Red or Green

I have eaten at McDonald’s all over the world.

Beer in Germany and Austria. Spam and eggs in Hawaii. Teriyaki burgers. Espresso counters in Europe. Every country bending the same corporate skeleton slightly toward local expectation. Most of it felt interesting in the moment, though usually a little self-aware, like globalization trying on regional clothing for an afternoon.

New Mexico felt different.

The first time someone at a McDonald’s casually asked me “red or green?” it stopped me cold for a second.

Not because the question was unusual there. Quite the opposite.

It was so normal that nobody felt the need to explain it.

No themed packaging. No faux desert branding exercise. No “Southwest-inspired experience” assembled by a marketing department somewhere three states away. Just a teenager behind a counter asking a question that carried the weight of an entire region inside four syllables.

Red or green?

That was the moment I realized the culture of New Mexico was too deeply embedded to flatten.

Most corporations survive through standardization. Same menu boards. Same flooring. Same calibrated familiarity whether you are in San Jose, Tulsa, or suburban Ohio. The point is predictability. Remove friction. Remove regional irregularities. Build a system so consistent the customer barely needs to think.

New Mexico quietly resisted all of it.

Not through protest.

Through gravity.

McDonald’s did not invent some ridiculous “McChileRelleno” product to perform cultural awareness. They altered the supply chain because the culture was strong enough that people simply expected chile to exist as part of daily life. The corporation adapted itself to the region instead of trying to reinterpret the region back to itself.

That distinction matters.

At some point I realized chile in New Mexico functioned less like cuisine and more like civic infrastructure.

The smell of roasting chile arrives around September and transforms entire grocery store parking lots into smoke and heat and earth. The air itself changes texture. People debate red versus green with actual conviction. Patios fill with Kokopelli figures, geckos, pottery, chile ristras, and Zia suns without feeling artificially curated. Adobe walls glow gold at sunset beneath impossible blue skies stretched against the Sandia Mountains.

It is hard to flatten a place that culturally coherent.

Even harder when the landscape reinforces it.

New Mexico feels electrically alive to me in a way I still struggle to explain without sounding irrational. The state carries a strange collision of energies that somehow coexist naturally. Physicists and mystics. Artists and engineers. Indigenous history and nuclear history. Lowriders and laboratories. Clay pottery and particle theory occupying the same desert horizon without contradiction.

I noticed something else while I lived there.

The smartest people around me all seemed to sense the same thing.

Different politics. Different professions. Different lives entirely. Yet many of them spoke about New Mexico with language that bordered on spiritual, as though the state existed slightly outside the emotional geometry of the rest of the country.

I understood exactly what they meant.

Some places host you.

Some places alter your internal temperature.

New Mexico felt less like a location and more like a frequency. The light behaved differently there. The distances changed your sense of scale. The desert stripped visual noise away until conversations somehow lasted longer and thoughts arrived cleaner.

Most American cities now feel optimized into one another. Same luxury apartments. Same chain stores. Same reclaimed wood interiors pretending to be local while every neighborhood slowly drifts toward the same algorithmic average of acceptable taste.

New Mexico still feels stubbornly itself.

Even at McDonald’s.

Especially at McDonald’s.