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Hispanic American Historical Review 84.1 (2004) 149-150



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Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict overLand in the American West, 1840-1900. By María E. Montoya. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Photographs. Illustrations. Maps. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. xvi, 299 pp. Cloth, $50.00.

María Montoya is the first scholar to examine a single Hispanic land grant closely, chosing as her target the most written about of all the roughly two hundred land grants in New Mexico, the Maxwell grant. Others have studied the Colfax County War, the grant's legal history, and Lucien B. Maxwell himself, but no one has attempted to study as a whole this large chunk of northeastern New Mexico from the time of the Jicarilla Apache to 1900. Previous works have emphasized the grant's top-down history: the largely unrealized plans for its economic development involving New Mexico's leading citizens and the story of Lucien Maxwell himself, who operated it much like a feudal baron. This atypical grant was made to Charles Beaubien and Guadalupe Miranda in 1843 and came to be owned by Lucien Maxwell when he married Beaubien's daughter and bought out Miranda's interest. Maxwell and his wife owned this vast empire (surveyed at 1.7 million acres) and were able to sell it as their property, although it was inhabited by a diverse group of settlers, homesteaders, squatters, miners, and small ranchers. Maxwell induced many of these people to settle there, but their property rights were not protected under the grant's original terms. These disposed people, who received no written titles from Maxwell, are the book's primary focus.

The Maxwell grant was stamped with the personality of Lucien B. Maxwell to such an extent that it was unique, rather than typical of other land grants. Montoya marshals a wealth of documentation in recounting the fascinating stories of the area's indigenous inhabitants, the settlers under Maxwell, Maxwell's highly questionable survey, and the saga of the settlers' battle to establish their rights. However, when Montoya attempts to use the Maxwell grant as a model for understanding other land grants in New Mexico, the Southwest, and even Latin America, she [End Page 149] treads on shaky ground. The Maxwell grant simply does not fit into the theoretical framework the author seeks to impose on it, nor does it serve as a model for the land tenure regime during 150 years of land grant history in New Mexico.

This grant was one of five such large grants made at the end of Mexican rule, when a U.S. invasion of Mexico was imminent. Governor Manuel Armijo wanted to privatize as much land as possible into the hands of his friends and associates (and into his own hands as well), leaving little public domain for the United States. These Armijo grants were made to one or two individuals with no conditions, although there was an unwritten assumption that the grantees would bring settlers on the land and arrange to grant them rights to part of the land. These Armijo grants differ from other New Mexico land grants because of their unique circumstances, and since Maxwell provided no written titles to the settlers, his grant differed from the other Armijo grants.

Montoya describes Maxwell's operation of the grant as feudal, calling it a modified hacienda and an impresario grant. There were no impresario grants in New Mexico, despite what the courts have said, and the hacienda model is highly misleading as well. To then ascribe these characteristics to most other New Mexico land grants simply compounds the error. In fact, there were only a few large private grants prior to the Maxwell grant and those few were generally made to communities. By implying that most land grants were large feudal-type haciendas, Montoya does a disservice to the many community land grants in New Mexico. These communities often contained a mixture of Hispanos and indigenous people who lived a self-sufficient lifestyle that...

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