New Mexico is discussed in this fifth volume of a nine-volume, six-state study of the impact of school finance reform on minorities and the poor. The report gives a demographic summary of the state and presents the history of its school financing efforts from 1847 to the present, with special emphasis on the 1974 finance reform law. To assess the law's impact, researchers used correlation coefficients, percentiles, averages, and maps to analyze data on educational revenues, school district wealth, tax effort, ethnicity, personal and family income, urban location, and federal aid, particularly aid from Public Law 874. Among the findings of this analysis are that minority students but not poor students tend to be concentrated in particular school districts and that the 1974 reform increased the mean tax rate, has little effect on fiscal neutrality or on total revenues received by poorer districts, and reduced state aid to American Indian pupils. (RW)