New Mexico’s Centennial
Celebrate, Ignore or Condemn?
By Richard Griego and Ezequiel Antonio López
Part 1: Colonialism and Land Ownership
New Mexico is celebrating its centennial as a state of the United States of America. In 1912 New Mexico became the 47th state of the United States of America. In the midst of all the hoopla of commemorations, we should pause and examine what the real status of New Mexico actually is, especially for the American Indian and Spanish-Mexican populations. Are the 100 years of statehood something to celebrate, ignore or condemn? We hope to demonstrate that in essence New Mexico has been a colony of the United States and that it continues to have the character of a colony and thereby we have little to celebrate.
Historically, New Mexico was a U.S. colonial territory from 1848 to 1912 when it became a state of the U.S. federation. For 64 years the territory was a classic case of colonialism. The question is, did the condition of a colonial situation cease to exist because the legal status of the colonial territory changed to statehood in 1912? Did the economic, political, cultural and social conditions for the colonized Mexican and Native peoples, change in a positive and qualitative way different from when they were in a colonized territory?
This analysis goes a long way toward understanding and explaining the dreadful statistics which are presented in the media about our homeland. The nature of our dismal condition is often explained away by saying that New Mexico is a “poor state”. But why are we poor? Does that description apply to everyone in the state, or mainly to the colonized populations, American Indians and Spanish-Mexicans? In order to understand the nature of our condition, we give an overview of Spanish and English colonialism, the two colonialisms relevant to New Mexico, and we present a statistical profile of New Mexico to illustrate its colonial status.
Our point of view is that economics and resulting social class structures are the main determining factors insociety in general, but while analyzing New Mexico one needs to view colonization as an economic system in order to get at what the main causes are for our present condition.
International Colonialism
Colonialism is the economic system of producing the power and control of a monarchy, a nation or an empire over another people’s territory, resources, economy and politics by physical conquest, military force and occupation. For our purposes, the global historical process of colonialism is the military conquest of a majority of the world’s populations in all the continents of the globe by a minority of Western European monarchies for the purpose of producing wealth to transport back to the metropole of the colonizer. The military conquest includes the physical occupation of the territory and land inhabited by the indigenous peoples who become the colonized. The colonizer forces the total imposition of an economic, political, cultural and societal structure on the colonized. The colonized are forced to labor for the colonizer because they lose their land, economic system, and the political power to govern themselves.
To affect this domination of the indigenous colonized by the colonizer, the colonized are forced to adopt the colonizer’s political and economic system to produce wealth for the colonizer. To force the colonized to “accept” such an oppressive domination, the colonizer imposes a total culture: its religion, its language, changes the names of the colonized, and denies and distorts the colonized people’s history. In short, the colonizer forces a whole new identity on the colonized for the purpose of controlling their resistance to this oppression. Over time, the condition of social structure and domination becomes worse when those of the colonized, who decide to assimilate into the colonizer’s identity, are rejected, humiliated and treated with contempt since the colonizers never intend to accept the colonized as an equal, much less as one of their own.
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| C for Colonialism? |
Spanish Colonialism
New Mexico has been the victim of two colonialisms: first, Spanish colonialism, followed by U.S. English colonialism. The Spanish colonizers were the first to land in the western hemisphere in the late 15th century, one hundred years before the English colonizers landed at Plymouth Rock. The Spanish colonizer since 1492 proceeded to implement a deadly colonial system. The northern part of the hemisphere, which included what are now the Mexican nation and the six U.S. southwestern states of New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada and California, was a Spanish colony up until 1821.
The Spanish colonial system was based on the conquest of lands, the subjugation of the people native to these lands and the use of the colonized labor to extract wealth for the monarchy in Spain. The encomienda and repartimiento systems were forced labor systems whereby colonized natives were required to pay tribute to the Spanish colonial government and the Catholic Church in the form of unpaid forced labor and products of the land, such as harvested crops. In return for this privilege from the monarch, the encomendero, the colonizer who received the encomienda or repartimiento, was required to instruct the natives in the Catholic faith and to protect them from hostile groups, such as other native tribes.
Officially, colonized natives were not to be enslaved, but in practice an encomienda led to slave-like conditions for the natives, and thus, the repartimiento system, which was less rigid and less extensive, was instituted in the place of the encomiendas. Nevertheless, both systems oppressed the colonized natives. The Spanish colonizers were the first to enslave and transport Africans to labor alongside the indigenous colonized peoples in the Western Hemisphere.
