Anita Scott Coleman, whose mother was enslaved and whose father was a Buffalo Soldier, was raised on a ranch near Silver City. Her award-winning essays, stories, and poems emphasized racial pride and Black women’s issues during the Harlem Renaissance, the “New Negro Movement” of the 1920s. In her essay "Arizona and New Mexico–The Land of Esperanza," she wrote of opportunity in a land of hope: “For here prevails for every man be he white or black a hardier philosophy—and a bigger and better chance, that is not encountered elsewhere in these United States.”