Reies Lopez Tijerina – even today opinions are divided. Was he a communist agitator or a selfless proponent of the poor and underprivileged? Let’s start at the beginning and explore.
Tierra Amarilla, just a few miles north of Abiquiú on Hwy 84, is a sleepy little town. It almost looks like a ghost town with a number of closed business buildings and abandoned houses. It is somewhat surprising that it has been the Rio Arriba county seat since 1880 when the town got its current name (“Yellow Earth”; before that, it was called “Las Nutrias”). When the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad constructed lines that connected Chama to their vast network, the area around T.A. must have experienced a cultural and economic expansion that just as quickly ended when the railroads stopped running.
The current courthouse was built in 1917. I have visited it a few times; once because I was called for jury duty, another time to attend a meeting of the County Commissioners; always totally uneventful trips. I was therefore utterly perplexed when I learned that there had been a raid on the courthouse in 1967, the National Guard was called in, and one person got shot!
About 20 members of a group which was founded in 1963 by Reies Tijerina and which called itself La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants) assembled at the courthouse on June 5, 1967, in order to place the district attorney Alfonso G. Sanchez under citizen’s arrest. They also wanted to free a few members of the group who had been arrested a day or two earlier. The Alianza had planned a meeting in Coyote, and Sanchez used police force to break up the gathering, and several members were taken into custody. However, the county judge had already freed the imprisoned people, and Sanchez wasn’t in T.A. at all but in Santa Fe mobilizing police forces. When they couldn’t find Sanchez, the Alianza group took a sheriff and a reporter hostage; they also shot and wounded a prison guard and a police officer. The event caused national attention; Governor David Cargo called in the National Guard which descended with tanks and helicopters, state police, and local sheriffs for what probably was the biggest manhunt in New Mexico history. The Alianza members and their leader, Reies Tijerina, fled to the near-by mountains where sympathetic ranchers protected them. Only after Tijerina’s wife (who was pregnant) had been arrested, did they surrender to authorities in Albuquerque.
Photograph of Reies Tijerina around the time of the ""Courthouse Raid"" incident in Tierra Amarilla, NM, in June of 1967. Tijerina was a leader in the fight to restore New Mexican land grants to the descendants of their Mexican American and Spanish owners. Photo by Peter Nabokov, used with permission.
By now, you’re probably curious what this was all about: WHAT did the Alianza want to accomplish? WHY was the district attorney so set to arrest its members?
The name of the group gives a clue: it was all about land grants. An issue that even today can cause heated debates. It goes back to the time when the land here was a colony of Spain. The governors who were accountable to the King of Spain granted the land to people here. A person would petition with the governor or his representative; when the petition was granted, the person would receive a document which would guarantee that the person could occupy and use the land. Actually, that was a condition: the person HAD to occupy and use the land. Something like developers was not allowed. Communities could apply for land grants as well, in order to establish settlements. When Mexico gained independence from Spain, they continued with the customary land grant system. An essential part of this system was the fact that the people didn’t really OWN the land – it was theirs to use and to live on, but if somebody would find gold or some other valuable substance, this would belong to the King. (I learned this from a video produced by New Mexico State Historian Rob Martínez; if you want to learn more, here is the link).
Things changed when New Mexico became part of the United States at the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848. Although the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo confirmed the legitimacy of land grants under Mexican law, in practice many people lost their rights. Americans had a different understanding of land ownership, and communally held ownership was a foreign concept – Ejidos (Community-owned land) were not recognized under U.S. law and fell into private hands. Much of it became National Forest or was assigned to the Bureau of Land Management. People didn’t have their original copies any more, and lost their land. They were not prepared to deal with a complicated legal system and especially with unscrupulous speculators. The Santa Fe Ring, a powerful group of corrupt lawyers, businessmen, and politicians, swindled land grant holders into selling their land. One of them, Thomas B. Catron who became a U.S. Senator, managed to acquire 3,000,000 acres of land. Compared to these individuals who often hired assassins to eliminate their opponents, Reies Tijerina looks almost like a choir boy.
