Chicanos:  A Remembered History of New Mexico

The basic historical facts are that Spanish colonizers arrived in New Mexico in 1598 and imposed a European ethic on indigenous peoples who had already been living here for at least 10,000 years.

That history between Spanish colonizers and indigenous peoples is the same story of European colonization played out countless times all across the world—in Africa, South America, and Asia.

That story of colonization has played out twice in New Mexico. First, for 250 years under Spanish and Mexican rule; and second, for the past 160 years under US rule.  US colonization wasn’t just imposed on Native Americans; Chicanos were tossed into the same crucible of colonization.

Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny annexed New Mexico into the US in 1846, named a provisional governor and moved on to claim California for the US as part of the Mexican-American War.

A few months later, the Taos Rebellion against American Occupation was organized and led by Mexicano Pablo Montoya and Taos Pueblo native Tomás Romero. The freedom fighters were able to kill Gov. Bent and several other officials Gen. Kearny had appointed, as well as other Americans living in the Taos area. The insurrection spread across northern New Mexico.

The rebellion was brutally put down by American forces. Insurgents were defeated at the battle of Mora; at the battle of Santa Cruz de la Cañada and finally, at the battle of Taos Pueblo. More than 500 Mexicanos and Indians were killed just in Taos alone.

Resistance to American Occupation was not limited to armed rebellion.

Ever since American Occupation, Mexicanos/Chicanos have been active in politics.

In the political arena, Chicanos were already active in the Mexican government, and had a long and successful history of political involvement in the Spanish colonial period. This engagement in the political process continued under US rule. So successful were Chicanos in participating in electoral politics, the US Congress refused statehood to New Mexico for more than half a century because of the dominance of Nuevo Mexicanos in territorial politics.

In the late 1880s and 1890s, when Chicano homelands and resources were being stolen on a massive scale, a political party called La Raza Unida was formed to protect Chicanos’ rights.

Supporting Chicano cultural, land and economic interests was a highly literate intelligentsia. Between 1834 and until 1958, scores of Spanish-language newspapers were published in central and northern New Mexico. Through these mass media, critical issues of cultural defense and land protection were widely disseminated among the 110,000 Chicanos living in New Mexico in 1890.

On a personal note, my father, Benjamín Sandoval, was one of those Spanish-language journalists. He wrote in the 1930s, 40s and 50s for El Nuevo Mexicano—the Spanish-language edition of today’s Santa Fe New Mexican. He was also El Nuevo Mexicano’s literary page editor and was a poet and essayist.

Despite the efforts of our ancestors to protect our lands and culture, US Occupation ended with the loss of most grazing and timbering lands in northern New Mexico. Those not stolen outright by speculators and crooks like the Santa Fe Ring were seized by the federal government, which claimed that village communal lands were actually public domain.  The Santa Fe National Forest, the Cibola National Forest and the Carson National Forest were all created partly out of communal lands taken under the public domain ruling of the federal government. Together, these three northern New Mexico national forests cover more than 5 million acres.

In the 1880s and 1890s, when the rip-off of Chicano homelands was in full swing, Las Gorras Blancas became a guerilla movement. At night, these Chicano freedom fighters destroyed fences, burned barns, and ripped up railroad lines to protest the loss of their communal lands. I am proud to say that my great-grandfather, Leonardo Salazar, was one of them.

In response to this political and armed struggle, Congress created in 1891 the US Court of Private Land Claims for the purpose of deterring and adjusting land claims in the territories which were acquired from Mexico. In hindsight, the Court ended up hastening the loss of communal lands, but also protected others. Today, we still have 22 recognized land grants that together hold 250,000 acres of communal lands in trust for heirs.

The struggle of Chicanos to protect land and water rights here has continued unabated through the years.

In 1967, an armed group of land grant activists led by Reies López Tijerina stormed the Rio Arriba County Courthouse.  There, they hoped to arrest the local District Attorney, who days before had illegally instructed state police to arrest people for simply trying to attend a meeting. The meeting was never held.

In the armed confrontation at the courthouse, a jailer and a sheriff’s deputy were shot, and two hostages were taken by the raiders into the nearby mountains. New Mexico authorities then launched the biggest manhunt in our state’s history to find and arrest the raiders.

Tijerina defended himself against 54 criminal charges resulting from the raid and was found not guilty on all of them.

For northern New Mexico Chicano land-based communities, the loss of communal lands has not only been economically devastating. We have paid a heavy price in other areas as well.

Our separation from our homelands has created a deep, troubling and ongoing general psychosis.

