The Martyr

In the two years following the 1967 Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid, Reies López Tijerina enjoyed a singular moment of triumph in December 1968 when he successfully defended himself against a series of raid charges in state court. Otherwise, he suffered and sought suffering. State and federal law agents surveilled him constantly. Anonymous terrorists shot at and firebombed the headquarters of the Alianza Federal de Pueblos Libres where he lived. Against this backdrop, Tijerina ran for state governor and then conducted a series of increasingly far-fetched citizens’ arrest. In June 1969, he nearly exchanged gunfire with U.S. Forest Service officials during a protest, prompting a judge to send him directly to jail. Convicted on multiple charges, Tijerina stayed behind bars for the next three years.

The Indo-Hispano

In 1966, Tijerina and members of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes took over the Echo Amphitheater picnic ground within Kit Carson National Forest, apprehended two U.S. Forest Service rangers and, in a mock trial, accused them of trespassing. Land-grant activists claimed the acreage because it had originally been granted to their ancestors by Spain, prompting the question that confronted Reies López Tijerina constantly: “Didn’t Spaniards steal the land in the first place from Native Americans?” In partial answer to this question, he sought alliances with Native Americans and promoted a new identity, the Indo-Hispano, the compound name recognizing centuries of cultural interchange and racial-mixing even as Tijerina minimized an equally long history of conflict.

The Evangelist

In New Mexico, Reies López Tijerina saw long-held aspirations—to secure a piece of land, to find ultimate justice, and even to establish and protect a cultural haven—hit fertile ground. Within two years of the 1963 Alianza Federal de Mercedes founding, he convinced thousands to join his new organization by spreading a three-part land-grant gospel that: 1) upheld Spanish colonial documents as a sign of legitimate ownership; 2) blasted American ownership of land grants as fraudulent; and 3) accused Americans not only of land theft but “cultural genocide.” Many land-poor Spanish-speakers in New Mexico responded to Tijerina’s fearless accusations and, as Tijerina turned to his preacher past, his religious allusions. Many shared his deep faith. More importantly, they bitterly recalled how their ancestors had once used the land without interference.

The Chicano

The massive news coverage of the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid catapulted Reies López Tijerina to the national civil rights stage almost instantly but only briefly. In the wake of the raid, Chicano movement participants felt empowered by his insistence that Spanish-speakers had a historic claim to the American Southwest. Soon he enjoyed invitations from Martin Luther King, Jr. to participate in the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign. For a short while, he also benefited from the advice of Maria Varela, a veteran civil rights activist. Yet in D.C. during the Poor People’s Campaign, the glare of publicity also exposed his autocratic tendencies and massive ego. Thrilled by the post-raid attention, Tijerina’s aspirations only grew. He eagerly spoke of moving beyond the land-rights agenda of the the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, the organization he had led since 1963.

The Patriarch

As a grown woman, Rose Tijerina accused her father, Reies López Tijerina, the founder of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, a land-rights organization in New Mexico, of sexual molestation when she was a teen-ager. Her father vigorously denied the accusation. Nevertheless, oral histories with family members as well as archival documents show that Tijerina did demonstrate a patriarchal and controlling nature that demanded compliance. Disobedience courted physical abuse. Because she believed in the land-grant cause, Mary Escobar, his first wife, continued to operate as the Alianza’s secretary for several months even after the pair divorced. Then Rose, also eager to contribute to justice, took over that position. Unfortunately for all, Reies López Tijerina operated the Alianza akin to how he ran his family, with power concentrated in his hands and no tolerance for criticism.

The King of Kings

Born in 1926 outside of San Antonio, Texas, to a migrant farmworker family, Reies López Tijerina’s earliest years were defined by severe poverty and intense religiosity. Nevertheless, starting as a boy, Tijerina saw himself as destined by God for greatness. After attending a Pentecostal Bible college, he spent five years as an Assembly of God minister before becoming an itinerant preacher. As a preacher, he crisscrossed the United States, including several trips through northern New Mexico, which introduced him to the sordid history of land dispossession in the region. His marriage to a fellow Bible school student, Mary Escobar, produced an ever-growing family that joined him in his constant travels and life of precarity. In 1954, a collection of his sermons condemned the United States and its citizens for licentiousness and greed.

Epilogue

As leader of the Alianza de Mercedes Federales, Reies López Tijerina failed to recover even one acre of contested land on behalf of his land-poor Spanish-speaking membership. However, his ideas regarding the nature of American continental expansion remain influential in 2020. After his release from federal prison in 1971, where he spent time in the psychiatric ward suspected of displaying a “personality disorder of the schizoid type,” Tijerina entered a slow slide into near obscurity. New interests, including numerology and genealogy, competed with his land-grant commitments. Certain that a vast Jewish conspiracy threatened global security, Tijerina also displayed a virulent anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, his ideas regarding conquest, indigeneity, land theft, culture, and history infused the Chicano movement and later entered mainstream historical works. He died in 2015.

The American

In 1964, Reies López Tijerina was unceremoniously deported from Mexico on the suspicion that he was interfering in governmental affairs. The suspicion was baseless, but it left Tijerina, who had always taken pride in his Mexican heritage, no choice but to appeal to the U.S. government to promote the agenda of the organization he headed, the Alianza Federal de Mercedes. Specifically, Tijerina, now emphasizing his U.S. citizenship, sought an investigation into how land originally deeded to Spanish-speakers in New Mexico before the American takeover of the region had rapidly fallen into American hands afterward. Tijerina traveled to Washington D.C. and met high-level officials, including Robert F. Kennedy. Ultimately, only the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) paid him any sustained attention, convinced that Tijerina might be a Mexican operative.

Introduction

On June 5, 1967, Reies López Tijerina and fellow land-grant activists, members of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes, conducted an armed raid on a courthouse in northern New Mexico to bring attention to their cause: redress for massive land dispossession among the region’s Spanish-speakers following the U.S. Mexico War. While the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid made Tijerina a hero to young activists within the emerging Chicano Movement, Tijerina’s ideas mattered as much as his actions. Drawing from a deep-sense of injustice rooted in childhood poverty and shaped by his years as a Pentecostalist preacher, Tijerina accused the United States of operating as a colonial power in New Mexico.

The Gunslinger

On June 5, 1967, Reies López Tijerina led what became known as the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid. That day, he and a few armed companions sought to conduct a citizen’s arrest of the local district attorney, Alfonso Sánchez, who they thought was in his office in the county courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico. Members of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes hoped to call attention to the long history of land dispossession in the region by arresting Sánchez. But Sánchez was not even in the building. Raiders shot one man, physically assaulted two, and kidnapped two more, a succession of events that, along with the raid itself, resulted in costly legal battles. Tijerina, however, emerged as the singular hero, an inspiration to young Chicano movement participants.