OPINION: How long will New Mexico allow itself to be erased?

How long are Hispanic and Indigenous New Mexicans expected to tolerate the steady dismantling of our history by newcomers who arrived yesterday and presume authority over a culture they do not understand?

Time and again, individuals who came to New Mexico decades — not centuries — ago invoke “the sins of the past” as justification to erase monuments, dismantle living history and delegitimize the descendants of those who built this place. This is not moral reckoning. It is cultural displacement dressed up as progress.

There are millions of us in the Southwest who descend from both Indigenous peoples and Spanish colonists who arrived with Juan de Oñate in 1598. I am one of them — more than one-fifth Native Azteca by blood quantum, descended from the original settlers of Nuevo México. Our ancestors did not arrive to an empty land, nor did they vanish after U.S. annexation. We remain — rooted in land, water, language, faith and tradition.

The blending of Indigenous and Spanish peoples over 18 generations produced a culture unlike any other in North America: our dialects, foodways, acequia systems, ranching traditions and communal land stewardship formed the foundation of what the world now calls the American Southwest. Even the cowboy is ours.

Yet that civilization was not absorbed — it was systematically dismantled.

In 1846, the United States invaded Mexico. Two years later, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo promised Mexican residents protection of property, language, religion and citizenship. Those promises were largely ignored. Spanish legal systems were subordinated to Anglo courts. Communal land grants were forced into unfamiliar legal frameworks. Families were bankrupted by litigation, taxes and fraud. More than half of Mexican landholdings were lost.

This was not accidental. It was structural.

Land grants that relied on shared grazing, forests and water were incompatible with a system built on private speculation. Acequia-based water governance — democratic, sustainable and communal — was overridden by “first in time, first in right” doctrines that commodified water and concentrated control. Spanish was punished in schools. Mexican history was removed from curricula. Catholic parishes were stripped of local governance. Place names were Anglicized. Sacred sites were fenced, commercialized or rebranded.

Violence enforced the message. Vigilantes, militias and the Texas Rangers terrorized communities resisting dispossession. Mexican Americans were lynched, evicted, silenced and driven into labor roles without political power. The message was clear: work here, but do not belong.

The result was not assimilation. It was dispossession followed by enforced forgetting.

This history matters because its consequences are still with us. Today’s land grant disputes, water conflicts and cultural preservation battles are not relics of the past — they are unresolved outcomes of a legal and political system imposed on an existing civilization.

Consider water. Acequia communities remain among the most climate-resilient systems in the Southwest, yet they are routinely sidelined by state compacts and urban demand. Consider land. Descendants seek not nostalgia, but legal continuity and access to communal lands stripped from their families. Consider culture. Museums celebrate artifacts while excluding living stewards from decision-making.

Recent examples:

• The dismantling of the BernCo Bernie live exhibit at the Gutierrez-Hubbell House. This was not a novelty attraction. It was living history: heritage livestock, agricultural education and intergenerational stewardship rooted in place, which was started as a hands-on learning project for high risk students from ACE Leadership High School.

• 2020, Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller removed Juan de Oñate's statue over the whining of a small number of misinformed protesters. I filed suit pro se in federal court to have it restored, but could not see it through due to an insufficient war chest.

This cultural amputation reflects a familiar pattern — institutions prefer static displays over living traditions that challenge bureaucratic control.

The recently released PBS New Mexico documentary "Saving New Mexico’s Dahl Sheep" reminds us of an inconvenient truth: History survives not in glass cases, but through people, land, water and animals still doing the work.

We see the same impulse in the removal of historical monuments without dialogue, due process or respect for descendant communities. In my own experience, local governments have criminalized traditional land use while ignoring the protections of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo — protections I was forced to assert personally in court. Many others simply give up, worn down by generations of exclusion.

When critics say, “This is ancient history,” the answer is simple: These systems were never abolished — only ignored. Their absence explains today’s conflicts.

When critics say, “We already honor this culture,” the response is equally clear: Celebration without authority is not honor. Preservation without access is erasure.

New Mexico was not conquered empty. It was reorganized to forget itself.

What we are witnessing today is not a revival of the past, but the survival of systems that never stopped working — and the insistence of their descendants that they still matter. Every little push back adds up when there are thousands of us doing the same.

Donald Chavez is a Valencia County rancher on the Belen Land Grant. He is of Spanish and Azteca ancestry.