What others have to say about "Trespassers on Our Own Land"

     “Al fin, finally! Trespassers on Our Own Land is a comprehensive history of the 1967 Tierra Amarilla Courthouse raid as well as a history of land grant issues that have plagued northern New Mexico for generations. Never-before have the events leading up to the raid, the raid itself, the escape of some of the participants later that evening and the turbulent political history of the era been presented in one narrative. Trespasser’s has finally identified why and how the United States intentionally relieved a number of Spanish and Mexican land grants of millions of acres of treaty protected lands and the fact that the federal government continues to this day to refuse to admit it unlawfully took the land or to compensate the heirs for the taking.”
                                            
                                                              Lawrence E. Sanchez,
                                                              President, Town of Tomé Land Grant
                                                              Adelino, New Mexico

     “Trespassers on Our Own Land is an oral history of the Juan P. Valdez family and a snapshot of the maltreatment forced upon our Pueblo Indian, Spanish and Mexican people by the United States government. In Trespassers, Mike Scarborough has presented a comprehensive history of the adversarial relationship our ancestors had with the United States government between the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and 1912. Trespasser’s brought back memories of my childhood in Coyote and Capulín and a renewed understanding of the difficulties my ancestors endured while struggling to survive on the San Joaquín del Río de Chama land grant. I recommend this book as a must read for anyone interested in an in-depth and comprehensive oral history and study of New Mexico’s land grants.”
                                                         
                                                                            Leonard Martínez, President,
                                                                            San Joaquín del Río de Chama
                                                                            Land Grant Association
                                                                            Cañon de Chama, New Mexico

     “Trespassers . . . is compelling and authentic; occasionally, it is hilarious; sometimes it is poignant. . . . It is fitting that a book that brings this man’s experiences to life is set in the broader context of the history of land grantsmercedes. These mercedes mattered so much to Juan Valdez that he risked his life to bring attention to the enormous injustice [the grantees and their heirs] had suffered at the hands of the U.S. government. In these pages we begin to understand why.”
                                           
                               From the Foreword by Prof. LM García y Griego
                                              History and Chicano Studies,
                                                University of New Mexico
                                                       Albuquerque

A people’s history of loss cries out for redemption

by Armando Rendón

Book Review of Trespassers on Our Own Land, by Juan P. Valdez and Mike Scarborough.

      The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo—signed this day 164 years ago—first came to my attention in connection with the news in June 1967 that a group of armed men had stormed the Rio Arriba County courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico: a police officer had been shot, hostages taken, a general furor had been sparked. Reies Lopez Tijerina had been named as the leader and instigator of the takeover of the building: it was from him that I first heard reference to the Treaty and its singular position as the most important document in the history of Americans of Mexican origin.

In my book, Chicano Manifesto, which was published in 1971, I blithely repeated the assertions that Tijerina had made in speeches, some writings, and in one-on-one charlas we had when we met in New Mexico in the late 1960s. Not having a legal background, and largely reporting on the various key protagonists of the Chicano Movement, I simply reaffirmed the notion that the Treaty was primarily an agreement that had been forced upon Mexico as the result of an unjust war instigated by the U.S. government but which mostly contained protections of Mexicans holding property, read “land grants”, in the conquered provinces.

It took me another 10 years or so to come to a different, although I believe complementary, conclusion. During that period, I had to earn a law degree to enable me to understand the Treaty and finally, spend considerable time doing my own research.

Trespassers on Our Own Land, couched as an oral history, with Juan P. Valdez, the descendent of the land grant of that name—land on which he was born and has lived his entire life—as the subject of what apparently is a class assignment assigned to one of his grandchildren by a well-informed college professor.

What Tijerina could not impart—he was neither a New Mexican nor a land grantee—and I could only recommend in legalistic terms, Scarborough encompasses in a work which provokes anger and dismay at one moment only to resolve into poignancy and humorous goodwill in the next.

By alternating the recounting of Valdez’ family history and personal anecdotes about growing up in Canjilón, New Mexico, with the more ponderous chapters that deal with legal matters and documentation, Scarborough attempts to “sugar”, one might say, the large amount of legal material that one has to absorb as the discussion between forebearer and grandson unfolds. One can sense the terrific challenges that grantees and their descendants faced over the past two centuries: constant struggles with nature, unrelenting oppression by Anglo speculators, and grim outcomes as nature and ruthless greed took their toll.

This book is a must-read for a full understanding not only of what the land grant movement is about and why the struggle continues, but also how disdain and hatred for  Americans of Hispanic origin, not just of Mexican ethnicity was inculcated in the Anglo American mentality going back to the early 1800s.

Scarborough, who obtained a law degree after a stint in the U.S. Air Force, grew up in Española, about 60 miles south of Valdez’ place of birth. He had practiced law for some 25 years until retiring about five years ago. Valdez approached him to help write the family history, starting with the Spanish king’s merced, a grant of land around the present village of Canoñes to Juan Bautista Valdez, Juan’s great, great, great-grandfather, who founded the grant in 1807.

This book is the product of five years of research and Q&A sessions between “ghost” writer Scarborough and his subject. Scarborough breathes life into what might otherwise have been a dry recounting of how bad things were in the “old days”, not that they’re much better today, and what terrible crimes have been perpetrated by a long string of politicians, including Presidents, U.S. Senators, and land grabbers ranging from judges to lawyers, unscrupulous exploiters to outright thugs.

