Folk Hero Or Bandit?

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.

US Route 84 at State Route 162. Photo credit Alvis E. Hendley

​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!

Rio Arriba County Courthouse. Photo credit Alvis E. Hendley

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). 

Reies Tijerina and his wife, Patsy, leaving Albuquerque District Court after acquittal of charges stemming from Tierra Amarilla Courthouse raid, December 1968 From: Tijerina and the Land Grants: Mexican Americans in Struggle for Their Heritage, by Patricia Bell Blawis. Open Source.

​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.

Mexican territorial claims relinquished in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in white (from National Atlas of the United States)

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. 

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​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.