The main method used by the Spanish colonizer to organize the occupation and settlement in the colonies was by the granting of mercedes or land grants. In New Mexico there were three types of land grants: 1) grants to individuals, 2) grants to communities or groups of families, and 3) grants given to Pueblo Indians. The grants to individuals could be sold and they predominated in the Rio Abajo region of New Mexico south of Santa Fe, the colonial capital.
The community land grants included small private holdings for settlers, but the largest portion of the lands were in the form of ejidos or communal lands that could not be sold. Pueblo Indian grants were but small portions of the vast lands traditionally claimed by Pueblos, but they were nevertheless officially recognized by colonial authorities. It is the loss of these community land grants and encroachments on Indian lands that have caused the most conflict regarding land tenure in New Mexico up to the present day.
Criollos wereSpanish colonizers born in the coloniesand they engaged in wars of independence from Spain all over the Americas. Mexico gained its independence in 1821. This new nation, which was still governed by descendants of the Spanish colonizer, claimed the Spanish colonial territory that now comprises the six U.S. southwestern states, as part of the Mexican national territory. Mexico gave citizenship to the Spanish-Mexican people and to the Pueblo Indians, but not to Apaches, nor to Navajos, with whom Mexico was still at war.
English Colonialism
The U.S. as a nation-state is a result of a classic case of English colonialism that was part of worldwide historical conquest of non-European peoples by Western European kings and monarchies that began in the 15th century. The English colonizer landed at Jamestown in 1607 and proceeded to organize the 13 colonies where indigenous peoples inhabited the land and had their own political, economic and social systems that included their own cultures, languages, religions and other social structures that had enabled them to progress through their own historical development.
All this changed when the English colonizer engaged in a genocidal war against the native peoples that resulted in the near extinction of the indigenous populations. For the few who survived their placement in reservations sealed their fate of poverty, alcoholism, drug addition, suicide, violence and death. This is not unlike other colonized peoples in all the continents where the English and Western Europeans imposed their domination on non-European peoples.
The sun has not yet set on the English Empire because, as a colonizer nation, the U.S. is an English colonial power that picked up the baton as a present day imperialist power. As was the case with all colonial empires, their purpose was to occupy these new lands to exploit the natural resources and the labor of the colonized peoples to produce wealth for the colonizer in England. The need for the most effective organization to exploit and transfer the wealth to the kingdom or mother country, led the colonizing monarchies to transform all colonies into nation-states, the latest form of organization for society up to the present day.
The English colonizer transformed the 13 colonies into a nation-state, and in 1776 fought the war forindependence from the English monarchy. This was a war of independence from the colonizing monarch in England by the English colonizers who were the founders of the new U.S. nation. The war of independence was not one for the colonized native people, or for the African slaves, or for the indentured servants, but was only for the landowning English male colonizer, who would inherit the new English colonial nation, that is, the United States of America.
During the period after 1776 the nation-building by the U.S. English colonizer included the expansion westward from the Atlantic eastern seaboard with the intention of building a nation that would extend all the way to the western Pacific Ocean. During this period of western expansion to increase the colonial territory of the new nation, the English colonizer, who now identified themselves as Americans, continued to engage the French and Spanish colonizer in their worldwide struggle for colonial possessions and wealth.
The enslavement of African Americans in U.S. history is further proof that America is a colonizing society. While African Americans did not have territory in the Western Hemisphere that was conquered by the colonizer, they were forced to serve as free labor by both the Spanish and U.S. English colonial empires. Thus, the African peoples in the United States have been in a colonial nation and are part of the colonized population.
A War between Colonizers
The English and Spanish colonizers, who now governed the newly independent nations, collided in 1848. The U.S. English colonizer in its expansion westward, provoked a war with the 25-year-old Mexican nation and militarily forced Mexico to give up the 6 states that now form the southwestern part of the United States. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed and $15 million were paid to justify symbolically the aggressive conquest of this huge portion of the Mexican national territory. At this historical moment the indigenous peoples and the mestizo population that had resulted in the rapacious domination of the colonized natives by the Spanish colonizers, now faced a second wave of occupation by the U.S. English colonization of the territory.
