IN the year 1922, the small Indian pueblo of Tesuque eight miles north of Santa Fe closed its doors to the outside world and prepared to starve in protest to the Bursum Bill then pending in Congress. In the year 1957, a crusty rancher named John Prather took up his rifle to defend his land from the United States government, which wanted to add it to the White Sands Missile Range. In the year 1966, a band of armed Hispanos invaded the Echo Amphitheater Park in northern New Mexico, administered by the National Forest Service, and declared it to be the free and independent Republic of San Joaquin. Three events wholly unrelated, it would seem. But were they?
It is doubtful that the participants—Indian, Anglo, and Hispano—in each of these incidents saw beyond the small circle of their own immediate troubles and perceived that they had become enmeshed in a larger problem inherent in the workings of the democratic process. That problem, foundation-cracking in its implications, was one that worried founders of the republic and has continued to perplex just men to the present day. And it is this: how can individuals and minorities be protected in their basic freedom and rights if an overbearing majority chooses to treat them capriciously? Beginning with the Bill of Rights, suecessive laws were formed to curb despotic tendencies on the part of government (which enforces the will of the majority) and to maintain a climate in which personal initiative and the creative impulse could thrive.
But from the outset, the safety of those who differed in some particular from their fellow men depended more on public tolerance than on laws, for laws are easily set aside. After all, it was God-fearing, self-righteous men, members of the democratic majority, who held up slavery in the South as a noble institution and who persecuted the Mormons, driving them from Missouri and Illinois into the deserts of Utah. After much bloodletting and social wrenching, those and similar wrongs were eventually righted, but from it all there emerged no guarantee that dissidents, nonconformists, and minorities of whatever stripe would not in times of stress suffer new oppressions.
It has been said of the twentieth century that it offers no room for the individual: he has been trampled upon, submerged, and swallowed up by the corporate state, corporate business, corporate labor. Even the collective weight of public opinion is often insufficient to halt the growth of massive bureaucracies, monopolies, and cartels. And on every hand men are heard to bewail their own impotence and entrapment in “the system.” Yet, a residue of hardy individualism remains—a legacy, many scholars believe, of our frontier experience—among people in every economic and social class in the fifty states. And to that may be attributed those periodic flare-ups in which persons alone or in small groups resist being reduced to ciphers in a statistical chart and risk all in defense of their essential humanity. Each state, each region, has seen such episodes, and none perhaps more than New Mexico.
The Pueblo Indians’ fight against the Bursum Bill, John Prather’s private war to keep his ranch, and the Hispano’s Republic of San Joaquin (founded as part of a continuing struggle to recover lost land grants)—all were expressions of the view that the little man in a democracy has a right to be heard and to survive. These three cases are singled out, because in each one people were ready to lay their lives on the line for what they believed.
The struggle of the Pueblo people to maintain their islands of individuality and culture in the great sea of conforming pressures that twentieth-century America had become reached a point of crisis when New Mexico’s Senator Holm O. Bursum in 1922 introduced his congressional bill. That measure was designed to settle the claims of white squatters on Pueblo land, but it did so to the detriment of the Indians. When the full details of the Bursum Bill became known, the Pueblos and their friends in the white community mounted a full-scale attack upon it, creating a controversy that soon gained nationwide attention.
The source of the trouble lay back in the nineteenth century. By terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ending the Mexican War in 1848, the Pueblos’ property rights over some seven hundred thousand acres had been guaranteed. The point was reaffirmed after 1854 by the surveyor-general and by the United States Congress. Notwithstanding, the Indians were continually bothered by trespassers and squatters moving upon their valuable irrigated lands, because the Supreme Court had decreed in 1876 that the Pueblos, owing to their advanced culture, were not wards of the government, as other tribes were, and hence were not entitled to government protection. It further declared that they had complete title to their lands, could dispose of them at will and that federal Indian laws were not applicable to them.
That decision proved most damaging for New Mexico’s Indians. The Spanish regime had diligently protected their property boundaries, upheld the doctrine that their lands were inalienable, and provided free legal services. Now the Pueblos found themselves thrown on their own meager resources and deprived of the supporting arm of the government. Also, it soon became apparent that, without federal protection, there was nothing to prevent individual tribal members from selling off small parcels of the lands that heretofore had been held in common. As a result of that situation, some thirty percent or more of the Pueblos’ best acreage shortly passed into non-Indian hands.
The land base would have continued to erode had not the court in 1913 reversed its earlier stand and ruled that the United States was in fact responsible for the welfare of the Pueblo people, just as it was for other Indian tribes in the country. Official guardianship, the court held, should have been continuous since 1848, and therefore all losses of original Pueblo lands to encroachers or purchasers were illegal. A victory for the Indians, or so it appeared.
