Land grants

It's interesting to compare what happened to the land grants in New Mexico with similar land grants in California. My home is on the former Rancho Saucelito. At the risk of some oversimplification, the Spanish and Mexican land grant owners in California appear to have fared much better than the land grant owners in New Mexico. In California mostly the Indians got screwed.

Some quick investigation suggests the reason may be that that grantees in California were individuals who tended to pattern themselves after the landholding "patrones" of Spain, and remained "well connected" even after the Anglos took over here. Moreover it is interesting how many Anglo names show up as the original grantees.

In New Mexico the histories suggest ownership of the grants was by collectives of subsistence farmers, and apparently defaults by one member of the collective could, in the hands of a good lawyer, result in the loss of land by all the owners.

I also get the impression the process in New Mexico was some 20-30 years later than in California, which provided time to educate more lawyers.

JBWX



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/14/2008 08:38AM by John West.