Recommended Citation
Gregory A. Hicks, Memory and Pluralism on a Property Law Frontier, the Contested Landscape of New Mexico's Costilla Valley, 47 Am. J. Legal Hist. 383 (2005), https://digitalcommons.law.uw.edu/faculty-articles/375
Publication Title
American Journal of Legal History
Document Type
Article
Abstract
This article describes the decades-long dispute between Hispano settlers of the Costilla Valley in northern New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo Land Grant and the succession of entrepreneurial owners of the grant during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the U.S. Freehold Land and Emigration Company and its successors, the new Dutch and American owners sought to replace patterns of land and resource use developed during the Mexican period with patterns of use intended to support Anglo colonial settlement and intense development of the region's natural resources. The Dutch and American owners faced continuing resistance from the area's Hispano settlers, which limited Anglo control over the Costilla lands.