Between Two Rivers: The Atrisco Land Grant in Albuquerque History, 1692–1968 (review)

The writing of histories of local communities is fraught with difficult challenges. Some authors of this genre feel compelled to focus on the trivial and the particular, while ignoring the larger regional and national context. Fortunately, Joseph P. Sánchez’s Between Two Rivers rises above this paradigm and represents a cogent narrative and analysis of an important community in the Middle Río Grande Valley of New Mexico, from its early Spanish colonial origins to the recent past. Building upon the pioneering work of Richard E. Greenleaf, Joseph V. Metzgar, and Eric Palladini, Sánchez skillfully utilizes primary archival resources in Spain, Mexico, and the United States to describe the evolution of Atrisco from a struggling seventeenth-century frontier settlement to a sprawling suburb of a major metropolitan area.

In the process of tracing this transition, Sánchez creates a rich tapestry, weaving together the stories of Spanish and Mexican colonists, their Pueblo Indian neighbors, Apache and Navajo Indians, and Anglo-Americans, whose presence started with a trickle in the early nineteenth century, and whose numbers increased greatly following the invasion and annexation of the territory by the United States in the late 1840s. But, rather than rely on the tired myth of the “tricultural society” (Indians, Hispanos, and Anglos), Sánchez carefully explains the knotty problems of inter-ethnic (and intra-ethnic) relationships, and how they affected life on the Atrisco Land Grant. Pueblo Indians and the Spanish, for example, who had been at each other’s throats in the seventeenth century, banded together for mutual defense against the Plains Indians in the eighteenth century. Nor was the relationship among Hispanos in the Valley always harmonious. Sánchez illustrates this point by utilizing land grant records and civil suits from the New Mexico Records Center and Archives to unravel the complex disputes over land between Atrisco and its neighbors.

Of particular value in the book are the discussions relating to the transformation of the Atrisco Grant from an individual to a community land grant; land-use issues, including the need to expand grazing lands west to the Río Puerco; and the difficult adjustment from Mexican to U.S. rule in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of the latter discussion treats the struggles of the descendants of the atrisqueños for the recognition of their rights to land and precious water resources, as well as the internal struggle within the Atrisco community over how the lands were to be used, who maintained the rights to sell communal lands, and how the grant would be organized.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Atrisco still faces severe challenges to its historical identity and retention of its culture, not the least of which is the threat to an extensive array of precious precontact petroglyphs from a growing demand for housing on Albuquerque’s West Mesa. Sánchez’s valuable work provides an important context, not only for atrisqueños, urban planners, and other citizens of the area in the consideration of these issues, but also for residents of similarly fragile communities throughout the Spanish borderlands.