This psychosis is reflected in the fact that more than half of our Chicano kids never finish high school.  In my home county of Rio Arriba—just an hour north of here—our people suffer the highest per capita deaths from heroin addiction in the country. Rio Arriba and other northern New Mexico counties are among the poorest in the nation, rivaling Appalachia and pockets in the deep South for the lack of health care, affordable housing, education and other indicators of poverty.

I believe these data reflect the damages inflicted by colonization over the past century and a half. As a community, Chicanos have also internalized much of this oppression. We have come to believe the stereotypes as reality and act accordingly.

The leadership of the Chicano community has much to do and must share in much of the blame for the poverty of spirit and body our people endure. I reject the role of victim and I know most of our people do as well. Despite our political muscle, we lack a coherent vision for re-creating healthy communities; we lack internal discipline; and we do not hold our leadership accountable.

Compounding our classic colonial situation is our mestizaje. Chicanos are mestizos—we are the product of Spanish-Mexicano intermixing with indigenous peoples.  Under Spanish colonial rule, we were the conqueror. Under US rule, we were the conquered.

This mestizaje has complicated our relationship to place.

For example, whenever Chicano activists in New Mexico seek to have the terms of the treaty ending the Mexican-American War enforced in their efforts to reclaim what were once land grant lands and now are federally-protected forests and public lands, or whenever Chicanos claim to be “native” to New Mexico, both Native American and Anglo communities argue that we were just the first wave of European colonizers to arrive in this area.  At the same time, we do not have control over the federal system that dictates how our homelands are used. 

How does our mestizaje play out in land and resource conflicts in New Mexico?

As Jake Kosek writes in his book, Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico:  “Hispano rights depend on their bloodlines to Spanish and Mexican pasts. To deviate from this blood purity is to dilute the rights and claims that come with these pasts—the treaties, deeds, patrimony and so on…The seamless, essentialized histories that reproduce rigid racial categories miss the ways in which Hispano and Native American identities are made…Underestimating the centrality and contradictions of mestizaje as a central part of contemporary southwest racial politics leads to the complications of land claims that are predicated on the fiction of racially pure and distinct ethnic groups. In this sense, Hispanos are trapped between what they need to remember and what others will not let them forget.”

Given the highly complex and politically charged context of a mestizaje reality playing out against a classic colonial pattern of exploitation in northern New Mexico, Anglo environmentalists have become a volatile addition to the politics of land use in northern New Mexico.

There exists a deep hostility between land-based Chicano communities in northern New Mexico and mainstream environmental organizations. This hostility is tied to class and race issues and to a widely-held belief among Chicanos that environmentalists are just another expression of US colonial exploitation. 

This hostility boiled to the surface a few years ago, when Forest Guardians sought and obtained a court injunction against logging in northern forests as an action to  protect the habitat of federally-protected owls. This action infuriated Chicanos, because their traditional wood-gathering activities were severely limited as part of the injunction.

Again, quoting Kosek: “The forest injunction and subsequent litigation by environmentalists are in direct conflict with community efforts to reclaim their lands. Sam Hitt, the former president of Forest Guardians, stated that he does not support communities regaining title to the land, nor does he support it being the source of their livelihoods.  (Hitt said) “Our first priority is protecting nature. Everything else, though it may seem important, is not our concern…We speak for nature, for the forest, because it does not have a voice.” The arrogance of this statement and the presumption that his group enjoys a direct and exclusive communication line with nature resonates with the arrogance of (other colonial institutions) (my paraphrase).”

Given Chicanos’ struggle against what we view as unrelenting colonial exploitation of our homelands, Anglo conservation groups have done little to separate themselves from this colonial model.

Part of that colonial model is defining just who a conservationist is. Look around this room. It appears we have defined a conservationist as someone who is middle-class, white and mostly male, though I’m pleased to see so many women joining the conservation movement in leadership positions.

Still, there is a deep cultural, class and ethnic divide in New Mexico in the conservation arena.

Mainstream conservation groups hire mostly all white staff and seek funding from mostly all white foundation staff and boards.

Left in the margins are other conservationists: Chicano acequia members, numbering in the tens of thousands; land grant activists, also in the thousands, and hundreds of Chicano farmers and ranchers.

Our challenge is to move beyond the rigid class and ethnic bias that afflicts the conservation movement and open ourselves to a deep re-examination of who a conservationist is and what a conservation movement should look like in this state.

If we can do that, who knows, we might create a re-invigorated, broad-based, conservation movement in the West that can change policies across the region, not through litigation and political maneuvering, but through the creation of a powerful set of voices that insist on saving our places.