Well, not really. Reies Tijeria was no angel, he wasn’t perfect. Born in 1926 in Fall City, Texas, he experienced from a young age the discriminating treatment of poor, migrant families with Hispanic/Mexican origin. After he became an ordained pentecostal minister, he founded a little community of some 20 families in the southern Arizona desert, The Valley of Peace, in 1955. He moved with his family and a few of his followers to New Mexico in 1957. That’s where he learned about the land grants and the injustice he perceived when he learned about the many families who had been dispossessed of their lands. This became his new passion: to bring justice to people who had lost their land, and to highlight the unequal working conditions that so many Native Americans and Hispanios had to endure. This led to conflicts with lawmakers and the police who branded him as a communist agitator, and eventually to the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse raid. After being convicted of charges related to the raid in 1970, the federal government sent Tijerina to a prison for the mentally deranged where he was forced to take psychotropic drugs. When he was paroled two years later, he was something of a broken man. He died in 2015 in El Paso, Texas.
Here is a corrido about these events performed by Roberto Martínez and his group Los Reyes de Albuquerque who was a friend of Tijerina. It was played on all the local radio stations and was featured in the Smithsonian touring exhibition Corridos sin Fronteras / Ballads Without Borders.
A quick mention has to be made of Tijerina’s involvement in the larger Civil Rights Movement: in March 1968, he was elected to be the leader of the Chicano contingent of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and worked with Dr. Martin Luther King to organize the Poor People’s March on Washington. After Dr. King’s assassination in April, Tijerina continued his work under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy.
When you decide whether Tijerina was a good guy or a bad guy, keep in mind that to stand up for minorities’ rights in the late Sixties meant to put one’s life in jeopardy. Justice seemed to be reserved for the privileged, and the punishment for acts of violence were hugely disproportionate, depending on who was the perpetrator. Maybe Tijerina was sort of in the middle, like most of us.
Poor Peoples’ March – conference at Hawthorne School in Washington, D.C., June 1968. Left to right: Rev. Andrew Young, Reies Tijerina, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Rodolpho “Corky” Gonzales, Roque Garcia. From: Tijerina and the Land Grants: Mexican Americans in Struggle for Their Heritage, by Patricia Bell Blawis. Open Source.
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I wrote about the origin of cats last week, so how about dogs? Well, to me, dogs seem way more varied than cats, both in size and disposition. I’ve seen dogs that barely look like dogs anymore they’ve been bred so much. Again, there’s a discussion in there I’m not willing to touch, at least not today.
We have 3 dogs. I love having dogs and wouldn’t want to live without them. They are all mutts, and strays. They all 3 showed up and adopted us, on different occasions of course. They all 3 have very different personalities, and ways to be annoying. Generally, I think of dogs coming from wolves, originally. Healers were bred from the Australian Dingo, BTW. Just a fun fact. The New York Times had an article describing domesticated dog fossils found in Europe from over 15,000 years ago. There is also speculation that dogs were getting domesticated at roughly the same time, in Asia, and in Europe and the Middle East. There may be DNA evidence supporting that theory. For fairly obvious reasons, at least if you have a dog or are a dog fan, they can be quite useful. They can be trained quite readily, some say, I wouldn’t know, and they can then be helpful in hunting, fighting, and protection. That all makes sense for early mankind. I think they make a fairly good friend and companion, if not a bit needy sometimes. It is speculated that all dogs descend from the Gray Wolf, though likely from two time periods. It is also suggested that it would take 130,000 years for the wolf to be bred into the modern dog, which implies that wolves were cohabitating or at least inter mingling with humans well before they were being directly selectively bred. The genetics of dogs is far less mixed up than you might imagine though. Particularly with Pure Bred species. A great article to look at, if you are interested, is from the PBS, which you can find by clicking here. We finally began to build our long desired screened-in gazebo on the riverbank. We started this project on Wednesday, planning completion on Saturday. Everything was going smoothly and as scheduled. We called ahead to reserve an orbital floor sander for early Friday morning, planning on finishing laying the deck boards and getting the sanding done all in one day.
