The village was the entire social universe of its inhabitants. The majority families living in a specific village were usually related by intermarriage the compadrazgo system. Quite a number of small villages were inhabited the members of a single large extended family. The world outside the village as viewed as dangerous and uncertain. Strangers, even the inhabitants of ighboring villages, were considered to be a potential menace. Almost no sense identification with any social unit larger than the village such as the ethnic oup, the state, or the nation existed until very recently. Every Spanish-Amerin village was a self-contained, semi-independent, peasant world that struggled meet the economic and social needs of its inhabitants.

CONFLICTING CONCEPTS OF LAND OWNERSHIP AND LAND USAGE

The chronic land conflicts between the Anglo American and Spanish American › characteristic of New Mexican history were perhaps inevitable considering e social and economic characteristics of the nineteenth century. The legal, conomic, and political systems brought into New Mexico by the Anglo Americans ere so different from those of the Spanish Americans that even under the best I conditions conflict could not have been avoided.

Anglo Americans coming into New Mexico after the American conquest found at land, minerals, trade, and politics were the only available land was owned y Spanish Americans who for the most part were not interested in selling it, hose Anglo Americans who desired land were forced to devise techniques to rest it from the original Spanish American owners.

However, land conflict could have been reduced if the Spanish Americans ad received even the minimal protection to New Mexican Indian groups by the ederal government. No effort was ever made to instruct the Spanish Americans bout the basic values and concepts of the American legal and economic systems. They were caught in the web of a foreign and alien economic, legal, and political ystem.

Land to the Anglo Americans was and is a natural resource to be exploited for personal profit. Under American law, it is a commodity to be bought or sold in he market place. The purchaser may use his land as he pleases with few restricions. He may abuse it to the detriment of his neighbors, and of future generaions. There is very little as yet that anyone can do about it legally. The owner may decide to virtually abandon the land unused for many years even though There are nearby landless families who could use it to support their families. There has seldom existed any close attachment between an Anglo landowner and his land. Almost every piece of privately owned land in America is for sale If the price is right.

To the Spanish Americans, land was not and is not a commodity to be bought or to be sold. The land that provided a living for the family was as much a part of the family as the home or the children. To sell it was equivalent to selling a family member. Ideally land should be preserved intact to be passed on through the family generations. A very strong attachment existed between the SpanishAmerican farmer or rancher and his land. He knew every physical characteristic of his land and regarded it as a basic part of his small social and psychological world. Even today migrating Spanish Americans are extremely reluctant to sell either their homes or their lands. The villages are full of boarded up slowly deteriorating houses and abandoned lands no longer under cultivation. Conflicts over methods of defining land ownership.-Another major source of land conflict developed over conflicting methods of defining land ownership. A valid title under American law is based upon a written document carefully filed and protected in a county, state, or federal office that has the legal function of registering land claims and deeds. The written document carefully traces the sequency of land ownership on a specific parcel of land from the first settler down to the present time. The document must specify how the land was transferred from one owner to another. If the sequence is not described in exact detail, the land title may be flawed and insecure.

Among the Spanish Americans, legal land titles were based in the beginning upon written deeds that conferred land upon the grantees. Copies of the documents were given to the families and to the villages that received land from the Mexican and Spanish governments. The originals to the deeds were guarded in the government archives in Santa Fe. Unfortunately for the Spanish Americans, early American governors partially destroyed the Spanish and Mexican archives.

To this day, large numbers of Spanish Americans believe that the destruction the archives was carried out as part of a conspiracy to destroy their written land titles.

As the majority of the Spanish Americans were illiterate, written documents had little meaning to them. Over the course of many years, the written deeds tended to disappear. The actual right of a family or a village to use land rested more upon the consensus of the inhabitants of the region than it did upon writ ten documents. If the surrounding population accepted the right of a family or a village to use a section of land, the family or village has a title recognized by the inhabitants of the area. The result was that when Spanish American land titles and land claims were challenged by Anglo Americans in Anglo American courts, the Spanish Americans were unable to produce written titles so the found it almost impossible to protect their lands.

Communal property.-Conflicting attitudes over communally owned village ejido land caused the loss of millions of Spanish-American owned acres to the Anglo Americans. The Spanish Americans accepted both the concepts of privately owned land and communally owned property. Privately owned land could be sold. However, it was felt that the land should be sold only to another village inhabitant. The selling of land to people from other villages and especially to Angio Americans was strongly frowned upon. The ejido could not under SpanishAmerican custom be legally sold or alienated from the village.

