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1 INTRODUCTION Property and the Legal Geographies of Violence in Northern New Mexico WHEN SPAIN IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY and later Mexico in the early nineteenth century pushed colonial settlements north into lands controlled by powerful Indian nations in what is today northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, they did so by distributing millions of acres in scores of large common property land grants to landless sheepherders and agriculturalists. Over the course of more than two hundred years, Spain and Mexico launched thousands of settlers into a remote territory dominated by the Utes, the Navajo, the Comanches, and the Apaches. Colonial administrators did this because they viewed these borderland settlements as human shields that could guard valuable mining regions south of Santa Fe from powerful Indian nations. When all of what is today the state of New Mexico was made part of the United States following the end of the U.S.-Mexican War in 1848, the United States agreed to recognize these land grants as preexisting property rights. Despite guarantees enshrined in the war-ending treaty, the late nineteenth century in New Mexico was a chaos of land speculation marked by dubious legal decisions that contributed to the dispossession of millions of acres of Spanish and Mexican common property land grants. The history of the loss of common property land grants in northern New Mexico was largely unknown until the late 1960s, when Chicano activists and the heirs of numerous land grants came together to form an organization called La Alianza Federal de Mercedes. Alianza rejected the then commonly held notion that the only lands lost during the period of postwar property adjudication were illegitimate claims. Instead they advanced the explosive idea that millions of acres were stolen outright from legitimate owners and that the United States government was complicit in this wholesale property dispossession . The charismatic leader of Alianza, Reies Lopez Tijerina, organized the group through a series of provocative tactics. He threatened to seize private lands from ranchers, organized sit-ins on former land grants controlled by the U.S. Forest Service—an agency he described as an occupying force in New 2 • introduction Mexico—and attempted to make citizen’s arrests of prominent political figures, including Warren Burger, the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. His tactics and rhetoric resonated with the thousands of living land grant heirs who populated scores of tiny hamlets and villages in the mountains of northern New Mexico. With that constituency Tijerina built Alianza on a promise that he alone could lead the heirs in their fight to reclaim the land grants. Through Alianza they would prove, he convinced many, that the large private ranches and huge federally owned forests that dominated, and still dominate, northern New Mexico were the illegal spoils of a colonial invasion. Rather than respecting treaty obligations, federal officials stood by, and sometimes joined in, as a vast land grab dispossessed hundreds of communities of their rightful property. According to Tijerina, because of the conspiratorial machinations of a gang of commercial speculators, duplicitous federal officials, corrupt public servants, and greedy territorial lawyers, the poor Spanish-speaking land grant communities of New Mexico had been robbed of their history. Their poverty was a monument to colonial greed. By the late 1960s Tijerina claimed that more than ten thousand dues-paying members had joined Alianza, including the wife of New Mexico’s Republican governor. Alianza’s tactics culminated on June 5, 1967, when nineteen of its members, armed with pistols and shotguns, stormed the Rio Arriba County Courthouse looking for a district attorney named Alfonso Sanchez. Just days earlier Sanchez had ordered the arrest of eleven Alianza leaders after the group threatened to take over the nearly six-hundred-thousand-acre Tierra Amarilla land grant in northern New Mexico. The raiders, Tijerina would later explain, planned to liberate those arrested and place Sanchez under citizen’s arrest. The raid turned into a pitched gun battle inside the courthouse. A New Mexico state police officer and the county jailer were shot, and two men, including a reporter covering the arraignment, were briefly kidnapped. Neither Sanchez nor the eleven arrested Alianza members, however, were in Tierra Amarilla that morning. Tijerina and the other raiders fled into the rugged mountains surrounding Tierra Amarilla. In the weeks after the raid, state police helicopters buzzed northern New Mexico’s land grant villages, while National Guard tanks prowled the dirt roads of the Carson National Forest looking for the raiders. The raid thrust...

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