Tierra o Muerte, bytegirl24, flickr
It was a sunny weekend morning about fifteen years ago. Here in Rio Arriba County, northern New Mexico, occasional bombs were still going off in remote mountain villages. Every now and then, a stolen, charred, formerly pale green US Forest Service truck turned up by the side of the road as a reminder: Tierra o Muerte.
Land or Death.
These were the last of the Land Grant skirmishes.
When the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago was signed in 1848, the US pledged to honor Spanish Land Grants, and the communally held land within their borders.
Of course, that didn't happen. In Rio Arriba, much of the communally-owned land wound up in the hands of wealthy Anglo land barons or the Forest Service. Various all-Anglo environmental groups were waging lawsuits, keeping indigenous Hispanic and Native American subsistence farmers from grazing small flocks of sheep or cattle on allotments their ancestors had worked for centuries. Hence, the sporadic property damage.
I worked for Rio Arriba County, a hotbed of land grant activism.
It was a weekend. And my phone was ringing.
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