The concept of private land ownership was so deeply ingrained among the Anglo Americans of the 19th century that they found it difficult to accept the Spanish American conception that the ejido or communal lands belonged to all of the village inhabitants. Anglo-American courts and lawyers adopted a totally different definition of the ejido. According to the courts, the communal lands belonged to the first families receiving the land grant and to their body heirs. This legal fiction was in complete opposition to the Spanish-American belief that the ejido was a part of the village community to be used by all of its inhabitants. Under this legal definition of the ejido, Anglo-American lawyers and ranchers searched out the presumed heirs and persuated them to sign a slip of paper for a small amount of money. The slips of paper were land deeds signing away the rights of ownership in the ejido. Many Spanish American informants relate that their fathers never knew what they were signing.

POLITICAL AND LEGAL CAUSES OF LAND LOSS

Although the government of the United States committed itself through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo at the conclusion of the Mexican American War to protect the property and civil rights of the Spanish American inhabitants of New Mexico, no provisions were established to enforce the provisions of the treaty. The Spanish Americans, as a result were treated as a conquered people. Defenseless before the dynamic, legalistic, ruthless and land hungry AngioAmerican frontier culture, they were abandoned by both the American and the Mexican governments. The treatment that the Spanish Americans received dur ing the first 70 years of American occupation brought into being strong long lasting feelings of bitterness, resentment, and hostility among them.

Even though there were few Anglo American residents in New Mexico before the Civil War, land loss began with their coming. A Catholic Sister of Charity living in New Mexico at that time made the following observation:

"In the early years of Anglo settlement in New Mexico the unsuspicious and native Spanish Americans were victimized on every hand. When the men from the states came out west to dispossess the poor natives of their lands, they used many subterfuges. One was to offer the owner of the land a handful of silver coins for the small service of making a mark on a paper. The mark was a cross which was accepted as a signature and by which the unsuspecting natives deeded away their lands. By this means, many a poor family was robbed of all its possessions."

The Santa Fe Ring.-During the 1870's and 1880's, as Anglo immigration into New Mexico accelerated, the territory gradually fell under the political and economic control of a small group of Anglo-American lawyers, politicians, judges, public employees, merchants, ranchers, and newspaper editors known as the Santa Fe Ring. Infiltrating both political parties and highly influential in Washington, D. C., the leaders of the Ring came to control the economic and political destinies of New Mexico from the 1880's to the 1900's. With component county rings throughout New Mexico, the Santa Fe Ring reaped rich benefits from the political and economic development of New Mexico.

As a former governor of New Mexico, E. R. Ross, observed in 1887:

Thus the Santa Fe Ring became to all intents and purposes a close corporation, and the syndicate it represented and controlled came to be and has for many years been known as the Santa Fe Ring, a great combination which included all the lesser rings and dictated at will the legislation and general conduct of the affairs of the territory with branches here and there in the lesser towns, but all subservient to the Central Head."

Within a few years after the formation of the Santa Fe Ring the majority the larger Spanish-American land grants passed into their possession. One the major leaders of the Santa Fe Ring, was reported by the New Mexican, Santa Fe paper, in 1894 as having an interest in seventy-five land grants. e also owned nearly 2,000,000 acres, and was part owner or attorney for an ditional 4,000,000 acres. All of this was accumulated at the expense of the panish Americans. Although his success overshadowed the activities of other ng members, they followed his example. The impact of their economic and olitical activities have permanently influencd the economic and social developent of New Mexico.

The impact of the American legal system upon Spanish-American landhold98.—Although the American occupation of New Mexico began in 1847, it was ot until 1854 that Congress finally considered the problems raised by conicting land claims in New Mexico. It passed a Congressional Act dated July 2, 1954 reserving for Congress the right to pass upon each land grant in New Mexico by direct legislative enactments. No provisions were made for surveying rant or claim boundaries, for incorporating Spanish-American concepts of and ownership, or to set up an appeal system from congressional decisions. As the New Mexican historian, Twitchell stated:

"No claimant could secure congressional affirmation of his title unless he was able to spend a long period of time in Washington and was abundantly equipped with funds to organize a lobby to smooth the passage of a private act confirming his land claim."

The poor Spanish-American village population knowing no English, completely unfamiliar with the American political and economic system, lacking any political contacts in Washington was through this act of Congress delivered into the hands of Anglo American land speculators. These men did possess the money and the political contacts to engineer the passage of private bills upholding their claims against the Spanish Americans.

