Black Rock, NM

Black Rock is a census-designated place on the Zuni Reservation in McKinley County, New Mexico, with 1,190 residents in the 2020 census. It sits about four miles east of Zuni along New Mexico Route 53, beside the Zuni River and the dark lava that gave the community its name. The landscape carries a much older agricultural history: Zuni people used a spring and irrigated fields here thousands of years ago, and Spanish records described a seasonal village as Ranchos de Zuñi.

The 1908 Black Rock Dam and Reservoir changed the river valley again, tying the community to a twentieth-century irrigation project whose later water story has been difficult and contested. Black Rock remains part of the Zuni Public School District, with Zuni High School in the community and the wider district rooted in A:shiwi cultural values. A small airstrip, highway, river, reservoir, and reservation roads make the local map easy to read. Black Rock is a Zuni community where ancient farming, a modern school system, lava, and the Zuni River meet in one high-desert settlement.