OPINION: New Mexico's land grants were not lost by accident 

New Mexicans are often told that the loss of our community land grants was complicated, technical or simply the result of history moving on. That explanation is convenient — but it is not true. What happened was a series of deliberate legal choices that treated some communities as worthy of recognition and others as expendable.

The Act of June 21, 1860 — formally titled “An Act to Confirm Certain Private Land Claims in the Territory of New Mexico” — shows that Congress knew how to confirm New Mexico’s community land grants when it chose to do so. Grants such as Tecolote, Tajique and Torreon were confirmed under that law. Those communities survived, at least in part, because Congress acted. Others did not.

Community land grants were not simply parcels of land. They were entire systems of life. Families held house lots and irrigated fields, but survival depended on shared lands — pastures, forests, watersheds and travel routes. These common lands supported grazing, protected acequias, supplied firewood and timber, and anchored religious and cultural life. Without them, the private parcels meant very little.

When the United States took control of New Mexico in 1848, it did so under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which promised that existing property rights would be respected. Under the U.S. Constitution, treaties are the supreme law of the land. New Mexico’s Constitution reinforces that guarantee, stating that the rights protected by the Treaty “shall be preserved inviolate.”

Yet only decades later, the U.S. Supreme Court walked away from that promise.

In 1897, the court decided Sandoval v. United States. That case affected seven community land grants now known as the “Sandoval Seven,” including San Miguel del Bado. The court ruled that common lands were not truly owned by the community, but instead remained sovereign unless individually assigned. With that interpretation, the court stripped these communities of nearly everything that made them viable. Nearly all of the commons were lost.

This was not because the grants were illegitimate. In the case of San Miguel del Bado, the federal government already knew the boundaries and scale of the grant. In 1879, the U.S. surveyor general recommended it for confirmation and documented a grant of more than 315,000 acres. What changed was not the history, but the law’s willingness to recognize communal ownership.

One of the least discussed consequences of this decision is where those lost lands went. Once the commons were declared sovereign property, they were absorbed into the federal public domain and later assigned to agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service. This process did not distinguish between empty land and places of deep meaning. As a result, historic cemeteries, burial grounds, religious sites, acequia headwaters and traditional use areas ended up on federal land.

Many of these cemeteries were never abandoned. Families continued to visit and care for them, often unaware the land had been reclassified. Today, descendants are forced to request permission to tend graves that predate the United States itself.

A 2004 Government Accountability Office report acknowledged that many unresolved land grant claims involve land administered by federal agencies and that remaining remedies largely rest with Congress.

New Mexico’s land grants were not lost because they were unclear or illegitimate. They were lost because communal land ownership was inconvenient to a legal system that preferred individual titles and federal control. That history still matters.

Louis “Lou” Gallegos is secretary of the Board of Trustees for the San Miguel del Bado Land Grant and lives near Villanueva.