As the crescendo of conflict over land claims increased in New Mexico, the Federal Government finally established a Court of Private Land Claims to adjudicate all land claims originating in Spanish and Mexican land grants in New Mexico and Colorado. The court was set up with five judges selected from other parts of the United States, a United States Attorney, and other court officials. The members of the court were Anglo-American legal officials who had little knowledge of Spanish and Mexican law and were ignorant of Spanish American land owning customs. Court decisions were based upon a rigid interpretation of Anglo legal precepts. Unless the land claims measured up to the most rigorous requirements of such precepts they were rejected. One observer noted that twothirds of all Spanish American land claims coming before the court were rejected. Many of the lawyers representing Spanish American clients before this court and others insisted that their fees be paid in land rather than in cash.

ECONOMIC FACTORS INVOLVED IN LAND LOSS

Economic factors such as land taxes, the credit operations of retail merchants, and the fluctuations of the American economic system took a heavy toll of Spanish-American landholdings. Living in a simple peasant economy until almost the end of the 1930's, the Spanish Americans existed on the margin of the American economic system. They knew nothing of the laws of supply and demand, the operations of commodity markets, the cyclic fluctuations of depression and prosperity, credit operations, or the characteristics of a dynamic rapidly changing commercial and industrial economy. Because of their naivete and their ignorance, unscrupulous businessmen found them easy to exploit.

The land tar.-The Spanish and Mexican governments in New Mexico financed their activities through subsidies from the central government, duties upon foreign trade, and an irregularly collected tax upon agricultural products. The

land itself was free of taxation. The Spanish-American subsistence village farmer was singularly unprepared to adjust to a fixed land tax system. He seldom ever acquired enough actual cash to pay taxes. Frequently, he was not even aware of the existence of such a tax until the sheriff came out to dispossess him from the land. There is probably no other Anglo-American measure that has had a harsher impact upon Spanish-American property than the fixed land tax.

The collection of the county land tax was subject to fraud and manipulation. Many an unfortunate Spanish-American farmer paid his tax money to a county official who failed to register the payment in the county books. Another, common practice was to forget to issue receipts or to issue fraudulent receipts for money paid as taxes. The word of a small Spanish-speaking village inhabitant protesting that he had paid his county land tax was of little value against a blank page in a county tax book or the statement of a county official. Because of high tax deliquency ratios, New Mexican law is harsh toward tax delinquency. Any person can pay taxes due on land that has been delinquent for three years and secure a title to the land.

The merchants.—Throughout the nineteenth century, Anglo American merchants extended their commercial activities until there were resident merchants in most of the larger villages. The merchants bought village products and sold goods to them on credit. Dealing with an illiterate population and keeping the only set of books, the merchants set the prices on the goods that they bought and sold and the interest rates on accounts extended. During a period of depression or when accounts had increased to where it was difficult for them to be paid, the merchants foreclosed on the property of the village debtor. Many fortunes and large landholdings grew out of commercial activities in the villages. The economic cycle.-The Spanish American rural farm village demonstrated amazing powers of resistence to the corrosive economic and social forces of the dominant Anglo-American economic system. The majority of the villages possessed a delicately balanced economy. The three major supports of the econ omic system were the grazing of livestock upon the village ejido, subsistence farming of small irrigated plots, and temporary employment as casual workers to obtain money enough to pay taxes and to buy items not produced locally.

By the end of the 1920's, the majority of the Spanish-American villages had been dispossessed of most of their ejido land. The village grazing lands disappeared. What remained suffered from serious erosion. The Spanish Americans became a society of stockmen without a rante. Every aspect of their culture was empoverished. The village population, however, struggled to maintain its traditional way of life. The irrigated farming land was utilized to the fullest extent that archaic farming methods permitted. More men were forced to leave the villages as migrant workers.

Their endeavors were brought to an end by the long period of drought in the 1930's. The continued series of crop failures brought the village people close to actual starvation. The situation grew worse, as men found it impossible because of the depression to obtain outside employment. Food resources were shared as best they could be among related families and neighbors, but reserves were ultimately exhausted. If it had not been for the massive government relief programs of the 1930's, the Spanish Americans would have faced acute deprivation and even hunger. A combination of continuous land loss, drought, and lack of employment destroyed the Spanish American village economic and social systems. The resultant social and economic disorganization have created serious economic and social problems over a large area of northern New Mexico that have as yet defied all attempts made to resolve them.

