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The King of Adobe

Author : Lorena Oropeza

Publisher : UNC Press Books

Page : 389 pages

File Size : 25,99 MB

Release : 2019-08-13

Category : History

ISBN : 1469653303

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Book Description

In 1967, Reies Lopez Tijerina led an armed takeover of a New Mexico courthouse in the name of land rights for disenfranchised Spanish-speaking locals. The small-scale raid surprisingly thrust Tijerina and his cause into the national spotlight, catalyzing an entire generation of activists. The actions of Tijerina and his group, the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (the Federal Alliance of Land Grants), demanded that Americans attend to an overlooked part of the country's history: the United States was an aggressive empire that had conquered and colonized the Southwest and subsequently wrenched land away from border people—Mexicans and Native Americans alike. To many young Mexican American activists at the time, Tijerina and the Alianza offered a compelling and militant alternative to the nonviolence of Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr. Tijerina's place at the table among the nation's leading civil rights activists was short-lived, but his analysis of land dispossession and his prophetic zeal for the rights of his people was essential to the creation of the Chicano movement. This fascinating full biography of Tijerina (1926–2015) offers a fresh and unvarnished look at one of the most controversial, criticized, and misunderstood activists of the civil rights era. Basing her work on painstaking archival research and new interviews with key participants in Tijerina's life and career, Lorena Oropeza traces the origins of Tijerina's revelatory historical analysis to the years he spent as a Pentecostal preacher and his hidden past as a self-proclaimed prophet of God. Confronting allegations of anti-Semitism and accusations of sexual abuse, as well as evidence of extreme religiosity and possible mental illness, Oropeza's narrative captures the life of a man--alternately mesmerizing and repellant--who changed our understanding of the American West and the place of Latinos in the fabric of American struggles for equality and self-determination.



They Called Me "King Tiger"

Author : Reies Tijerina

Publisher : Arte Publico Press

Page : 260 pages

File Size : 27,14 MB

Release : 2000-11-30

Category : Biography & Autobiography

ISBN : 9781611920505

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Book Description

In this autobiography, Reies López Tijerina, writes about his attempts to reclaim land grants, including his taking up arms against the authorities and spending time in the federal prison system. They Called Me "King Tiger" is Reies López Tijerinas visionary autobiography chronicling his activities during a tumultous period in U.S. History. Along with César Chávez, Rodolfo "Corky Gonzales, and José Ángel Gutiérrez, Reies López Tijerina was one of the acknowledged major leaders of the 1960s Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement. Of these four, Chávez and Tijerina were the most connected to, and involved in, grass-roots community organizing, while the latter two were more dedicated to political change. But where Chávez consistently advocated non-violent protest, López Tijerina increasingly turned to militancy. He and his followers even took up arms against the authorities. And of the four, Tijerina was the only one to spend significant time in prison for his acts. Tijerina is also the only member of this historical group to have penned his memoirs, perhaps in an effort to explain the trials and frustrations that brought him and his Federal Land Grant Alliance members to break the law: reclaiming part of a national forest reserve as part of their inheritance; invading and occupying a courthouse, inflicting a gunshot wound on a deputy sheriff in the process; and challenging New Mexico and national authorities at every opportunity. But the acts that placed him in most danger were also the ones that won the hearts and minds of many young Chicano activists. Originally self-published, They Called Me King Tiger is now published as part of the U.S. Hispanic Civil Rights Series. What is clear from López Tijerinas testimony is his sincerity, his years of research on the issues of land grants and civil rights, and his persistent spiritual and political leadership of the disenfranchised descendants of the original colonizers of New Mexico. All of the passion and commitment, as well as the flamboyant rhetoric of the 1960s, is preserved in this recollection of a life dedicated to a cause and transformed by continuous prosecution. They Called Me King Tiger is an historical document of the first order, clarifying the motives and thinking of one of the Chicano Movements now-forgotten martyrs - a man who sought justice for those who have been treated like foreigners on their own soil.



