New Mexico and entitled "Cultural Issues in Mental Health and Primary Care." Each of the authors has substantially revised his conference presentation for inclusion in this special section of the Journal of Community Psychology. The rationale for holding such a conference in New Mexico is clear to anyone familiar with the state, where addressing cultural issues is a daily experience for health and mental health professionals. Both the conference and this volume were conceived as preambles to the acquisition of knowledge of cultural aspects of mental health care for program planning and clinical practice. Unfortunately, research into the cultural dimensions of health and mental health care in New Mexico has hardly begun, even though cultural diversity has been characteristic throughout the state's history.
By virtue of its multiethnic, indigenous, and non-indigenous population, New Mexico is a natural laboratory for the understanding of cultural factors that should be considered when treating patients and planning health care services for ethnic groups. Its population includes Pueblo Indians of five distinct cultural divisions, Navajos, Apaches, and Hispanic Americans of different generations and levels of acculturation. It is interesting to note, however, that very little attention has been paid to the people of New Mexico in either the cultural psychiatry or cross-cultural psychology literatures.
There are 26 Indian reservations in New Mexico. Pueblo Indian settlements extend from north to south along the Rio Grande River. West of Albuquerque are the Pueblos of Laguna, Acoma, and Zuni. The heterogeneity of the Pueblos is marked not only by the different languages they speak (Tiwa, Tewa, Towa, Keresan, and Zuni) but also