A01=Maria E. Montoya
american west
Author_Maria E. Montoya
Category=KFFR
Category=LNSP
Category=NHK
chicano
colonialism
colorado
eq_bestseller
eq_business-finance-law
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
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
Product details
- ISBN 9780520227446
- Weight: 680g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 29 Mar 2002
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Maria E. Montoya is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