This is the historical moment when the Mexican citizens and the indigenous people who were left behind the U.S. political border became colonized peoples under U.S. occupation. The U.S. English colonizer granted citizenship to Mexicans in the colonized territory, but not much else. As in all classical colonial conquests, the colonized were forced to accept the new colonizer’s social system beginning with the loss of land, the language, the customs and other social institutions for self-governance. In this aggressive colonial conquest, as in other conquests, “military might makes right” and treaties that include financial compensation for defeat lend a veneer of legal justification for conquest. Beyond the “legality of conquest”, colonized people remain in a colonized condition economically, politically, culturally and socially.
The clash between private ownership of the means of production, especially the land, that is the core principle of the capitalist economic system organized by the U.S. English colonizer, was imposed on the Mexican Spanish colonizer’s feudal monarchical system of land ownership. Secondary components of land ownership in the Spanish colonizer’s economic system were the land grants that were characterized primarily by common ownership of lands by Spanish and mestizo settlers and Pueblo Indian communities. The Spanish colonial settlers were given land grants to occupy the land and to combat resistance by colonized native peoples.
Under this feudal monarchical economic system the Spanish colonizers were the land lords and the mestizo settlers were the serfs or peons working the common lands in the interests of the Spanish kingdom. This is a similar characteristic of colonial settlement of the land by the U.S. English colonizer who granted private lands to the settler colonizers who occupied the land all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
As historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes, “Mexican village and Pueblo Indian land use is distinguished by communal property ownership and use, in contrast to capitalist private ownership, and is further characterized by the predominance of use value production in the former as opposed to production for market exchange in the latter.” (Ref: Roots of Resistance, A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico, Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne; University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2007, p. 7.)Thus, in the U.S. capitalist system land is used as a commodity, to be bought and sold, while in the Mexican and Indian way of life land was to be used for subsistence on a communal basis.
It should be emphasized that the U.S. English colonizer left out Article 10 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848 specifically because it dealt with the protection of lands owned in common by the Spanish colonizer and mestizo settlers, as well as by the indigenous Pueblo peoples. The intention and colonial plans by the U.S. English colonizer were to change the ownership of all the land in the colonial territory from the Spanish colonizer’s common ownership to private and governmental ownership.
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| Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo Signature Page |
According to Dunbar-Ortiz, “The means by which the subsistent land-tenure system of New Mexico was destroyed under capitalist control was through the introduction of mercantile capitalism, followed by monopoly capital supported by the U.S. government. In the process, the agricultural producers were effectively stripped of their means of production and transformed from the owners of the means of production to a laboring class - a surplus, cheap labor force, dependent on capital for their existence.
Loss of land and the introduction of a money economy and money taxes dispossessed the agricultural producers. Though the Pueblo Indian communities retained possession of narrowed land bases under U.S. trust, they too were forced into wage labor for subsistence in a money economy.” (Ref: Ibid, pp. 7 – 8)
The history of New Mexico and the power struggle for the land between the U.S. English colonizer and the Mexican and indigenous colonized populations has not ended as of the year 2012. Below we outline major factors underlying our contemporary condition in order to answer the question whether New Mexico is still in a colonized condition or not.
Militarization
The U.S. military was instrumental in the takeover of New Mexico when the American Army of the West under Stephen Watts Kearney invaded in 1846 and proclaimed that “we come as friends to better your condition”. Nevertheless, there was resistance to the American takeover. Battles erupted in Arroyo Hondo, Las Vegas, Mora, and Santa Cruz. In Taos, Spanish-Mexicans and Pueblo Indians killed several American invaders, including U.S. colonial governor Charles Bent. Colonel Sterling Price led a punitive expedition armed with cannons to put down the Taos rebellion and 150 Mexican patriots were killed.
Forty other Mexicans were hanged in Santa Fe on charges of “treason” against the United States. But, how could these Mexican combatants be guilty of treason to the U.S. since they were still patriot citizens of Mexico? Military campaigns continued against Navajos and Apaches until 1886 and resulted in their placement on reservations. The role of the military, thereafter, was to pacify the native populations.
Consistent with New Mexico’s colonial status, the military presently assumes a large role in the state. There are three air force bases (Kirtland, Holloman, and Cannon), a testing range (White Sands), and a proving ground (McGregor Range of Fort Bliss). New Mexico also has a National Guard, a New Mexico State Defense Force and a National Guard armory. Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque is a site for the storage of some 2450 nuclear weapons.Furthermore, the Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories engage in nuclear weapons research and production. Indeed Los Alamos is the birthplace of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. The Chemical and Metallurgical Research Replacement Nuclear Facility was a proposed, and now suspended, $4 billion project slated for Los Alamos that would have enabled the increased production of plutonium pits, which form the core of nuclear warheads. This facility has been criticized as being unnecessary; however, efforts are still being made to build it.
