Hispano Land Grants and a Culture Older Than the State

Drive through the villages of northern New Mexico, Truchas, Chimayó, Abiquiú, Tierra Amarilla, and you are moving through a world that does not look much like the rest of the American Southwest. The adobe walls are thick, the acequia ditches are old, and the Spanish spoken here contains words that have disappeared from Castilian Spanish for three centuries. These are the descendants of the original colonial settlers, and they have been here, without interruption, since the sixteen hundreds.

They call themselves Hispanos, and their relationship to the land is rooted in the Spanish land grant system. Under Spanish and then Mexican law, communities and individuals were granted tracts of land, some of them tens of thousands of acres, that were collectively held and managed for grazing, water, and timber. When the United States took New Mexico in eighteen forty-six, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised to honor those land titles.

What followed over the next half century was one of the largest legal dispossessions in American history. A Court of Private Land Claims established in eighteen ninety-one was supposed to adjudicate grant boundaries, but its procedures favored American legal standards over Spanish documentary practice. By the time the court closed in nineteen four, it had confirmed only a small fraction of the acreage presented to it.

Much of that land passed to Anglo ranchers, timber companies, and eventually the federal government. Descendants of the original grantees watched common grazing lands that had belonged to their families for generations become national forest, without compensation or recourse. The most dramatic protest came in nineteen sixty-seven, when a fiery political leader named Reies López Tijerina led an armed raid on the Tierra Amarilla courthouse in Rio Arriba County, demanding the return of grant lands.

The raid itself failed, but it became a flashpoint for the Chicano rights movement in the Southwest. The land grant question has never been fully resolved. The villages remain, and in them the Hispano culture, its santos, its matachines dances, its centuries-old dialects, remains stubbornly alive.