The fly in the ointment was that, by this time, some three thousand Hispanos and Anglos had claims to former Pueblo farmlands and irrigation rights. Both they and the state were unwilling to see that property given back to the Indians without a fight. Much of the land indeed had been acquired by the current owners in good faith; some of it had been lived upon by non-Indians for two or more generations.
Although the court had said that the government must move to recover the Pueblos’ lands and water rights from outsiders, suits to quiet title and delays interposed by the Interior Department kept the matter festering year in and year out. In the meantime, several pueblos such as Tesuque, San Ildefonso, and San Juan, which had suffered the greatest losses, were forced by circumstances to take government rations. Drought added to their woes. With the state of uncertainty, tensions mounted, and isolated instances of violence began to erupt between Pueblos, Anglos, and Spanish settlers. That was the situation in 1921 when New Mexico’s own Albert B. Fall was appointed Secretary of the Interior by President Warren G. Harding.
Fall genuinely wished to defuse the explosive land controversy in his home state, but in so doing he hoped to strengthen his own political hand. The settlers were loudly defending their claims; moreover, they represented an important block of votes. The Indians, on the other hand, defended themselves with milder words, appeared to have few supporters outside their own communities, and had no power at the ballot box, since they were still denied the right to vote. Not surprisingly, Secretary Fall chose to follow a course highly unfavorable to the Pueblos.
In May of 1921, Fall asked Senator Bursum to draft a bill to resolve the land crisis. The final measure that emerged after much tinkering and revision was designed to confirm all non-Indian claims of title held for more than ten years prior to statehood in 1912.1 The Indians were delivered an additional blow by another provision of the bill proposing that future challenges to Pueblo water rights and land should fall under the jurisdiction of the unfriendly state courts. By inference, this could be taken to mean that all internal affairs of the Pueblos came under authority of the court system. Should that prove true, it would suggest that judges could force native priests, governors, and other principal men to provide information on the most secret aspects of Pueblo life or face contempt citations. Since all the Indians’ affairs, political as well as economic, were closely bound up with religion, and village customs were protected by an inviolable rule of secrecy, any such invasion of their privacy by the state would quickly lead to dissolution of Pueblo society. The Bursum Bill, then, pending before Congress in 1922, carried with it the potentiality of disaster for New Mexico’s village Indians.
Shut up in their mud pueblos, two thousand miles from Washington, they nearly missed hearing about the bill altogether. No reports of it appeared in the local press, no public official called it to their attention. In fact, it seemed there was a deliberate conspiracy of silence on the part of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to keep the measure quiet until it had become law. But the Pueblos had friends of whom, until this point, they had been unaware, and those friends now came to their aid with advice, money, and political muscle.
The earliest and most vocal supporters of the Indians sprang from the colonies of artists and writers that had grown up in recent years in Santa Fe and Taos. The same enchanting landscape and Old World atmosphere that had inspired Governor Lew Wallace to pursue the avocations of painter and author also drew and exhilarated others of artistic and intellectual ability. Two of the pioneers were Ernest L. Blumenschein and Bert Phillips, who landed in the isolated Shangri-La of Taos in 1898. They stayed, they painted sublime canvases of Indians and of mountains, brilliant with sunlight; they attracted others; and in 1914, they formed the Taos Society of Artists. Their work, constituting a distinctly New Mexican school, was disseminated and publicized by the Santa Fe Railroad, and it put their little colony on the nation’s art map.
Where the painters led, writers and other intellectuals had soon followed. Mable Dodge Sterne, who dabbled in letters and had once run a salon in Greenwich Village, arrived in Taos in 1917. To her wide circle of acquaintances in the East, she wrote effusive letters filled with praise of New Mexico’s lustrous viewscapes and multicultural people. At her urging, a young New York poet, John Collier, came, as did D. H. Lawrence from England, and others. The high country of northern New Mexico became a refuge for literary exiles, many of whom developed a strong feeling of kinship with their Pueblo neighbors.
It was the youthful and intense poet John Collier who learned of the onerous Bursum Bill before Congress and sounded the alarm. With Mabel Sterne’s new husband, Taos Indian Tony Luhan, as his interpreter, Collier met far into the night with the Pueblo elders, explaining the full implications of Senator Bur-sum’s legislation. Of their reaction, he wrote later, “The old men of the tribe moaned, knowing it was a sentence of death.”2
Collier carried his warning down the Rio Grande to the remaining Pueblos. They listened in astonishment and reacted swiftly. Messages went out, just as they had 242 years before, at the time of the great Pueblo Revolt, summoning the Indians to unite. Delegations from each village came together at Santo Domingo, north of Albuquerque; they formed an All-Pueblo Council and pledged to use every resource available to defeat the Bursum Bill. The little pueblo of Tesuque went further, declaring that its people would barricade themselves behind dirt walls and starve before surrendering their traditional sovereignty.