Land-Grant Colleges and Popular Revolt

Author : Nathan M. Sorber

Publisher : Cornell University Press

Page : 175 pages

File Size : 15,13 MB

Release : 2018-12-15

Category : Education

ISBN : 1501712373

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Book Description

Clearly written and compellingly argued, Nathan Sorber's Land-Grant Colleges and Popular Revolt should be read by every land-grant institution graduate and faculty and staff member, and by all high government officials who deal with public higher education.― Times Higher Education Sorber's history of the movement and society of the time provides an original framework for understanding the origins of the land-grant colleges and the nationwide development of these schools into the twentieth century. The land-grant ideal at the foundation of many institutions of higher learning promotes the sharing of higher education, science, and technical knowledge with local communities. This democratic and utilitarian mission, Nathan M. Sorber shows, has always been subject to heated debate regarding the motivations and goals of land-grant institutions. In Land-Grant Colleges and Popular Revolt, Sorber uncovers the intersection of class interest and economic context, and its influence on the origins, development, and standardization of land-grant colleges. The first land-grant colleges supported by the Morrill Act of 1862 assumed a role in facilitating the rise of a capitalist, industrial economy and a modern, bureaucratized nation-state. The new land-grant colleges contributed ideas, technologies, and technical specialists that supported emerging industries. During the populist revolts chronicled by Sorber, the land-grant colleges became a battleground for resisting many aspects of this transition to modernity. An awakened agricultural population challenged the movement of people and power from the rural periphery to urban centers and worked to reform land-grant colleges to serve the political and economic needs of rural communities. These populists embraced their vocational, open-access land-grant model as a bulwark against the outmigration of rural youth from the countryside, and as a vehicle for preserving the farm, the farmer, and the local community at the center of American democracy.



A New Insurgency

Author : Howard Brick

Publisher : Michigan Publishing Services

Page : 559 pages

File Size : 16,40 MB

Release : 2015

Category : Education

ISBN : 9781607853503

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Book Description

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was just one of several new insurgent movements for democracy and social justice during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and it must be understood in the context of other causes and organizations--in the United States and abroad--that inspired its founding manifesto, the Port Huron Statement. In A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times, a diverse group of more than forty scholars and activists take a transnational approach in order to explore the different--though often interconnected--campaigns that mobilized people along varied racial, ethnic, gender, and regional dimensions from the birth of the New Left in the civil rights and pacifist agitation of the 1950s to the Occupy movements of today. This volume features three never-before-published "manifesto drafts" written by Tom Hayden in early 1962 that generated the discussion leading to the Port Huron meeting. Other highlights include recollections from leading women in the Port Huron deliberations who, three years later, protested the subordination of women within the radical movements, thus setting the stage for the rise of women's liberation. A New Insurgency is based on the University of Michigan's conference commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement in 2012. Blurb "The fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement has drawn a great number of reflections and commemorations, but this carefully conceived volume offers an account of unrivaled ambition, exceptional breadth, and surprising insight. It both excavates the event itself--vividly, perceptively, exhaustively--and gives it the largest and most illuminating of contexts. A New Insurgency is as close to definitive as any volume of this kind can become." Geoff Eley, Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History, University of Michigan





Trespassers on Our Own Land

Author : Juan P. Valdez

Publisher : Dog Ear Publishing

Page : 312 pages

File Size : 29,91 MB

Release : 2011

Category : Juan Bautista Valdez Land Grant (N.M.)

ISBN : 1457505843

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Book Description

Juan P. Valdez was born May 25, 1938 in Canjilon, New Mexico, the second of Amarante and Philomena Valdez' seven children. Juan's father took him out of school after the third grade to help with the raising of crops and tending of livestock necessary to support the family. After having been continuously denied grazing permits by the U. S. Forest Service it was necessary for Juan to sneak his family's cattle on and off the forest pastures on a daily basis. While in his mid-twenties Juan met Reies Lopez Tijerina, a charismatic former preacher who was traveling from village to village in Northern New Mexico speaking out about how the United States had stolen hundreds of thousands of acres of grant lands that were supposed to have been protected by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Juan was the first of eight members of Tijerina's Alianza to enter the Rio Arriba County courthouse on June 5, 1967 in a failed attempt to arrest the local district attorney, Alfonso Sanchez. Ironically, the judge in the courthouse that day was J. M. Scarborough, the father of Mike Scarborough who would wind up assisting Juan in the telling of his family history. Trespassers On Our Own Land is the history of the Valdez family from the time Spain granted Juan Bautista Valdez, Juan's great, great, great-grandfather an interest in a land grant located around the present village of Canones, New Mexico. Mike Scarborough grew up in Espanola, sixty miles south of where Juan grew up. After having spent eight years in the United States Air Force, Mike returned to New Mexico, attended college and law school, and practiced law in the area for twenty-five years. Some years ago he was asked by his good friend, Juan Valdez, to help write Juan's family history. Mike recently completed a five year study of Juan's family history and the period during the late 1800s and early 1900s when the United States government chose to claim ownership of million of acres of then existing land grants and to deny the settlers who had lived on them for over eighty years their legitimate right to use the land. Trespassers on Our Own Land is the result of his research."



Land Uprising

Author : Simón Ventura Trujillo

Publisher : University of Arizona Press

Page : 273 pages

File Size : 24,87 MB

Release : 2020-03-31

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 0816541264

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Book Description

Land Uprising reframes Indigenous land reclamation as a horizon to decolonize the settler colonial conditions of literary, intellectual, and activist labor. Simón Ventura Trujillo argues that land provides grounding for rethinking the connection between Native storytelling practices and Latinx racialization across overlapping colonial and nation-state forms. Trujillo situates his inquiry in the cultural production of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes, a formative yet understudied organization of the Chicanx movement of the 1960s and 1970s. La Alianza sought to recover Mexican and Spanish land grants in New Mexico that had been dispossessed after the Mexican-American War. During graduate school, Trujillo realized that his grandparents were activists in La Alianza. Written in response to this discovery, Land Uprising bridges La Alianza’s insurgency and New Mexican land grant struggles to the writings of Leslie Marmon Silko, Ana Castillo, Simon Ortiz, and the Zapatista Uprising in Chiapas, Mexico. In doing so, the book reveals uncanny connections between Chicanx, Latinx, Latin American, and Native American and Indigenous studies to grapple with Native land reclamation as the future horizon for Chicanx and Latinx indigeneities.



