Ken Salazar, Obama's Secretary of the Interior and a native son of the San Luis Valley, visited San Luis this past Friday (August 28). The official purpose of the visit was so the Secretary could participate in the dedication of the newly designated "Sangre de Cristo National Heritage Area" (SCNHA). While in San Luis, Secretary Salazar also made a bombshell announcement: The federal government plans to purchase all of the rather large privately-held high mountain estates that have long defined "legal ownership" of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in southcentral Colorado and northcentral New Mexico.
Culebra Peak (14,047 ft.) with signature snowfield, "El Pajarito," the little bird. The lands in question are currently owned by wealthy elites. These include the former Forbes Trinchera Ranch now owned by Louis Bacon and consisting of close to 180,000 acres; the Cielo Vista Ranch (former Taylor Ranch) owned by Bobby and Dottie Hill (77,000 acres); and Ted Turner's Vermejo Park Ranch which is approximately 588,000 acres or an astounding 920 square miles. These landscapes include two fourteen thousand foot high peaks (Mount Blanca and Culebra Peak) and more than a dozen peaks in excess of thirteen thousand feet in elevation. This central section of the Sangres is also absolutely critical to the future of biodiversity conservation and watershed integrity in the Southern Rocky Mountain biome. How we as a society got into the business of allowing the rich and powerful to gain private ownership of entire mountain ranges is a matter left for a future blog entry.
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| Wind-swept snows on La Sierra. |
At more than one million acres, this purchase (probably involving a transaction of close to a billion dollars) would constitute one of the largest acquisitions for the public domain in the Southwest in more than 100 years. However, there are older, much more deeply rooted, claims to these mountain lands. All of these lands include the skyline mountain watersheds that are also the historic common lands of the original settlers of the Sangre de Cristo and Maxwell Mexican-era land grants.
To those who claim that Mexicans (and now Chicana/os) have no more right to these lands than Anglos because these originally belonged to Native Americans, I can state unequivocally that Chicana/os are "Native Americans," and indeed the first Mexican-origin peoples that farmed New Mexico were Tarascan and Tlaxcaltec native peoples. Intermarriage between these and the original Pueblo and Plains peoples forged a native identity and place-based character in the emergence of the Chicana/os.
It is significant that the Ute Nation endorsed the land rights struggle of the people of the Culebra River land grant communities. "La Sierra" or "Mountain Tract" is the subject of the 2002 Colorado Supreme Court ruling in Lobato v. Taylor that partially restored the historic use rights, sans subsistence hunting and fishing, for some 500 families of heraderos (heirs) and successors with a stake in those use rights to the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant commons (a.k.a. Cielo Vista Ranch).
The Last Commons?
Over the past twenty years or so, I have interviewed dozens of participants in the original Rael v. Taylor and the successor Lobato v. Taylor land rights lawsuits decided in favor of the plaintiffs in 2002. These interviews are part of a long-term and in-depth ethnographic and historical study for a forthcoming book I am preparing, The Last Commons: Endangered Lands and Disappeared People in the Politics of Place (University of Arizona Press, 2012).
La Sierra or "Mountain Tract," the middle section of the million-acre Sangre de Cristo Land Grant, granted in 1844 and permanently settled in 1851, was the last of the Spanish and Mexican-era land grants to be issued and settled. It was also the last land grant commons to be enclosed in 1960, much later than the land grants in New Mexico that suffered unethical partitioning and enclosure by the end of the 19th century under the onslaught of Anglo land speculators, corrupt court officials, lawyers, and a federal government eager to add holdings to the national forests and other public lands.
This is why I call La Sierra the "Last Commons." It is also the first Mexican land grant commons to be restored as a community resource for the local farming families as a result of the aforementioned and historic Colorado Supreme Court decision in Lobato v. Taylor.
This was an unprecedented legal decision that restored historic use rights to a commons that is still under private ownership. This has never happened before and could have a profound impact on pending claims involving more than 120 such common lands in New Mexico alone.
Every family involved in the land rights case sacrificed a lot over the more than 30 years of litigation. Some even had Zachary Taylor place liens on their historic acequia family farms to guarantee payment of attorney and legal fees before the 2002 ruling reversed the lower court. They risked everything including the possibility of losing their ancestral farms to get their day in court and find justice.
Heir and Successor Farm Families Concerned about 'Federalization' of la Sierra
Obviously, these same families are now concerned that their life-long sacrifices and cherished traditional resource rights will once again be trampled under the proposed "federalization" of La Sierra Commons.
Some of these families fear that even if the Obama Administration and Secretary Salazar make a deal that includes respect for and security of these historic use rights, the political reality is that when and in the event that Republican conservatives retake the Presidency and Congress those rights will likely be challenged and undermined. It has happened before and some pledge to engage in direct resistance to prevent a public domain enclosure that fails to secure and respect the historic use rights in perpetuity.
Others fear that the conversion of La Sierra to the public domain will close off the dream shared by the majority of the heirs to directly purchase the lands through a community land trust. This too has a precedent in the form of the Rio Costilla Cooperative Livestock Association (RCCLA) that wisely gained ownership control of a significant chunk of a southern portion of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant in New Mexico.
In Colorado, such an effort begun in 1992 was sadly interrupted and ended when then-Governor Romer signed an Executive Order creating the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant Commission in 1993 in an unsuccessful effort to secure a local community-state partnership acquisition of the land from Zachary Taylor, Jr. Yet others object that the land was stolen and should be returned to its rightful heirs, the acequia farming communities that rely on the mountain as their watershed and for their livelihoods.
Some heirs point out, rightly so in my view as an environmental historian, that the experience of Chicana/o people with federal ownership of these lost land grants in New Mexico has been anything but positive. They point to the bitter and tragic experiences of the acequia/land grant communities in the Vallecitos Sustained Yield Unit (Kit Carson National Forest) who saw their old-growth Ponderosa forests destroyed by outside corporations only to be harassed by the Johnny-come-lately environmentalists that tried to shut down the traditional resource rights these communities had fought for over more than six generations.
We should not forget: Reís Lopéz Tijerina staged the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid because Chicana/o civil rights have seldom been respected and la floresta (USFS) has seldom acted to follow the law or its own regulations to invest in stabilizing traditional rural, cash-poor, and resource-dependent communities that often are the best "stewards" or caretakers of the land. The Environmental and Food Justice Blog will follow this unfolding story very closely.
In our next entry, I will examine the issue of the so-called "tragedy of the commons," and argue that what we really have experienced historically is a "tragedy of the commoner" displaced from her lifeblood and sustenance. '
We will explore the history of Chicana/o land grant community relations and conflicts with federal public land managers and introduce readers to the growing body of evidence from anthropologists and conservation biologists that place-based commonwealth management by local communities is the most enduring, sustainable, and just form of inhabitation or "environmental management."
There are proven and viable options to privatization or public ownership of our landscapes. Ultimately, we belong to the land, not the other way around.
We would do well to listen to those voices of place-based people who understand La Sierra is there to sustain life and not to become a commodity for the rich and powerful or an uninhabited wilderness kept separate from humans. La Sierra is an "inhabited wilderness," and as such would best be protected by those who directly depend on the watershed forests for their right livelihoods.
NOTE: This occasional series is based on selected and revised excerpts from my forthcoming book, The Last Commons: Endangered Lands and Disappeared People in the Politics of Place, which I am completing in 2011 for publication in 2012. If my readers and followers quote from the materials presented in this series, I would be most appreciative that the fair use include this source citation: Originally published in Environmental and Food Justice Blog.