Now that the Indians had joined battle, their allies began to rally in legions. The artists and writers of Taos, and those who had spilled over to Santa Fe, issued a stinging manifesto, grandly titled “Proclamation to the American Public,” in which they eloquently defended Indian rights.3 Uniting under the slogan of “Let’s Save the Pueblos,” they unleashed a blitz of paper and words, inundating newspapers and magazines across the country with protest resolutions, letters, and articles. Many of their friends in the eastern intellectual community were persuaded to join the struggle though they had never seen New Mexico or a Pueblo Indian. The rising chorus of protest was becoming fierce.
But more was yet to come. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs, with a national membership of two million, threw its full weight behind the Pueblo cause. The energetic president, Mrs. Stella Atwood of California, raised money, hired lawyers, and set up an effective lobby in Washington. Her fellow club members, at her prompting, showered their congressmen with telegrams and letters. She visited meetings of the Pueblo Council and trod the halls of Congress, where she reasoned, pleaded, and threatened retaliation at the voting box. And with all her travels and thunderings, Mrs. Atwood raised the Indians’ plight to the level of a national issue.
The usually reticent Pueblos, too, were now carrying the banner plainly for all to see. They had drafted their own appeal to the people of the United States, condemning the Bursum Bill as a threat to their way of life, and they had raised $3,500 to send a delegation to Washington to present their case. The Pueblo spokesmen traveled across country accompanied by John Collier and carrying the venerable Spanish and Lincoln canes as symbols of their authority. At major cities, they appeared before huge gatherings of sympathetic citizens and won new partisans; and in Washington they stood toe-to-toe with stern-faced senators whose votes would decide the fate of their villages.
The intensity of the furor dumfounded Secretary Fall. It appears never to have occurred to him that anyone gave a penny for what happened to the Indians. But now he learned differently.
The campaign on behalf of the Pueblos began to take effect. In Congress, the Bursum Bill was recalled from the House by unanimous consent, with the explanation that its intent had been misrepresented to the lawmakers. Then further hearings on the entire question were undertaken by the Senate Subcommittee on Public Lands and Surveys. Finally, in 1924, the matter was judiciously settled with passage of the Pueblo Lands Act which set terms for the eviction of—and, in some cases, compensation for—squatters on patented Indian grants. The ancient land rights extended to the Pueblos by Spain were at last recognized as perfect and unimpaired.
The heated debate over the Bursum Bill had aroused broad interest in Indian rights and had focused attention on New Mexico and its people, as well. Even more fundamental was the shift in government policy that ultimately resulted. Before the affray, the Bureau of Indian Affairs had actively worked to discredit the culture and religion of the first Americans and to bring about their speedy assimilation. Now, with defeat of the bill and clear evidence of widespread support for the Indians’ effort to maintain their tribal integrity, a more tolerant attitude began to make itself felt among government policy-makers and administrators. President Franklin D. Roosevelt added the crowning feather when, in 1933, he appointed John Collier to be Commissioner of Indian Affairs, with the understanding that the red men would be accorded the respect and responsibility to which they were entitled as members of a free nation.
The Pueblos’ exertions in the 1920s, while paving the way for better treatment of all American Indians, did not, of course, prevent new controversies from arising in succeeding years. That first all-out fight, however, did show them how to get a hearing for their grievances and where to find backers when a forceful push was needed to make their point. Such valuable knowledge was later put to good use by Taos Pueblo in a long bout to gain title to the sacred Blue Lake located on national forest land high in the mountains above the village.
Largely at the urging of Commissioner Collier and New Mexico’s senators, Congress in the 1930s directed the Secretary of Agriculture to issue the Taos people a special permit that would give them exclusive use of the Blue Lake shrine and to instruct the Forest Service to prevent any desecration of the surrounding wilderness area. That arrangement worked fairly well until the 1960s. Then, however, population pressures brought increasing numbers of outdoorsmen into the high country, resulting in numerous instances of vandalism; and Forest officials grew lax in maintaining the wilderness character of the lake, allowing, for example, the inroads of logging companies.
To the Taos Indians, who felt the security of their religion was at stake, the situation became intolerable. They therefore decided to petition Congress to grant them title to the lake and to a wide belt of adjacent lands to serve as a buffer. The claim they put forward was based on use and ownership before the coming of the Spaniards and was substantiated by both Indian tradition and archeology.