Being the early bird in our family, my wife set an alarm for 5:30AM, hopped out of bed and gently whispered to ask me if I wouldn’t mind letting the goats out in a bit, as it was still dark and too early to release the beasts safely. I mumbled a grudging “yes” and squeezed in another hour of sleep. When I climbed the ladder down to the living room I was surprised to find her sitting by a roaring fire ablaze in our woodstove. I asked “Why are you still here?” to which she replied, “Look outside.” Holy moly, it was snowing! Real snow! Fat sticking flakes in a dark intimidating sky. Yikes, what’s happening here!? It's almost May and I’m sunburned from yesterday's framework! Realizing it was time for plan B, we called to cancel the rental and decided to go out to eat instead, maybe even catch a movie. We've been wanting to try breakfast at the Artesian Restaurant at Ojo Caliente hot springs. After a quick check online to make sure it was open, we hopped in the car and off we went. We were so entranced with all of the new snow on the Sangre de Cristos that we missed the turn onto Highway 285 by several miles. Oops! We decided to keep going into Espanola to try breakfast, instead, at La Fonda Del Sol at the Delta Inn. This is a fairly new restaurant boasting a no borders approach to Mexican cuisine. We parked in the large, dirt lot and could have used an old school map to find the entrance. Once inside, we found warm, Spanish colonial decor with a soft Saltillo floor and lots of rich, brown wood accents on the walls and above. Tall ceilings and two huge indoor trees make this a special place to dine. There’s a small table piled with fun tchotchkes from Mexico that are also for sale. Our server, Karina, ended up being the sister of Juan, who owns the place and opened only three years ago. Juan boasts being the bringer of quesabirrias to the area, a very unique and delicious dish consisting of a corn tortilla soaked in red chile sauce overnight, then filled with broth cooked beef birria, and grilled to a soft, but crispy perfection. We ordered two of these to start and were not disappointed. They were served with a small cup of consome, aka broth, and two medium spiced, creamy salsas. The habanero green was the most complimentary to this build of beefy cheesy perfection. Intrigued by the Chiles en Nogada and with Karina’s urging, we went out on a limb and ordered that as well. Now, these were a surprise. I still don’t know if I loved it, or if I will never order it again, unless maybe it’s Christmas, and I happen to find myself here on December 25. It was a chile relleno, one of my favorite foods on the planet, but was almost unrecognizable as one. The menu calls it a Pre Hispanic recipe. It’s a large, perfectly tender but al dente Poblano chile stuffed with ground beef slow cooked in apples and smothered in a pecan cream cheese sauce and topped with pomegranate seeds and fresh parsley. It was served with nicely seasoned perfectly tender Spanish rice, a small Mexican style green salad and corn tortillas. I was trepidatious as I took my first bite. My taste buds were overwhelmed by the tart popping pomegranate kernels, smoothly accompanied by the savory cream sauce. The apple soaked beef and the slightly spicy chile were a strange combination at first, but once my brain caught up to my mouth, we made peace with this odd combo and ended up liking it quite a bit! Upon Karina’s suggestion, we also ordered two gorditas of her choosing and a tripe taco, street style. The gorditas come with your choice (in this case, Karina’s choice) of flour, yellow corn or blue corn. The blue corn gordita was stuffed with rajas con queso, an ample serving of green chile strips and a bland, white cheese, which could have been elevated with an over-easy egg on it, and maybe a side of crispy bacon. The flour gordita was filled with asada de rancho, a grilled beef steak in a mild red sauce. Yummy! The street taco with tripitas (deep fried intestine) and onions and cilantro was simple but amazing. It had a fried calamari taste and feel. Crunchy, a little slimy, but flavorful. This was some good, authentic fare from the middle of Mexico, mainly influenced by the cuisines of Jalisco and Zacatecas. We loved the quesabirrias so much that we ordered two more and slammed them right down. As you can imagine, we left quite full and for just under $68 with tax and a generous tip. The Delta is a 10 suite inn that also caters to special events. The grounds are well maintained, the rooms are very large and the buildings are beautiful. Other than the dining room that we ate in, there are two more, much larger dining rooms and a lovely outdoor courtyard available for private bookings. La Fonda de Sol caters these as well as off location events. After our self guided tour, by the time we made our way back to the car, the sun was shining, and the sky was blue. I guess we no longer had an excuse for taking the day off, but decided to do so anyway. We did go home, but, instead of finishing the deck, we simply sat by it and watched the swollen river flow smoothly by. I highly recommend taking the next snow and hot sun day off. It still counts as a snow day! |
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