Military-related activities are also polluting or threatening to pollute our state. New Mexico is being used as a nuclear dump by means of the Waste Isolation Pilot project near Carlsbad. Twenty four million gallons of jet fuel from Kirtland Air Force Base has leaked from an underground pipe over the course of 40 years and is threatening the water supply of Albuquerque. Also, there is a plan to turn 94,000 acres of Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado into a Low Altitude Training Area for the U.S. Air Force, which proposes to fly CV-22 and C-130 airplanes at altitudes as low as 300 feet above ground level at night and at speeds of 350 miles per hour. There would also be in-flight refueling. In addition, the area will be used for the training of pilots for drones.
The Peaceful Skies Coalition has assembled an impressive array of community interest groups to oppose the taking of this huge area for the proposed training flights. Most groups mention the negative environmental impacts that these flights would have, while some say that ever more of our state is to be dedicated to the perpetuation of endless wars. In a similar manner, Vieques Island in the U.S. colony of Puerto Rico was used as a U.S. Navy bombing range for more than 60 years resulting in high cancer rates and environmental destruction. A concerted campaign of civil disobedience among the people of Vieques finally convinced the Navy to suspend the bombing of the island in 2003.
In addition, New Mexico universities conduct military-related research for both the government and corporate clients. In 2011 the University of New Mexico (UNM) established a collaborative relationship with the Air Force Research Laboratory involving students and faculty, including projects to design and build small satellites. The Kirtland commander expressed the hope that this relationship would continue for 50 years. Also, UNM and New Mexico State University received a grant from the U.S. Army under which the two universities would receive some $50 million over nine years. UNM President Louis Caldera, said that “virtually none” of the projects are classified. “Under terms of the grant, the universities would collaborate with Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories. According to UNM vice president for research Terry Yeats, the university had $248 million brought in during 2002, 60 percent from the federal government. The excuses given for the research were typical. They were being proactive and not reactive; it would be used for defense and not offense.”(Ref: Army Awards UNM Grant, Daily Lobo, UNM, April 18, 2003, pp. 1 and 3 http://elloborojo.wordpress.com/2010/07/07unm-gets-grant-of-over-50-million-from-army-in-2003/)
In2003 New Mexico State University in Las Cruces received $21.8 million from the Department of Defense and in 2004 NMSU established a graduate program in intelligence studies. The New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro houses the Institute for Complex Additive Systems Analysis (computer security), the Energetic Materials Research and Testing Center (explosives), and the Center for Explosives Research and Education.
The military establishment contributes mightily to the overall economy of New Mexico. How-ever, military bases and activities damage and pollute the environment. Given the nature and high level of nuclear weapons activity in New Mexico, it would not be a surprise to find out that New Mexico is a target in case of war.
Land Ownership in New Mexico
The control of land is the primary focus of any colonial conquest. In a colonial situation the colonizer endeavors to dominate the colonized by controlling the land. Thus, the first factor to consider is the patterns of land ownership in New Mexico. The question is simply put: who owns the land in New Mexico?
Original Land Grant Area in New Mexico
All of New Mexico’s 77,724,740 acres of territory had historically been claimed by American Indian tribes of the region. However, the Spanish and Mexican governments took upon themselves to “grant” a total of 46,646,649 acres of land to its subjects and to the Pueblo Indians.
At present, about 45% of New Mexico land is owned by the federal and state governments. Many of these federal and state lands were acquired from Spanish/Mexican land grants. According to Article 10 of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which concluded the war between Mexico and the United States, all grants of land were to be “respected as valid”. However, Article 10 was deleted from the final treaty, thus clearing the way for wide-scale expropriation of land grants.
Office of the Surveyor General
In 1854 the United States established the Office of Surveyor General to legitimize claims of land, but the procedures required land grant heirs to pay for surveys necessary to adjudicate land titles. Heirs were forced to sell lands to pay for surveys or give lands to lawyers to present their claims in court. In the Spanish and Mexican systems land grants were not taxed, whereas the U.S. did tax land grants. Lands were lost due to the inability of the land grant heirs to pay the taxes. These were major methods by which the U.S. English colonizer appropriated the land.
