Although Mexico lost its northern territories to the United States in 1848, battles over property rights and ownership have remained intense. This turbulent, vividly narrated story of the Maxwell Land Grant, a single tract of 1.7 million acres in northeastern New Mexico, shows how contending groups reinterpret the meaning of property to uphold their conflicting claims to land. The Southwest has been and continues to be the scene of a collision between land regimes with radically different cultural conceptions of the land's purpose. We meet Jicarilla Apaches, whose identity is rooted in a...
Although Mexico lost its northern territories to the United States in 1848, battles over property rights and ownership have remained intense. This tur...
When American settlers arrived in the southwestern borderlands, they assumed that the land was unencumbered by property claims. But, as Maria Montoya shows, the Southwest was no empty quarter simply waiting to be parceled up. Although Anglo farmers claimed absolute rights under the Homestead Act, their claims were contested by Native Americans who had lived on the land for generations, Mexican magnates like Lucien Maxwell who controlled vast parcels under grants from Mexican governors, and foreign companies who thought they had purchased open land. The result was that the Southwest...
When American settlers arrived in the southwestern borderlands, they assumed that the land was unencumbered by property claims. But, as Maria Montoya ...