In 1965, a bill was offered that, if passed, would have separated the Blue Lake watershed from surrounding federal land and placed it under the Department of Interior as trustee for the Indians. But Congressional approval was delayed another five years by opposition in the Senate. In the interval, Taos leaders labored tirelessly to win confirmation, repeatedly following the now well-worn path to Washington. Again, as they had done forty years before in the Bursum Bill affair, friends of the Indians rattled the drums in support and spoke with determined voice to their elected representatives. The news media throughout the country, sensing the awakening interest in America’s Indian heritage, gave front-page coverage to the issue and on occasion editorially defended the Taos position.
Resistance in Congress finally crumbled, and President Nixon, on December 15, 1970, signed a bill placing 48,000 acres of Carson National Forest, including Blue Lake, in trust for the sole use of Taos Pueblo. That victory for the Indians not only reaffirmed basic principles of justice, but demonstrated a strong sentiment among the Anglo community for protection of divergent cultural and religious enclaves within the larger fabric of society. Exactly how much straying from conformity’s road a democracy could tolerate was still not definitely answered; but at least this case had shown it could stand some, without toppling into ruin.
A hundred miles below New Mexico’s southernmost pueblo, battling John Prather won the same point and in a manner not wholly unlike that of the Indians. Prather’s name is not one generally found in formal history books. But it deserves to be, just as the stand he took deserves to be pondered by all thoughtful people.
In 1883, John Prather and his brother Owen came to New Mexico on horseback, from Texas. As part of the last wave of the western movement, they were seeking free land at a time when most of the prime land had already been claimed. The Prathers were stockmen, and as they rode, they looked with admiration upon the grassy plains of southeastern New Mexico. But other Texans had got there first, twenty years before, with their beef herds, and even now they were being pressured by a new sort of migration—rangy, hollow-eyed men driving patched-up wagons loaded with plows, fencing tools, and hollow-eyed children. These dry-farmers out of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Missouri would try, and try again, over the next decades to bring in a crop in a country that had adequate rainfall on an average of once every three years. Some of them would always be going broke and pulling up stakes for California, but others would hold out until the dust-bowl days of the thirties.
In any event, the Prather brothers caught the drift of things there oh the plains and, having no desire to compete with either the established ranchers or the encroaching sod-busters, they kept moving. Beyond the Pecos, they followed a pass through a ridge of mountains and emerged upon the western slope to see, dipping before them, the shimmering expanse of the Tularosa Basin and the distant dark ridge of the San Andres Range.
What they had entered, after their trip over the plains and through the cool mountain forest, was a different world—a kingdom whose pebbly soil could support only a thin mantle of grass and scattered clumps of yucca and greasewood. Gypsum flats and lava beds covered great sections of the land, and summer’s blazing light and dry heat shriveled every living thing. The White Sands, a lake of shifting, glittering gypsum dunes, reached fifty miles north and south down the center of the basin and served as a playground for little whirlwinds, called dust devils, whose antics could be followed by anyone with a perch in the mountains fifty miles away. A typically Spanish landscape, people called it; but that description wandered considerably from the truth. Nothing in Spain, even in the bleakest parts of Andalucía, could quite match the desolation and forlornness of that portion of New Mexico extending from the Tularosa Basin west across two mountain chains to the Rio Grande.
Such hard, inhospitable country—much of it then in Lincoln County—attracted a certain breed of men. Restless and roistering men were drawn to it, especially those who felt uncomfortable in crowds, shunned society’s constraints, and were at ease with solitude. And men like the Prathers, hereditary pioneers with no other frontier than this to go to. In those early days, almost everyone else was prepared to leave the Tularosa kingdom to the Apaches and the jackrabbits; and they joked, after seeing natives grubbing roots for fuel and bringing water on burros from the mountains, that this was the only place on the continent where men, reversing the usual order of things, dug for firewood and climbed for water.
But it was here that John Prather, after some shifting about, settled on a spot with fair grass below the Sacramento Mountains and went to raising cattle. Owen, nearby, began developing a sheep ranch. Decades crept by, wars and depression bedeviled the outside world, and all the while under the flaming New Mexican sun, John Prather worked his stock and continued to improve his property of some four thousand deeded acres and an additional twenty thousand acres leased from the government. For all the hardships, there were compensations: the burning flush of indescribable sunsets, the smell of summer rain on the desert, the display put on by giant yuccas each spring when for a few weeks they send forth a tall stalk and clusters of snowy blossoms—like hominy ice cream on a stick, according to one old-timer. But best of all, in the view of John Prather and of the few hundred other scattered souls who scratched out a living in this desert world the size of one or more New England states, it was a place where a fellow could go his own way, unfettered by many of the shackles that had been clamped on modern life, and where he could still enjoy the satisfaction of benefiting directly from his own labor.
