What happens when you have an all-women city council? New Mexico is about to find out.

Originally published by The 19th At city hall in Las Cruces, New Mexico, a wall of photographs displays the faces of elected city council members. “That there will be all women on the wall on the other side — it’s going to be really exciting.” Las Cruces, a city of roughly 100,000 people in the southern part of the state, has a long to-do list of policy issues around the pandemic, the economy and general equity. “Instead, it’s always like, ‘Oh, this strange set of women, we don’t know what to do with this.’” The earliest known example of an all-women governing body in America was recorded in 1887 in the city of Syracuse, Kansas, when an all-woman city council was elected to serve with a man mayor. “Watching my daughter’s face light up when she heard that Las Cruces had elected an all-woman city council for the first time in history … the look of inspiration and happiness on her face said it all for me,” she said. “It’s not that nobody can get into those networks of power — women frequently do, people of color do, women of color do — but we haven’t seen this sort of whole-scale transformation of what those networks of power might look like.” Still, Bencomo is hopeful about what Las Cruces’ nearly all-women city council signifies.