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Thomas B. Catron Land Grant Robber Baron |
There was also rampant corruption during the period of the Surveyor General and large areas of lands were transferred from Spanish-Mexican land grant heirs to private owners, who were overwhelmingly English-American colonizers. A private owner could then apply under the Partition Statute of 1877 to sell his portion of the land. Three Surveyors General were themselves involved in land speculations, which constituted a conflict of interest. They furthered the interest of land speculators composed of lawyer, judges, politicians, businessmen and journalists, who had formed a network called the Santa Fe Ring. The Ring was dedicated to land manipulations and the transfer of lands, especially land grants, into the hands of Ring members. Lawyer and Santa Fe Ring member Thomas B. Catron was the king of the land grant robber barons. He owned at one time 2 million acres, largely obtained from land grants. At the time he was the largest land owner in the United States.
Of the adjudications that took place under the Office of Surveyor General in New Mexico from 1854 to 1891, there were 23 grants to Pueblo Indians and 272 grants to Spanish-Mexican communities or individuals for a total of 295 land grants. Not all land grants filed claims for confirmation with the Surveyor General. Only 208 claims were filed out of a total of 295 identified land grants. Of Pueblo Indian filed claims, 78% were confirmed by Congress (18 out of 23 claims). Only 28% of Spanish-Mexican community filed claims were confirmed (30 confirmed out of 106 community claims and 76 rejected). Also, only 24% of Spanish-Mexican individual filed claims were confirmed (19 confirmed out of 78 and 59 rejected). However, this left nearly 35 million acres of land with consequent unsettled titles.
Court of Private Land Claims
Due to the wide-spread corruption, fraud, and theft in the Office of the Surveyor General era, the U.S. Government established the Court of Private Land Claims in 1891 to adjudicate land titles until 1904. The new Court was supposed to evaluate land claims according to more exacting legal standards. However, the procedures were designed to favor the English-American colonizers.
President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed in his 1889 State of the Union Address: “The judges of the Court of Private Land Claims, provided for by the Act of March 3, 1891 have been appointed and the court organized. It is now possible to give early relief to communities long repressed in the development by unsettled land titles and to establish the possession and right of settlers whose lands have been rendered valueless by adverse and unfounded claims …” (Ref: President Benjamin Harrison, State of the Union Address, Dec. 3, 1889)
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| Court of Private Land Claims |
Harrison was talking about appointing judges who would help English-American colonizers whose lands had been made “worthless” due to “unfounded” Spanish-Mexican claims, in spite of the fact that Anglo lands were not to be adjudicated by the Court. It is clear that the process was slanted against the Spanish-Mexican land grant heirs. For example, bona fideoriginal Spanish or Mexican documents were required, proof was required that the granting official had authority to award a grant and that all steps for validation of the grant had been fulfilled. Things only got worse for land grant heirs.
In 1897 in the U.S. vs. Sandoval court case, the U.S. Government successfully claimed that common land grants that had belonged to Spain and Mexico now belonged to the U.S. As a result of the Sandoval decision, huge acreages were incorporated into national forests and some of these lands were made available for purchase from the government and for homesteading. The claim made by the United States government in the Sandoval case is consistent with the intent of the U.S. English colonizer in removing Article 10 from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The main purpose in a colonial conquest is to expropriate the land, labor, and the resources that comprise the main means of producing wealth. The U.S. English colonizer never had any intention of protecting any of the colonized peoples’ interests, much less the land.
Of the 211 decisions by the Court of Private Land Claims (1891-1904), there were a total of 82 (38.9%) that were confirmed by the CPLC.
Comparisons of Pueblo Indian and Spanish/Mexican land grant confirmations and current holdings reveal large disparities between Spanish/Mexican non-Indian grant outcomes versus those of Pueblo Indian grants. This is due to the fact that Pueblo Lands are held in trust for the Pueblo Indians by the United States Government, while non-Indian grants are not under that kind of protection. Spanish/Mexican non-Indian grants have been, so to speak, on the open market, even after their confirmation. Indeed, of 5,356,967 acres originally confirmed in Spanish/Mexican non-Indian land grants, only 254, 100 acres are now held.