Then World War II changed all that for the Tularosa country and for all the off-the-path pockets in New Mexico that had kept one foot planted in the nineteenth century. Even Albuquerque, the state’s transportation hub and largest city, was to have its character permanently altered by events of the 1940s.
The war was hard on New Mexico, too, for reasons other than those having to do with fast and irritating change. In proportion to the scant population, New Mexicans—Indian, Hispano, and Anglo alike—experienced the highest casualty rate of any state during the opening years of the conflict. Two of their regiments were at Bataan in the Philippines, and after Bataan fell to the Japanese, they endured the infamous “Death March” and three years of imprisonment. Some of the survivors, keeping a vow made during that harrowing time, later undertook a pilgrimage on foot to the rustic adobe Santuario de Chimayo, a popular Hispano shrine north of Santa Fe that dates from colonial days.
Another course of events during the war was to make an even deeper impression on New Mexico and at the same time would start John Prather on the road to his small rebellion. It had its beginning on the pine-clad summit of the Pajarito Plateau west of Santa Fe. Upon the plateau in 1943, the U.S. government sealed off a tract of land and built the secret city of Los Alamos around an atomic energy laboratory. Scientists living with their families in almost complete seclusion soon produced the first atomic bomb and tested it on July 16, 1945, at the Trinity Site in the desolate White Sands of southern New Mexico. The full significance of the project was not known to the public until the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki revealed to the world the arrival of the nuclear age.
The explosion of the atomic bomb at the White Sands Proving Ground (now the White Sands Missile Range) was felt over much of New Mexico in that summer of 1945. But it was what followed that proved more disturbing to the residents of the Tularosa Basin. The military was in need of land, a great deal of it, for the testing of rockets and the training of their crews, a program deemed crucial for national defense. To expand the range, hundreds of thousands of acres were ordered withdrawn from the public domain and from private ownership, which meant condemnation proceedings were instituted against surrounding ranchers. Many of these people waged fierce court battles and appeared at congressional hearings in a bid to keep their land, but one by one, over succeeding years, they lost out and were displaced.
Then, in 1955, the government, as it crept eastward toward the Sacramento Mountains swallowing up chunks of ground in whale-sized gulps, ran straight into eighty-two-year-old John Prather. His land, which he had held and worked for fifty years, was not for sale, Prather announced. And anyone who tried to put him off might get hurt. In the U.S. District Court at Albuquerque, a condemnation suit resulted in a ninety-day eviction notice for John Prather and his neighbors. The old man’s response to that action was to issue a public statement: “I’m going to die at home.”4
The army found itself in an awkward position. Prather, with all his stubbornness and independence, was an authentic pioneer who had a personal hand in taming the West. He was a survivor of that frontier stock whose experience had come to be viewed by Americans in romantic and heroic terms. If he stood by his guns, as he was threatening to do, the whole affair might be ballyhooed to the skies by the news-hungry press and the army made to look like an oppressive monster. The situation demanded gentleness and tact, and government officials mustered every ounce of that they could.
The army reasoned and cajoled. It offered this thorn in its side the sum of $200,000 for his ranch. It warned him that missiles, enough to scare any man, would be shot over portions of the property, and his life would be in danger. To the offer, John Prather said no. And to the warning, he replied, “I’m not afraid of missiles. I’ve raised mules all my life.”5
By now, August 1957, the episode was spread across the front pages of the nation’s leading dailies, and reporters were pouring into El Paso, where they looked for transportation northward to the Tularosa Basin. At the ranch, Prather’s kin had arrived, twenty-five in all, and they joined in fortifying the main house in preparation for a siege. As jeeps brought in army officers and newsmen over a dusty, washboard road, it appeared the basin’s first battle since the days of the Apache wars was about to be fought.
Officials, however, had had enough. Public opinion was clearly swinging to the side of the courageous old rancher, and since he could not be moved, short of force, a directive from Washington ordered military personnel to withdraw from the Prather Ranch. The army then went back to court and obtained a new writ exempting the ranch house and fifteen surrounding acres from confiscation; the remainder of the land was forthwith annexed to the military reservation. If John Prather raised no further fuss, he would be left alone.
