Care Lab Bipartisan Senate Chiefs Delegation Visits New Mexico
In a small rural town our delegation stood on a front porch while we watched a parade of local beauty queens, hometown high school alumni, hunters, pro-life marchers, and… democratic candidates. It was a small moment, but it captured something we'd see again on this trip: New Mexico's politics don't sort neatly into the partisan categories or divides we bring with us from Washington.
This past July, seven U.S. Senate Chiefs of Staff traveled with Care Lab to north-central New Mexico as part of a bipartisan delegation designed to build relationships, trust, and mutual recognition — between the group of Chiefs, and between D.C. and New Mexicans.
The participants — three Democrats and four Republicans — represent Senators with opposing political interests and very different constituencies. All of them are part of Care Lab's Senate network. By signing up for the trip, they extended the commitment to bipartisan relationship building, curiosity, and engagement beyond the Care Lab cohorts they've participated in in D.C., and into conversation with local leaders and community members they'd otherwise be unlikely to have the opportunity to engage with.
The trip's itinerary — based on a model Care Lab's founder originally created for international congressional delegations, and informed by Care Lab's pilot state trip to Utah — rests on a simple recognition: shared travel lets partisan leaders forge relationships in a way that's impossible during the daily grind in D.C.
But the trip wasn't only for them. For Care Lab's partners in New Mexico — a diverse range of community groups, local grasstops leaders, tribal elders, foundations, and business representatives — it was also an opportunity to make visible their on-the-ground realities, demystify national political leaders, and connect with each other in new ways, beyond existing divisions and silos.
Familiar challenges, in unfamiliar company
As the Chiefs observed, New Mexico faces challenges that parallel those many of them see in their own states: rural infrastructure, education, broadband access, addiction and mental health, and climate-related disasters.
But the state is also distinct and surprising in ways that opened up conversations that, back in D.C., could quickly become politicized. New Mexico is home to the oldest continuously inhabited community in North America, as well as 18 other Pueblos, and the oldest seat of government in the present-day United States. It's also where the Manhattan Project was born — the same national laboratory system that today anchors much of the region's economy — and it's home to Spanish-descent communities who have governed shared water resources through the acequia system for over 400 years.
New Mexico is a solidly blue state, but as that parade outside Democratic headquarters made clear, New Mexicans' political perspectives are nuanced. The state is full of its own tensions, too: the resources and highly educated professionals the National Labs bring in, set against the poverty and substance addiction rates of the surrounding county; the concerns around environmental protection weighed against the very real benefits oil and gas revenue brings to the state's schools; and more.
Along the way, we learned about the conflicts these dynamics raisem and heard many stories of resilience, innovation, care, and shared life on beloved lands.
What changed, and what didn't
We closed the trip with a final dinner alongside a group of local grasstops leaders — conservative, progressive, elected, non-profit, urban, rural, tribal, business, think tank, and philanthropic. Regis Pecos, founder of the Santa Fe Indian School, led us in reflection on our core values–who gave them to us, how they can bring us together, and what to do when they come into conflict with our everyday realities.
By the end, no one changed their own core values, and no one was asked to. But everyone's capacity and openness — to understanding each other’s, and to working together despite differences — had.