On the other hand, there has been an actual increase in Pueblo lands after the original confirmation of 602,035 acres to the extent that Pueblo holdings now amount to 2.4 million acres. In addition Pueblo Indians have received financial compensation from the federal government to settle land claims in the amount of $130,918,094. (Ref: Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; Findings and Possible Options Regarding Longstanding Community Land Grant Claims in New Mexico, United States General Accounting Office, June 2004, GAO-04-59, pp. 148-149 and pp. 158-159)
By way of comparison, the 55,000 acres of Atrisco land grant common lands were sold in 2006 for $250 million to a California-based land development company. Atrisco was the only land grant that had been converted to a for-profit corporation by means of a 1967 New Mexico law that allowed for such conversion. However, there has not been any kind of federal government financial compensation for non-Indian Spanish/Mexican land grants, as there has been for Pueblo Indian land grants.
The loss of the non-Indian Spanish/Mexican lands after they had been confirmed is often blamed on the practices of the land grant heirs themselves, but objection to this view is contained in a report to the New Mexico Attorney General (August 2008): “… the federal government’s breach of its original duty to land grantees, by confirming land grants improperly, set in motion the ultimate loss of common lands. Rather than breaching a post-confirmation duty, the breach had already occurred – resulting inevitably in significant loss to community grants.” (Ref: A Report to the New Mexico Attorney General, August 2008, prepared by David Benavidez and Ryan Golten, p. 66) More simply stated, the federal government’s handling of land grants led to their effective disappearance. Or did the federal government really achieve what it had intended all along – the dispossession of lands that had been held in common?
The loss of the land grants dealt a fatal blow to the economy of the Spanish-Mexican population. A non-cash agricultural economy that had been largely based on barter was replaced by a wage-based capitalist economy. This necessitated many Spanish-Mexican men to leave their communities to seek wage work in cities and other states. The absence of male figures for months at a time caused disruption in the social fabric of the villages and towns. Thus, the independence of Spanish-Mexican and American Indian populations was lost. The basis for the welfare-intensive economy and dysfunctional social structures of much of the lives of the colonized in New Mexico were formed in this period.
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| Reies López Tijerina |
After decades of relative quiescence, land grants became an issue once again in the 1960s and 70s with the activities of Reies López Tijerina and his Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants). Tijerina listened to the people of New Mexico for whom the loss of their lands was a bitter legacy and he took up their cause to recover the lost lands. Tijerina was ultimately jailed for his efforts and his movement ceased to be an effective political force. However, younger activists, who were inspired by Tijerina’s example, took up the torch and got a state law passed by which 23 New Mexico land grants now have political subdivision status. The land grant issue in New Mexico has not gone away and it is evolving into a new stage of development.
Pueblo Indian lands have been under assault under both the Spanish and the U.S. English colonial systems. Pueblo societies were deeply affected by Spanish colonization; however, it was English-American colonialism with its imposition of capitalism that more seriously threatened the Pueblos’ survival as peoples. For example, in 1921 New Mexico Senator Holm Bursum introduced a bill that would have allowed non-Indians to retain Pueblo Indian land on which they had squatted on before 1902 – some of these squatters were Spanish-Mexicans. Furthermore, the bill gave state courts the right to settle any future land disputes. Since these courts were unsympathetic to Indian rights, the way would be open to dispossess Pueblo Indians of their land.
The Pueblos were not even aware that the Bursum Bill had been introduced, but were notified of the bill by some of their allies. Ultimately, the bill was defeated after Pueblo leaders went to Washington to testify against it. It was not until 1924 with the Indian Citizenship Act that all Indians, with or without tribal ties, were made citizens of the United States. But it took a lawsuit to grant New Mexico Indians full rights to vote in 1948.
Other Indian groups in New Mexico, such as the Navajos and various Apache groups had their sovereignty reduced by the reservation system. The tribes lost much land and also control over education. This led to disruption of traditional economic patterns and practices.
Part II will follow in January 2013.
Richard J. Griego, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at University of New Mexico and Northern Arizona University, is a member of the New Mexico Land Grant Consejo as a trustee of the Atrisco Land Grant. At UNM, he was the first full-time director of the Chicano Studies Program and at Northern Arizona University, Director of the Research Institute in the Mathematical Sciences, NSF. Since retiring in 1997, Dr. Griego has been active in writing articles on Hispanic culture, as well as in home schooling his grandchildren in history, science and Spanish.
Ezequiel Antonio López, Ed.D., taught Sociology in the City Colleges of Chicago system for 25 years before retiring last year in Albuquerque, New Mexico. During those years, he served as Chairperson of the Social Science Department, Dean of Instruction at Malcolm X College, and Director of the South Chicago satellite campus. Dr. López was the research coordinator of the Calumet Community Empowerment Zone Governance Council, and director of the Chicago Far South Side Economic Environment Scan Project.