Overview

Through a compelling story about the conflict over a notorious Mexican-period land grant in northern New Mexico, David Correia examines how law and property are 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. Nearly all of the huge land grants scattered throughout New Mexico were rejected by U.S. courts or acquired by land speculators. Of all the land grant conflicts in New Mexico's history, the struggle for the Tierra Amarilla land grant, the focus of Correia's story, 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 surprising and remarkable cast of characters: millionaire sheep barons, Spanish anarchists, hooded Klansmen, Puerto Rican terrorists, and undercover FBI agents. By placing property and law at the center of his study, Properties of Violence provocatively suggests that violence is not the opposite of property but rather is essential to its operation.

Full Product Details

9780820345024

Table of Contents

Reviews

Properties of Violence is a smart, original, and vibrant retelling of the history of land struggle in northern New Mexico. David Correia, through rigorous archival and ethnographic research, raises compelling questions about the complicated relationships between colonialism, violence, and property that have broad and deep implications for land struggles around the world. Moreover, it is a refreshingly well-written book, nimbly walking the difficult terrain between meticulous scholarship and well-crafted prose that makes it ideal for both the seasoned academic and anyone interested in a riveting story of violence, political struggles, and the very meaning of property. --Jake Kosek, author of Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico

Correia's remarkable book is not just about New Mexico, not just about land grants. Properties of Violence presents a way of conceiving of property as a mobile, fungible, plastic set of social relations. It offers a process legal geography, not one solely fixated on the 'product' of land grant injustices. . . . When will a serious effort on the New Mexican land grants issue pay material dividends? That's impossible to predict, but for now, storytelling, familiar Nuevo Mexicano dichos , and work like Properties of Violence should help keep the issue alive, active, and relevant for decades to come. And changes in understanding property depend upon on-going stories conscious of the past but relevant now. This book does both. --Eric Perramond, La Jicarita

Correia has written a fast-paced, interesting, enjoyable, and academically rigorous book that tells a story of injustice in impeccably precise terms.</p>--Lorena Oropeza author of <i>Raza SI! Guerra No! Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era</i>

Author Information

DAVID CORREIA is an assistant professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available