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2 Inhabiting the Border Radical Rhetoric and Social Movement in 1960s New Mexico Right now we look like a cricket. What is a cricket? King of the insects; a little tiny animal. All the cricket can do is just “cricket, cricket, cricket.” Just a noise, that’s all. But you know, if that cricket gets in the eye and the ear of the lion and scratches the inside, there is nothing the lion can do. . . . We are a cricket, but we are too deep inside of this continent, of this country. —Reies López Tijerina The Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants) was organized in 1963 to lobby for the return of Mexican and Spanish land grants to their original heirs (the same land grants guaranteed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo), but by 1967 its mission and influence had expanded and its tactics had become more confrontational , leading to increased government surveillance and persecution. The Alianza was planning a large-scale convention to be held in the small town of Coyote, New Mexico, on June 3, 1967, which would be one of several national conventions publicizing the Alianza’s cause, coordinating future actions, and building relationships with other activist organizations. However, before it could convene, and because rumors circulated that the Alianza would be coordinating violent resistance at this meeting, New Mexico district attorney Alfonso Sanchez shut down the meeting by arresting several of the aliancistas (Alianza members). Sanchez’s aggressive and preemptive crackdown on the Alianza’s planned convention on June 3 in Coyote was part of an escalating contest between the movement and law enforcement, and, unbeknownst to anyone, these events would lead to the Alianza’s most (in)famous action. On Saturday night, June 3, 1967, the night of Sanchez’s arrests, seventy-five members of the Alianza held a meeting “in the back room of an old adobe building” to discuss their response. Later, the group’s leader, Reies López Tijerina, would tell 54 | Chapter 2 one of his biographers that the aliancistas who congregated there “were furious like never before.” After all, or so they reasoned, the Alianza had intended to meet only to demand the return of their ancestral, communal lands and to protest the violation of their cultural and civil rights. They viewed Sanchez’s action as a gross abuse of power. In its anger, the group decided to make a “citizens’ arrest” of Sanchez for “tampering [with] and abusing” their “constitutional rights” of assembly.1 As a result , a group of activists including Tijerina and his daughter Rose raided the federal courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, two days later, on Monday morning, June 5, with the goal of freeing the jailed aliancistas who were being held there and arresting Sanchez. Though the group had decided to refrain from violence during the citizens’ arrest, the armed aliancistas immediately clashed with law enforcement. They were unable to free the prisoners or arrest Sanchez, neither of whom were in the courthouse as expected. Instead, the raid provoked a shootout with police in which two policemen were wounded and two individuals were taken hostage in the Alianza’s escape. The events at Tierra Amarilla and the federal search that led to the participants’ arrest garnered national attention and catapulted the group to the forefront of the then still nascent Chicano movement(s).2 The events at Tierra Amarilla on June 5, 1967, which have come to be known as the “courthouse raid,” present a peculiar case in our exploration of Latina/o discourses of citizenship, particularly in comparison to the preceding chapter. In contrast to reasoned debate about citizenship rights and duties, the Alianza’s radical activism seemed to stand against citizenship, as an act of revolution or separatism rather than civic identification. Paradoxically, an armed and violent raid on government agents was purportedly performed, according to the Alianza, as an expression of Mexican Americans’ citizenship (as a citizens’ arrest). As I will show in this chapter, not only the courthouse raid but the Alianza’s rhetoric and activism in general struck a tenuous balance between citizenship and separatism, from Tijerina’s speeches to the group’s demonstrations. The tension in the Alianza’s discourse—between enacting U.S. citizenship and challenging its very boundaries—forms the locus of this chapter. I argue that the Alianza demonstrated an unstable model of performing citizenship based on the liminality of the border itself; its vernacular border rhetoric straddled the divide between citizen...

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