If Valdez is bitter about the past, some inkling of his optimism—sorely challenged every day that he forces himself to face the present situation in Canjilón—filters out through the dark shadows and lets a natural good humor show forth instead. Valdez is anything but defeated; he is determined to continue the fight that began in the late 1800s.

From a legal standpoint, Scarborough has compiled, with the help of Valdez, a book load of evidence that reveals the connivance among legislators, speculators and Presidents that led to the loss of thousands of square miles of grant lands. The communal nature of land “ownership” among New Mexican grantees and their descendants was virtually irreconcilable with, let alone comprehensible to, those asserting an Anglo-centric system of individual private ownership.

From the early 1800s, the territories beyond the Mississippi became fair game, one, because to Anglo onlookers the land was uninhabited and undeveloped, and two, for many they were perceived as a means to expand the system of slavery and enhance the wealth and influence of Southern states. Of course, the lands were inhabited, by native peoples and in the Mexican provinces by mexicanos and españoles, criollos and mestizos, all carving out a meager and perilous living from the land.

Anglo interest revved up, of course, with the end of the U.S. invasion of Mexico, which resulted in the U.S. capturing a third of Mexico’s territory, what we now call the Southwest; Texas had already been incorporated in the Union; California became a state almost overnight after the discovery of gold; and the other expanses of land were up for grabs, as far as unscrupulous speculators and proponents of “Manifest Destiny” were concerned.

I believe that anyone with an open mind who has studied the way that the U.S. dealt with the lands and peoples obtained as spoils in the war would assert that the U.S. had no intention to honor the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Valdez and Scarborough describe the many ways that the letter and intent of the Treaty were ignored and violated by the U.S. Congress and the Presidents beginning with James K. Polk (who provoked the war) into the 20th century.

For example, in early 1907, after Theodore Roosevelt had been caught trying to set up a forest reserve in Washington without Congressional or public input, an amendment to the annual agricultural appropriations bill included an amendment prohibiting the President from creating more forest reserves in six Western states. Before the act took effect on March 4, 1907, he and Gifford Pinchot, the Chief of the Forest Service, blue penciledabout 16 million acres into forest reserves.

Scarborough points out that in actuality Roosevelt’s blue pencil went beyond the six states for a total of 30 million acres, including the expansion of the Jémez Forest Reserve in New Mexico: unfortunately, the Valdez grant was smack in the middle of the expanded reserve. Eventually this was to lead to oppressive tactics by the Forest Reserve, loss of the means of their livelihood, conflicts with Forest Service and other federal agencies, and a growing bitterness and frustration among the grantee heirs.

In the most publicized outburst of that frustration, the “raid” on the Tierra Amarilla courthouse on June 5, 1967, Valdez figured significantly—he was the first of a group of men, including Reies Tijerina, to enter the building and ended up shooting a state policeman, then leading a fugitive few across miles of rugged terrain to evade a massive manhunt. The details of this and other related events are intriguing and may sound like scenes from a movie thriller.

The case for seeking retribution is quite clear. Scarborough does not spell out a specific plan of action although he has said this: “My purpose in researching and writing the book was in part to establish the intentional maltreatment so that possibly, scholars, historians and lawyers would realize that the legal battle is far from over: That there are still ways to seek justice other than the worn out go-nowhere bills introduced in congress and the multitude of unfavorable court decisions of the past.”

Scarborough echoes a lament of mine of the past 30 years, since I came to realize that the Treaty was not merely a guarantee, mostly honored in the breach, of land rights, but as a living treaty document, a guarantor of human rights as well. Human rights adhere to the person by virtue of his or her being a human being, simply being born. But human rights can only be asserted when their violation extends beyond the civil rights protected by a State, that is, a sovereign nation.

As long as violations of civil rights can be addressed and adjudicated to some resolution within the country, the tenets of international law need not apply. That is why I have been asserting for decades now that in order to trigger the protections of international human rights law, we have to identify a confluence of facts—a case—which  cannot or will not be resolved under national statutes.

Perhaps the current level of disregard for culture, history, and personal dignity demonstrated by the state of Arizona under the color of law constitute violations of human rights: as far as I know, there is no statutorily protected right to one’s culture, or to speak a certain language, or to one’s personal integrity. But we can construe from the words of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that it is in fact a human rights document, and therefore, a recourse to seek redress under international law.

That route, to seek redress of human rights violations in Arizona through international treaty law, is a challenging one, requiring knowledge in a highly complex field of law, understanding and addressing the Inter-American system of human rights, and substantial economic resources.

Although Scarborough does not commit to a definite plan of action, it is certainly the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which holds the key to open our eyes at least to the potential for redress of long-standing grievances against the U.S. government with regard to the theft of thousands of acres of communal lands in New Mexico and Colorado and to the virulent attacks against the basic human desire to keep one’s culture and history alive, to seek a better life for oneself and one’s family, and to achieve fulfillment as a person.

The heirs of the land grantees in New Mexico such as Juan Valdez and the children who are deprived of being able to know their own history in Arizona are one. On this, the Chicano birthday, I can only pray that by this time next year, we will have filed that case for Valdez and begun the counter-offensive for the children of Arizona.

Published originally in February 2012 by Armando Rendón, Editor, in Somos en escrito Magazine, http://www.somosenescrito.blogspot.com/, cell phone 510-219-9139.