Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (review)

Although several of the essays are a bit plodding or cover too broad a period of time to provide sufficient depth, The African American Experience in Texas is an incredibly significant work and its historiographic influence will shape not only Texas and African American history, but the fields of American South and West as well. Jefferson College Scott Holzer Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico. By Roxanne DunbarOrtiz . (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007. Pp. 258. Map, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 978-0-80613-833-6. $19.95, paper.) In the preface to this new edition, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz discusses the roots of her analysis of land tenure in New Mexico. Stretching back to her first visit to New Mexico in 1958, Dunbar-Ortiz recalled how as a student at the University of California at Los Angeles in the 1960s she learned of the conflict over land rights in Tierra Amarilla. In the midst of the Chicano, black, Native American, and other movements for social justice and equity, here were people who had lived in New Mexico for generations fighting for something as elemental as land. The evangelical firebrand Reis López Tijerina led Hispano farmers, Chicano students , and their supporters against local police and the National Guard, but Dunbar-Ortiz noted that many Pueblo Indians, despite similar grievances, did not join them. She subsequently became interested in the ways in which the historical systems of land tenure developed by Indians, Hispanos, and Anglos factored into the events before her. This confluence of contemporary protest and historical curiosity led to the writing of Roots of Resistance. In this updated version, the University of Oklahoma Press has re-released an influential book on the history of New Mexico, southwestern Native peoples, and Chicana/o history. More than a quarter century after its first publication, it remains just as relevant to the contemporary dilemmas facing communities in New Mexico and the American West. A new final chapter brings the book up to date with recent events in New Mexican land and environmental politics, but it remains true to the book’s thesis: colonialism and capitalist commodification of resources serve as the foundation for the sociocultural and racial relations that developed in northern New Mexican land tenure. Grounded in a Marxist analysis of capitalist development, Dunbar-Ortiz has several goals for this socioeconomic interpretation of New Mexican history. First, she challenges popular portrayals of Indians and Hispanics as timeless people living in isolation from historical change. She argues that Indians and Hispanos actively shaped new land tenure systems imposed by outsiders, and in the process deflected the most extreme elements of capitalism. Second, she traces competing land tenure systems from pre-conquest eras through Spanish land grants and how those grants created racial and economic divisions among settlers and Pueblos, the emergence of self-sufficient village and communal resource usage, the transformation of land grants with the penetration of mercantile capitalists that reoriented local economies to the United States, the expropriation of 2009 Book Reviews 351 *jan 09 11/26/08 12:00 PM Page 351 resources by foreign capitalists and the new politico-legal regimes they brought at the end of the nineteenth century, and the transformation of Hispanic and indigenous landowners into wage earners in a highly stratified economy. Few books approach complicated issues with a similar balance of theoretical clarity and historical depth. Although some readers may wonder about recent concerns with racial identity and gender, Dunbar-Ortiz provides a sweeping analysis of the ways in which outsiders have sought to control land and water in northern New Mexico. To her credit, she attempts to highlight Native agency and resistance to expropriation, even as her methodological framework is a sociohistorical interpretation of systems and institutions. Her use of Marxist stages and a materialist view of historical development may seem strange to scholars immersed in poststructrualism and cultural studies, but she attempts to shine a bright light on the contentious struggle over land in northern New Mexico. For this, her book will remain crucial reading for anyone interested in southwestern , Native American, and Chicana/o history. University of Texas at El Paso Jeffrey P. Shepherd Lyndon...