Fractions of Justice: A Legal and Social History of the Las Trampas Land Grant, New Mexico

Abstract

AND LAW was a time-honored practice in New Mexico when the United States took control in 1846.It was so commonplace that the first surveyor general of the territory began his tenure with fear lest the shady dealings of the Mexicans corrupt the moral Americans who came to the new land to seek their fortunes.)He need not have worried.Immigrant Anglos, quite on their own initiative, soon compiled a record of unscrupulousness beside which even the worst swindles of New Mexico's Spanish and Mexican past seemed pale and timid.By exploiting the discordances between Spanish and American codes of law, Anglo speculators, often with the assistance of native New Mexican rieos and politicos, managed to buy up many tens of thousands of acres of valuable land grants at little cost.Their success, which stripped most of the territory's Hispanic villagers of their patrimony and their chief source of wealth, yielded a legacy of bitterness and anger from which New Mexico continues to suffer to the present day.2This paper will explore the roots of that legacy by reconstructing the experience of the people of a small northern New Mexico village during the time when the land grant on which they lived was being acquired by Anglo speculators.Their grant was the 28,OOO-acre Las Trampas Grant, located on the west slope of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains about halfway between Santa Fe and Taos, and their village was the village of El Valle, a small farming and ranching community typical of the area.Although local conditions shaped the events that took place in El Valle, they also bore