That ended the matter. Prather had lost his ranch, but he had also won a victory of sorts. Standing firm, he had forced the U.S. government to compromise and in so doing had chiseled himself a niche in the history of southern New Mexico. As one writer later explained it, John Prather reacted as his forebears had reacted against invasion of their independence and property rights. His was the code and the psychology of the eighties, and he was the last of his kind.6
The upheaval in New Mexico produced by World War II, by the growth of postwar defense installations and industries, and by the sudden influx of population—all of which hastened the end of John Prather’s world—also contributed to rising social and economic problems among Hispanos in the mountains of the north. Again, as in the cases of the Pueblo Indians and the ranchers of the Tularosa Basin, a struggle for land became the focus of a human drama, bringing private citizens into conflict with established authority.
Descendants of the Spaniards, particularly those dwelling in rural areas, had managed with some success to cling to the core of their culture and language during the early decades of the twentieth century. They continued to farm in traditional ways, to pursue the yearly observance of ancient religious practices, to speak a lilting and archaic Spanish, and to perform folk plays and to sing songs brought to this land three hundred years earlier by their ancestors. But after 1940, the modern world—swiftly, inexorably—began closing in, with its powerful pressures for assimilation into the dominant stream of national life. People left their adobe villages in droves to look for high-paying jobs in industry outside the state or to seek work in suddenly booming Albuquerque or in the uranium mines that opened in the Grants area in the early 1950s. Many communities, bereft of their young and middle-aged, were abandoned to the care of a few old people; schools and small businesses closed; village life declined and family unity was sundered.
There is nothing new, of course, about a migration from farm to city, and the stresses such a movement can cause are well known. But for New Mexico’s Hispanos, the difficulties were compounded because leaving home also meant leaving their language and culture behind. To enter into confident, prosperous, urban America and gain a measure of success, one needed to become a homogenized American. Many New Mexicans in fact made that transition and in time dropped the ties to their native villages. Their children grew up speaking only marginal Spanish, or none at all, and the pride once held in their Hispanic heritage seeped away.
Yet, there were others, perhaps the majority, who still felt a powerful kinship with the past, and who never lost, in the midst of smog and noise and the clutter and clatter of the city, a longing to return to the places of their birth and once again to work the land and smell the crisp winter air heavy with piñon smoke. Often they did go back for a day—arriving from California or Texas or beyond—to a kind of symbolic homecoming on the feast day of the village’s patron saint, and afterward taking the long road back to their new homes and jobs. Some of those who had settled in Albuquerque, Bernalillo, Santa Fe, and Las Vegas, only a few hours’ drive from their country places, could go on weekends to look after small fields or a few head of livestock, maintaining that one small link in the chain of their former lives. And, finally, there was that handful for whom the pull of their homeland was too strong, and they gave up city life altogether to return to their mud houses in what had become known as the “poverty pockets” of the northern mountains.
The rub was that the land base of the Hispano villages had been eroding for a hundred years, and what remained was scarcely enough to provide a minimal livelihood even for the small population still engaged in farming or stock-raising. As with Pueblo lands, the problems of Spanish land grants had commenced soon after the American conquest of New Mexico. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Mexico provided for the protection of property rights of those persons who had suddenly become citizens of the United States. The difficulty of fulfilling that guarantee became apparent only later, as differences in Spanish and Anglo concepts of law and land tenure began to raise complex legal questions. The most flammable of these involved the old community land grants which had been made by Spain and Mexico. Originally, under terms of such grants, settlers had received individual title to the small amount of farmland available along the irrigation ditches, while the remainder of the grant was held in common for purposes of grazing and wood-gathering. The boundaries of the community holdings, in the absence of surveyors, were inexactly delineated, using such natural landmarks as large rocks, prominent trees, springs, and arroyos. Within a short time after establishment of the American legal system, complications arising from these Hispanic practices produced a tangled web of claims and counterclaims and opened the way for speculators to obtain, often through deceit and fraud, a controlling interest in some of the most valuable grants.
Early, Congress took a sidelong look at the exasperating problem and then handed it to the Office of the Surveyor-General, which was created in 1854 for the specific purpose of adjudicating Spanish and Mexican land titles. At the time, New Mexico had more than one thousand claims awaiting settlement, some of them dealing with the community grants and others with large private grants that had once been allotted to individual Spaniards. The first surveys showed that many of the old boundaries could no longer be accurately defined and that often the grants had overlapping claims. Legitimate descendants of grantees seldom possessed their original papers, and some of those who did, through fear or distrust of the alien legal procedures now imposed upon them, failed to bring the documents forward to receive new patents for their lands.
