Enclosure in New Mexico

One of the recurrent themes of Stones from the Creek is that resistance to oppression can take varied and surprising forms.  In the story “White Caps” the federal Surveyor General has trouble seeing past the masks of the gorras blancas and sees them as somehow analogous to the Ku Klux Klan, even though in the case of New Mexico it is the persecuted nationality who were wearing the white hoods.

In that story the Territorial Legislator Pablo Herrera explains the significance of the lands owned by his community in common:

“Those are the lands we never divide, that we hold in common as a community.  We graze our livestock on those lands, we cut fuel for our fireplaces on those lands, we harvest timber for construction and to build furniture on those lands.  If by some chance we need cash, we can supplement our living by cutting ties on those lands for the railroads.  That common land enables us to make a living on our farms.  Without them, we are reduced to being wage laborers.  We cannot provide enough for ourselves in our little gardens near the rivers.  It is a dry country and this is how we live.  It was the law of Mexico and of Spain before that.  Those common lands are our living.  They are our legacy from our parents and to our children.”

At the time of the story, the Supreme Court of the United States had already ruled on those lands, in Sandoval v. US (1897), and concluded that under the original Spanish law they had been royal lands, which now belong to the government of the United States.

In many of the land grant communities, this loss of their common lands did, in fact, reduce the people to poverty.  The Forest Service wouldn’t issue grazing permits for what they considered “hobby size” livestock herds and the people had to move their animals from the commons to their small fields near the rivers.  Many of the villages lost their ability to support their people as a result.  And if one visits San Miguel del Vado, the village in “Warrior Princess, today, it is far from the gateway to New Mexico that it was in the 1840’s.

But in his article “San Miguel del Bado and the Loss of the Common Lands from New Mexico Community Land Grants,” (New Mexico Historical Review, October 1991) Emlen Hall explores a different reason for the dispersal of the people of San Miguel.  And it suggests a deep creativity and resilience.  Hall shows that as soon as those alienated lands appeared for homestead claims, the people of the San Miguel del Bado communities scooped them up.  Granted they were now private, instead of communal, property.  But they were still controlled by members of the San Miguel community, not outsiders.

In other parts of the arid West slick speculators knew that access to water was the only thing that gave 160-acre homesteads any value and they immediately made claims to the tracts with water.  But the private lands of San Miguel already controlled most access to water.  And the residents knew where they other sources were and made claims at the government land office.  Even those new private tracts that did not have water located on them were mostly claimed by people who already had small parcels on the Pecos River.

Hall concludes that people had to reverse the usual residential patterns because of the new legal relations.  Instead of living in compact communities in their garden plots on the river, they were forced – in order to prove occupancy – to live on the grazing lands they had claimed as homesteads.  He estimates that on the San Miguel del Bado grant, two-thirds of the land seized by the government under US v Sandoval ended up in the hands of community members.

This is no way contradicts the devastating losses in other communities.  Nor does it gloss over the tremendous difference between communities working together and individuals competing with one another.  But it is important to acknowledge the immense creativity of people working to preserve themselves in the face of oppression.

Above is the Church of San Miguel del Bado, which might look surprisingly large and well-maintained in comparison with what is left of the rest of the town if you didn't know the secret of resilience.