A view from New Mexico: recollections of the movimiento left

Monthly Review, July-August, 2002 by Elizabeth Martinez

ELIZABETH 'BETITA' MARTINEZ

If ever there has been a chapter of the U.S. left with deep cultural roots in every sense, it is the movirniento of New Mexico.

The roots include social relations, economic traditions, political forms, artistic expression, and language--everything that defines peoplehood. They are Native American, Spanish, and Mexican mestizo (mixed) and they go back centuries. Migrant workers of the last 150 years have played a crucial part, but "immigrant" does not describe the totality of those roots.

Unlike any other area except southern Colorado, the movimiento in Nuevo Mexico evolved within the framework of a long, popular struggle against U.S. colonization and for land--that is to say, nothing less than the means of production. Its origins lie in the colonization of First Nation peoples like the Pueblos and the Dine (Navajo) in what became Nuevo (later New) Mexico and their long resistance to occupying forces. In 1680, some of the Indians joined with Mexican workers in Santa Fe and drove out the Spanish for twelve years.

The land struggle that came much later, waged by Spanish-speaking mestizo people and sometimes armed as well as underground, could be called nationalist. But if we do so, we should not equate it with the nationalism of many other U.S. movement groups. It was not primarily cultural, not exclusionary of other peoples, not "mi Raza primero" (my people first). And whether or not we call that land struggle consciously left, it directly or indirectly encouraged militant leftism including Marxism during the movimiento years.

New Mexico had remained a territory for over fifty years after the war on Mexico. It did not become a state until 1912, when its Spanish-speaking, Catholic majority had given way to an Anglo majority that made white easterners much less nervous. Before and after that date, Mexicans carried out underground actions against Anglo landowners, mainly in rural areas of the north. Cutting Anglo fences and burning barns were common forms of protest against the continuing land robbery.

After arriving in 1968, I soon learned to respect names like Las Gorras Blancas (White Caps) a longstanding underground resistance group, and La Mano Negra (Black Hand), reputed to be headed by a woman at that time. Resistance nourished by historical cultural or religious tradition was also strong. Examples could be found in the Penitentes (a semisecret religious organization), dances and plays performed on certain holidays reenacting key moments in the area's colonial history the curanderos who cured with herbs not usually known to outsiders, along with other expressions of a long isolated, necessarily self-sufficent society--from building with adobe bricks, to cultivating a unique variety of chilies for cooking. A spirit of collectivity and interdependence ran strong in all this.

Politically, northern New Mexico presented an almost classic example of European colonialism. Anglos stood at the top holding economic and political power while "Hispanos" formed a control or buffer class that included teachers, judges, police, and other local officials, leaving the majority of Mexicans at the bottom. That colonial reality defined the anti-imperialist project and its class conradictions.

The Alianza Federal de Mercedes emerged in the 1960's to initiate a new, militant stage in the land struggle, making national news with its 1967 armed takeover of the courthouse in the mountain village of Tierra Amarilla to protest state repression. Alianzistas, led by Reies Lopez Tijerina, organized to win back communally held land that had been distributed to their ancestors in grants by Spain (which had seized it from indigenous peoples). Their Spanish colonial ancestry, which preceded Mexico's rule, made them probably the only group in the United States today who can call themselves "Hispanic," or Hispano, with some accuracy.

In the 1960's and early 1970's, Alianzistas sympathized with the struggles of other peoples of color, like African Americans (the Alianza welcomed visiting SNCC leaders twice), Puerto Ricans, and Palestinians. Of all the possible alliances with Native Americans at home, the Alianza is best known for supporting the long Taos Pueblo struggle to get back their sacred Blue Lake lands.

The worldview of Alianza's constituency--impoverished, dispossessed small landowners--could be very conservative. They were not radical in the sense of consciously seeking to restructure the entire society as opposed to achieving justice in one area, recovery of land ownership that the United States had promised to respect under the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. At the same time, their goal could hardly be met without that restructuring, any more than the U.S. government was likely to "give it back to the Indians." For some Alianzistas and supporters, who saw that their poverty could not be ended without systemic change, their worldview could certainly be called revolutionary nationalism.

The anticommunist influence of McCarthyism could be found among a few Alianzistas, who equated the word with dictatorship. However, Tijerina himself did not take virulent anticommunist positions. His conservatism in other areas was notable, for example, having an almost entirely male Alianza leadership and expressing male supremacist attitudes. (On the unofficial level, many Alianza women were respected for their wisdom, strength, and leadership in ways similar to what I had found in rural Mississippi in 1964.)