In the forefront of those who profited from such a situation were the lawyers—the class of men who Father Martínez had predicted in the 1850s would supplant priests as the real power in New Mexico. For clearing titles, they exacted huge fees. These fees were usually paid in land from that held in common, so that, within time, as seemingly endless litigation over titles continued, sharp-eyed American lawyers and their associates acquired possession of prodigious sections of the Spanish grants. One Santa Fe attorney, for example, was reported by a local newspaper in 1894 to have an interest in seventy-five grants and to own outright nearly two million acres.7
Commented one of New Mexico’s leading land-grant authorities, “Only a few claims were confirmed and patented under the Surveyor-General, and by the 1880s speculation in the grants had reached the point of a national scandal.”8 As a result, a Court of Private Land Claims was established in 1891 in a bid to settle the many controversies by judicial means. Although that body succeeded in adjudicating all claims by 1903, it sowed the seeds of future discord by accepting and continuing a precedent regarding community grants that had been laid down by earlier courts.
Unfamiliar with Spanish law protecting and preserving village commons, American judges had ruled that the ancient common lands could be partitioned and divided among the numerous grant-claimants. That meant that vast areas of upland pastures and mountain woods, of which villagers had made free use for generations, were now allotted to individuals who could put them up for sale if they chose. Not surprisingly, surrounding lands soon slipped from the grasp of community members and passed to the control of outsiders—often cattlemen from Texas—or into the public domain, where much of it was placed under the National Forest Service. A similar pattern of land loss was experienced by a number of American Indian tribes in the twentieth century, when by Congressional Act their reservations were broken up and the land granted in severalty, thereby destroying the common-property base of community existence.
In response to social and economic frustrations and to lingering resentment over land problems, disaffected Hispanos in the late 1950s began to be drawn to a strange folk movement with revolutionary undertones. Its spokesman and leader was a man of rare charisma—Reies Lopez Tijerina, a Mexican-American fundamentalist preacher who came to New Mexico and found in the long-unresolved land issue a cause upon which to build a personal crusade. As Tijerina saw it, the Hispano people’s diminishing lands and loss of a sense of community were leading unavoidably to surrender of control over their own destinies and to eventual cultural extinction. To reverse that unhappy process, Tijerina advocated a concerted push, via the courts, to obtain equal rights in education and employment—which, he declared, federal and state governments had been remiss in providing. But more to the point, he called for restitution of the community land grants that, to his view, had been usurped and illegally dispersed when the U.S. government failed to protect them under an obligation imposed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
The better to disseminate his ideas and attract followers, Tijerina founded the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants), usually referred to simply as the Alianza. He delivered heated speeches with messianic fervor, making the sweeping claim that members of his organization were the rightful heirs of millions of acres of land now in possession of the Forest Service and Anglo ranchers. And he asserted that twenty thousand people had joined the Alianza to participate in a common struggle for their lost rights. (A more accurate figure, perhaps, would be a quarter of that number.)
Through the mid-sixties, the militancy of the Alianza increased, as its demands became more shrill, and mounting resentment found an outlet in mass meetings and protest marches. Then, in October 1966, Reies Tijerina, with 350 followers, many of them armed, made a dramatic and unprecedented invasion of the Kit Carson National Forest northwest of the village of Abiquiu. At a popular tourist park called the Echo Amphitheater, located just inside the forest boundary, the Alianzans seized control and proclaimed establishment of the Republic of San Joaquin del Cañon de Rio de Chama—a new city-state founded on land alleged to have been once part of the nineteenth-century Spanish land grant of San Joaquin. The people set up tents and built campfires, elected government officials, erected a pole and upon it raised the blue-and-gold banner of their “republic.” When Forest Service rangers attempted to intervene, the Alianzans arrested them for trespassing. It was a grandstand play engineered, as Tijerina admitted later, to gain publicity and to bring the old matter of land grants into the courts for airing.
