451 Comments

The courthouse raid was in1967, not 1965.

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I come late to this thread today, to make what few paltry noncomments I may, to cast what are likely immaterial lights on the subject.

1. I lived in Northern New Mexico for twenty-eight years. I have lived in various other places as well. There is truly no other part of the United States like Northern New Mexico.

2. The mountains will lift you up, the vistas expand your horizons, the forests refresh your soul, and the night skies will take your breath away. The desert will kill you without a second thought. You'll want to be careful.

3. In dollar terms, New Mexico is rather poor, though there are other terms of riches than dollar terms. Did I mention the night skies? Did I mention what it is like to see snow-capped mountains rising from the horizon a hundred miles away, through a clear and almost cloudless sky? You will never see a sky so blue as the New Mexico sky.

4. Catron is pronounced CAY-tron. There is a county named after that fellow. For a while, just a couple decades ago, everyone in Catron county was required to carry a gun in their car. The southern boundary of the county is about a hundred miles north of the border with Mexico. It is in the uplands on the western part of the state, hard by Arizona.

5. Catron donated his copy of the 70-volume 𝘖𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘙𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘜𝘯𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘧𝘦𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘮𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘢𝘳 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘙𝘦𝘣𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘪𝘰𝘯 to the University of New Mexico. It is a useful resource. It used to be you could check it out, but now you have to read it in the university library, as it is too valuable to be let astray.

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Thank you for that.

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You're welcome.

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I'm an immigrant brought here by my mother at the age of 8 in 1951. I am beginning to wonder why I should stay here. In the 1600s white assholes were alive and well when killing off indigenouse peoples was a core occupation. Rounding up and "deporting" them to undesirable tracts of land called reservations was de riguer for a long time. The Civil War moved attention from "Red" to Black. Jim Crow, lynch laws, racism became a fact of life for 150+ years. Even the advances of 1965 are now being deliberately tanked. I understand that cruelty comes with Homo Sapiens DNA and evolution is slow but I find myself wishing for a pandemic like the Black Death that will wipe out 99% of humanity. Maybe that surviving 1% will have a better genetic makeup.

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Ta, Erik. I knew very little about this.

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I didn’t know any of this story. Thank you for enlightening me.

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Coming in to Tierra Amarilla, NM (which is where the courthouse raid was), there is a billboard with a picture of Zapata and the legend "Tierra o Muerte" (land or death).

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Good to see someone else remembers Tierra Amarilla. Troops, both National Guard and Regular Army were brought in to put down the uprising, but it didn't even make the papers back East.

On June 5, 1967, Reies López Tijerina, also known as King Tiger, led the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants) to storm the Tierra Amarilla courthouse and arrest District Attorney Alfonso Sanchez, free detained members of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, and raise awareness of the New Mexico land grant movement of the 1960s

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As far as swiping parts of New Mexico, the Republic of Texas, in an act of breathtakingly overambitious neoimperialism, had already declared everything in New Mexico east of the Rio Grande part of Texas, because of like this map they made in Austin that one time. Includes a chunk of Oklahoma, some Colorado, and a bit of Wyoming. The US was only too happy to continue that claim after Texas joined the Union in 1845.

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I am a little bothered by the reality that no matter how much I read, I won't be able to learn everything.

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I'm hoping this isn't a violation of non-comment rules. But this ai photo is going around online. Enjoy?

https://substack.com/profile/5870746-annie/note/c-90565852

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Still not as good as the Musk/Zuckerberg 'shop that made the rounds a few weeks ago when Meta said there would be no fact checking any longer.

https://substack.com/@cynmac/note/c-86016054

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Barfing Gnome Dot Gif

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Is there some way the American people could start a class action lawsuit against Leon? IANAL but what he and his minions are doing sure seems illegal. I know Marc Elias is busy but maybe he could give us referral.

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I know this is kind of out of nowhere, but MAGAs are just some of the dumbest people out there. I mean, even the ones who are smart and competent in one specific area ...their sheer stupidity just takes my breath away sometimes. They do not know what tariffs are, they think that that freak Elon Musk is on their side, they have absolutely no clue about how our government and economy work, and they think dear leader actually likes them. I don't know how much more I can take.

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I lived in northern New Mexico for almost 25 years and wrote a piece about Reies Tijerina and the 1967 Courthouse Raid (https://abiquiunews.com/news-and-features/folk-hero-or-bandit). Much of that history is still hidden. J.Edgar Hoover persecuted not only Civil Rights Movement members but also anybody they could call "communist" -- those standing up for the poor and/or supporting Unions. Somehow, things never seem to change.

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Really, it's weird that land is not held in common by communities. Land wasn't produced by any individual(s). It's essential to the production of anything else. Use and benefit should be communal. But these stories of theft are worldwide and a cause of poverty everywhere.

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In the 19th century, the prevailing theory of "liberaiism" looked at communal lands as retro. In Mexico, "corporations" (which included communal properties) were outlawed. It was one of the things that drove Emlliano Zapata and his family into rebelllion. After the Revolution, especially in the 1930s, "ejitos" were restored or created out of seized haciendas, although with Carlos Salinas and NAFTA and neo-liberalism, the communal land were broken up into private plots, which were unsustainably small farms, leading to the mass rural exodus to the US and Mexican cities.

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Another aspect to this is that we took away Mexico's only navigable rivers and left them with an inaccessible lawless wasteland to govern on our own border. All the issues on the border are caused by the fact that that region was cut off from better lands and rivers to the north and can't be easily controlled from Mexico City because there's a fuckton of mountains in the way.

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You can’t explain the economics of tariffs to people who think workplace diversity crashes planes.

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Butt we have to ***listen*** to the rabid incels, nazis, and Confederate MAGAt hordes that're gonna rape and murder us! Rude!

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