VIOLENCE

The Spanish Americans were and are a pacific unarmed people. Guns and ammunition were so scarce during the Spanish and Mexican periods that the village population found them difficult to obtain. The inhabitants in order to secure themselves from Indian raids were forced to fall back upon Indian weapons. They became very proficient in the use of the lance and the how and arrow. The Spanish Americans, therefore, were helpless against the invasion of bellicose Mexican hating Anglo-American ranchers and cowboys who swarmed into New Mexico from Texas in the 1870's and 1880's. The Spanish Americans were murdered, their women mistreated, their lands stolen, their livestock

stled, and their people humiliated. There was nothing that the Spanish Amerans could do about it. They and middle class groupings, accelerated culture 'eakdown, and high rates of immigration. For New Mexico, the destruction of e traditional Spanish-American village way of life has created a large disessed area covering most of the northern part of the state. Unless the state nd federal governments can devise effective cultural and economic programs resolve these problems, the entire state will find its progress hampered. The Spanish-American inhabitants of northern New Mexico have been caught a harsh cycle of culture shock, resentment, hostility, bitterness, apathy, and en self hatred that have paralyzed their ability to resolve their own problems. owever, strong tides of unrest are beginning to run through the mountain alleys and down the streams into the urban centers. It will not be long before panish-American protest organizations will come into being. If a comprehensive ialogue can develop between the Spanish Americans and the state and federal overnments, a possibility exists that social unrest may be averted and solutions btained to existing problems. If such a dialogue does not come into existence, ven more radical voices will be heard among the Spanish Americans until they egin to slide down the long road to civic disobedience.

PATRON-PEON PATTERN AMONG THE SPANISH AMERICANS OF NEW MEXICO (By Dr. Clark S. Knowlton, Department of Sociology, Texas Western College) In this paper an endeavor will be made to delineate the role and structure of the patron-peon pattern in the rural social organization of the Spanish American people of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado, the changes that have taken place in this system, and the social and cultural implications of these hanges. Living for the most part in rural farming villages, the Spanish Americans are a unique ethnic group different in language, culture, and historical experience from other Spanish-speaking groups in the United States.1

The rural Spanish American social organization structured upon the interlocking institutions and patterns of an extended patriarchal family, the Roman Catholic Church, the independent self-sufficient farming village, and the patronpeon system has been until recently quite resistant to acculturation toward the dominant English-speaking society.

This resistance has been further intensified by the unfortunate historical experiences of the Spanish Americans. Stripped of much of their land by Englishspeaking Americans, exploited economically, treated with contempt and prejudice by many and forced into a subordinate social and economic position within their own state, they have reacted in the past by withdrawing from all but essential Social, political, and economic contacts with the dominant English-speaking group.

2

The cultural and social isolation of the Spanish Americans lasted until the depression of the 1930's. Mass unemployment, serious loss of land and water rights, growing population pressure upon a narrowing resource base, the temporary termination of traditional occupations such as migrant agricultural labor, sheepherding, and track work for the railroads destroyed the independent self-sufficient nature of the Spanish American villages. The villagers, unable to maintain themselves by their customary economic activities, were forced to accept economic assistance from the government agencies. Through these agencies, large numbers of the Spanish Americans became dependent upon the larger Englishspeaking world outside the village.'

1 See Lyle Saunders, Cultural Differences and Medical Care (New York: Russell Sage Foundations, 1954), pp. 42-103: John H. Burma, Spanish Speaking Groups in the United States (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1954), pp. 3-34; George I. Sanchez, Forgotten People (Albuquerque, N.M.: The University of New Mexico Press, 1940).

Burma, op. cit., pp. 6-7. See also Allan G. Harper, Andrew R. Cordova, Kalervo Oberg, Man and Resources of the Middle Rio Grande Valley (Albuquerque, N. M.: The University of New Mexico Press, 1943), pp. 60-62.

Sounders, on. cit., pp. 51-54: Hugh G. Calkins, Village Livelihood in the Upper Rio Grande Area (Soil Conservation Service, Department of Agriculture. Albuquerque. N.M.. 1937) Charles P. Loomis, "El Cerrito, New Mexico: A Changing Village." New Mexico Historical Review, 33 (January 1958), pp. 56-57: Carey McWilliams, North from Merico (New York: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1949), pp. 75-79: Kalervo Oberg, "Land Use Planning In Cuba Valley, New Mexico," Rural Sociology, 5 (December 1940), pp. 438-448.