After occupying their campground for several days, the Alianzans left quietly, believing that they had scored a point and won attention for their cause. In time, Tijerina and several of his lieutenants would be charged by federal authorities with assaulting forest rangers and with conversion of government property. State officials too were taking another look at the movement and assessing its potential for stirring up added trouble. Governor David Cargo from Santa Fe spoke out emphatically, “I can sympathize with the people involved. … They are very, very poor. … It’s the right of every citizen to petition government. However, I will not tolerate violence or destruction of property.”9
But both the note of conciliation and the warning contained in the governor’s words went unheeded. In June 1967, the combative Alianza unleashed its now celebrated raid on the Rio Arriba County Courthouse at Tierra Amarilla. It was a frenzied shooting attack by Tijerina’s partisans, who captured and held the town and courthouse for two hours, wounding two officers and taking a pair of hostages, in an episode ripped from the pages of the Old West. Afterwards, the attackers—labeled insurrectionists by much of the nation’s press—fled to the mountains. New Mexico’s lieutenant governor (in the absence of Governor Cargo, who happened to be out of the state) called out National Guard tanks, 40mm cannons, helicopters, and masses of troops in trucks and on horseback to pursue the offenders—the largest manhunt in the history of the Southwest. Some Alianza members, mainly women and children, were taken, but most managed to elude the searchers. In the days and weeks that followed, they were identified and arrested, one by one, among them Reies Lopez Tijerina. Brought to trial in Albuquerque, Tijerina conducted his own defense with consummate showmanship and, in a stunning verdict, won acquittal. Tried again on different charges stemming from the Echo Amphitheater incident and related matters, he was later convicted and served a two-year term in a federal prison and a short term in the state penitentiary.
The power and influence of the Alianza dwindled rapidly after the Tierra Amarilla affair. Awaiting trial, Tijerina tried to broaden his appeal for justice by merging with the nationwide civil rights movement; he traveled to California to confer with labor organizer Cesar Chávez and to Atlanta, where he met with Martin Luther King, Jr. As leader of a Chicano contingent to the Poor People’s March on Washington in 1968, Tijerina gained attention as one of the loudest and most dedicated spokesmen for social reform. But back in New Mexico, his standing with his followers was on the wane, and others in the Hispano community, particularly militant youth, began to look for answers in new directions.
Meanwhile, as the 1970s opened, land problems and poverty continued to plague northern New Mexico—the “Appalachia of the Southwest,” some observers had labeled it. However, numerous federal programs and a renewed willingness on the part of Hispanos of all ages to work for the revitalization of village culture gave promise of a more productive future. As yet, however, New Mexico’s distinctive Hispanic heritage has not received the recognition and respect that it deserves as one of America’s oldest and most creative wells of human experience. Whether that error will ever be fully corrected remains to be seen.
In recent decades, many New Mexicans have campaigned vigorously, though without the violence of the Alianza, to promote a variety of causes that they believe to be fundamental for the preservation of their state’s distinctive character and environment. Beginning in the 1920s, residents of Santa Fe embarked on a program to revive the use of Pueblo architecture and the old territorial building style, a movement insuring that the flavor of the past, at least in that city, would not be buried under a tasteless modernity. Throughout the northern part of the state, a clandestine group of artists, known popularly as the “Billboard Vigilantes,” periodically conducted nighttime excursions to remove from the highway advertising signs that sullied the landscape. When, in the late 1960s, plans were announced to build a pulp mill on the Rio Grande, aroused citizens banded together in newly formed conservation organizations to protect the area’s principal water course from pollution. After stopping construction of the proposed mill, they went on to challenge land promoters who were subdividing huge tracts of desert into “jackrabbit estates” to be sold to gullible easterners. And they took on a new wave of strip miners and began working in the Four Corners to correct the hazards associated with huge power plants whose stacks spewed tons of fly ash into the clouds.
New Mexico’s Indians too have entered upon a new period of activity in which, more and more, they are looking outward and participating in community, state, and even national affairs. Tribal members campaign for positions on local school boards, run for legislative offices, and win appointments in state government. The Jicarilla Apaches on their capacious northern reservation and the Mescalero Apaches on their well-timbered lands in the south have demonstrated resourcefulness and initiative in developing business enterprises and sponsoring programs that promote economic self-sufficiency and foster tribal unity. The largest Indian group in America, the Navajo, occupying a far-flung reservation from New Mexico across northern Arizona and into Utah, continue to show amazing adaptability to changing conditions while maintaining, perhaps to a greater degree than any southwestern tribe, their native language and customs. The new Navajo Community College, for example, helps prepare young people for life in today’s world, but at the same time it places strong emphasis on the Indians’ cultural heritage.
What now seems clear to all thoughtful New Mexicans is that they must keep looking for ways to preserve the old alongside the new. And in the face of diminishing resources, they must seek to perpetuate some measure of that reverence for the land and its waters that was characteristic of the best among both Spanish and Anglo-American pioneers and among the original Indian inhabitants.
The sense of dust-laden timelessness that seems to hang over all New Mexico, from Clayton in the northeast to Lordsburg in the southwest and from Shiprock in the northwest to Hobbs in the southeast, carries with it the accumulated experience of centuries, the sum total of the lives of Indians, Spaniards, and Americans who left their imperishable mark on this big, dry, windy land. Forgetting either their achievements or their failings as we lurch into the future can only bring an impoverishment of spirit that modern man can ill afford.