SWOPblogger

In 1967 author, historian, human rights activist and professor Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was working on a Ph.D. in Latin American history at UCLA when a TV report drew her attention. Armed men of the Alianza Federal de Pueblos Libres had captured a small town's courthouse in northern New Mexico. This is what happens in Latin America, she thought, not the U.S. Wait a minute, Dunbar-Oritiz continued, that was the historic name for a place in the U.S. She writes of this contradiction and others in a paperback version with a new chapter of her 1980 book Roots of Resistance: A History of Land Tenure in New Mexico (University of Oklahoma Press, September, 2007). In it, she delivers a "socioeconomic interpretation" of New Mexico's "historically dynamic peoples," Pueblo Indian and Mexican, to the present.

Prior to Spanish colonialists' arrival in the late 16th century, Pueblo Indians for three centuries lived and worked on land with "intensive irrigation farming" and "kinship associations and a religious superstructure intimately related to agricultural seasons." Pueblos, reliant upon the Río Grande and the river tributaries, were part of a far-reaching network of producing and trading peoples in this area of North America. Such communal self-provisioning societies preceded the Pueblos' by 20 centuries, writes Dunbar-Ortiz.

...n 1680, a Pueblo-led uprising, planned for generations, Dunbar-Ortiz writes, drove out the foreigners for 13 years. After a re-conquest, Spanish rulers, mindful of their previous ouster, chose a policy of community land grants to detribalized Indian, and mestizo and mulatto residents.

... The Spanish caste system had 32 degrees, with Indians on the bottom then Africans, according to Dunbar-Ortiz. This system of racial oppression as a tool of social control helped to lay the groundwork for future conflicts between colonized people in New Mexico. Her point is that grasping race, or ethnicity, should dovetail with a critique of social class, is well taken.

...Manifest Destiny, the ideology of U.S. empire based on the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, sparked war against Mexico in 1846. Though defeated by the American invaders, Mexico negotiated the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Crucially, it guarantees the property rights of Mexican citizens and their heirs to ownership of their land "equally ample as if the same belonged to citizens of the United States," Dunbar-Ortiz explains. Spanish colonists had seized that from Pueblo peoples, which became the basis of Spain's land-tenure policy. The absence of this clarification in standard history reveals its importance to the prevailing imperial ideology of "tragic" American military interventions, from Iraq's March 2003 invasion and well before that.

Dunbar Ortiz places the land question in the New Mexico of the 19th century squarely within the colonial trends underway on other continents. In this way, she analyzes capitalist imperialism as a global system. While the Treaty also prevents the sale of public lands to private hands, Dunbar-Ortiz details how this promise of protected property rights was repeatedly broken, with the federal government failing to protect the original land grantees. Pueblo Indians and Mexican villagers suffered grievously. The U.S. legal profession played a decisive role in this land transfer. One example is American lawyers' use of power of attorney agreements to deprive Mexican farmers from using the commons for sheep-grazing. Capitalist land speculators such as Thomas B. Catron, also a territorial politician in New Mexico, grabbed crucial grazing lands adjacent to the estimated 2 to 3 million acres he also acquired.

Labels: History, New Mexico

# posted by karlos @ 5:28 PM