Abstract | Keywords | Export | Availability | Bookmark

Choose an application

• Reference Manager
• EndNote
• RefWorks (Direct export to RefWorks)

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 sense of place; Mexican governors and hacienda patrons seeking status as New World feudal magnates; "rings" of greedy territorial politicians on the make; women finding their own way in a man's world; Anglo homesteaders looking for a place to settle in the American West; and Dutch investors in search of gargantuan returns on their capital. The European and American newcomers all "mistranslated" the prior property regimes into new rules, to their own advantage and the disadvantage of those who had lived on the land before them. Their efforts to control the Maxwell Land Grant by wrapping it in their own particular myths of law and custom inevitably led to conflict and even violence as cultures and legal regimes clashed.

Land tenure --- Agrarian tenure --- Feudal tenure --- Freehold --- Land ownership --- Land question --- Landownership --- Tenure of land --- Land use, Rural --- Real property --- Land, Nationalization of --- Landowners --- Serfdom --- History --- Maxwell Land Grant (N.M. and Colo.) --- New Mexico --- Beaubien-Miranda Grant (N.M. and Colo.) --- Miranda-Beaubien Grant (N.M. and Colo.) --- Nuevo México --- Nuevo Méjico --- History. --- Race relations. --- Nuebo México --- Departamento del Nuevo Mejico --- american west. --- chicano. --- colonialism. --- colorado. --- ethnicity. --- frontier. --- history. --- homestead act. --- indigenous people. --- indigenous rights. --- land development. --- land grant. --- land rights. --- legal history. --- lucien maxwell. --- mexican americans. --- mexican governors. --- mexican history. --- mexico. --- native american. --- new mexico. --- pioneers. --- race. --- settler colonialism. --- settlers. --- settling the west. --- southwest. --- squatters. --- supreme court. --- treaties. --- treaty of guadalupe hidalgo. --- us courts. --- wild west.