Rewriting the Chicano Movement

Author : Mario T. García

Publisher : University of Arizona Press

Page : 289 pages

File Size : 35,75 MB

Release : 2021-03-09

Category : Social Science

ISBN : 0816541450

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Book Description

The Chicano Movement, el movimiento, is known as the largest and most expansive civil rights and empowerment movement by Mexican Americans up to that time. It made Chicanos into major American political actors and laid the foundation for today’s Latino political power. Rewriting the Chicano Movement is a collection of powerful new essays on the Chicano Movement that expand and revise our understanding of the movement. These essays capture the commitment, courage, and perseverance of movement activists, both men and women, and their struggles to achieve the promises of American democracy. The essays in this volume broaden traditional views of the Chicano Movement that are too narrow and monolithic. Instead, the contributors to this book highlight the role of women in the movement, the regional and ideological diversification of the movement, and the various cultural fronts in which the movement was active. Rewriting the Chicano Movement stresses that there was no single Chicano Movement but instead a composite of movements committed to the same goal of Chicano self-determination. Scholars, students, and community activists interested in the history of the Chicano Movement can best start by reading this book. Contributors: Holly Barnet-Sanchez, Tim Drescher, Jesús Jesse Esparza, Patrick Fontes, Mario T. García, Tiffany Jasmín González, Ellen McCracken, Juan Pablo Mercado, Andrea Muñoz, Michael Anthony Turcios, Omar Valerio-Jiménez



Properties of Violence

Author : David Correia

Publisher : University of Georgia Press

Page : 374 pages

File Size : 47,84 MB

Release : 2013-03-01

Category : Business & Economics

ISBN :

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Book Description

Through the compelling story of the Tierra Amarilla conflict, David Correia examines how law and property, in general, and a Mexican-period land grant in northern New Mexico, in particular, have been constituted through violence and social struggle. Spain and Mexico populated what is today New Mexico through large common property land grants to sheepherders and agriculturalists. After the U.S.-Mexican War the area saw rampant land speculation and dubious property adjudication with nearly all the grants being rejected by U.S. courts or acquired by land speculators. Of all the land grant conflicts in New Mexico's history, Tierra Amarilla is one of the most sensational, with numerous nineteenth-century speculators ranking among the state's political and economic elite and a remarkable pattern of resistance to land loss by heirs in the twentieth century. Correia narrates a long and largely unknown history of property conflict in Tierra Amarilla characterized by nearly constant violence-night riding and fence cutting, pitched gun battles, and tanks rumbling along the rutted dirt roads of northern New Mexico. The legal geography he constructs is one that includes a remarkable cast of characters: millionaire sheep barons, Spanish anarchists, hooded Klansmen, Puerto Rican freedom fighters-or as J. Edgar Hoover, another of the characters in Correia's story would have called them, "terrorists." By placing property and law at the center of his study, "Properties of Violence" first reveals and then examines a central irony: violence is not the opposite of law but rather is essential to its operation.



Chicano Communists and the Struggle for Social Justice

Author : Enrique M. Buelna

Publisher : University of Arizona Press

Page : 305 pages

File Size : 13,9 MB

Release : 2019-04-02

Category : History

ISBN : 0816538662

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Book Description

In the 1930s and 1940s the early roots of the Chicano Movement took shape. Activists like Jesús Cruz, and later Ralph Cuarón, sought justice for miserable working conditions and the poor treatment of Mexican Americans and immigrants through protests and sit-ins. Lesser known is the influence that Communism and socialism had on the early roots of the Chicano Movement, a legacy that continues today. Examining the role of Mexican American working-class and radical labor activism in American history, Enrique M. Buelna focuses on the work of the radical Left, particularly the Communist Party (CP) USA. Buelna delves into the experiences of Cuarón, in particular, as well as those of his family. He writes about the family’s migration from Mexico; work in the mines in Morenci, Arizona; move to Los Angeles during the Great Depression; service in World War II; and experiences during the Cold War as a background to exploring the experiences of many Mexican Americans during this time period. The author follows the thread of radical activism and the depth of its influence on Mexican Americans struggling to achieve social justice and equality. The legacy of Cuarón and his comrades is significant to the Chicano Movement and in understanding the development of the labor and civil rights movements in the United States. Their contributions, in particular during the 1960s and 1970s, informed a new generation to demand an end to the Vietnam War and to expose educational inequality, poverty, civil rights abuses, and police brutality.