Sandía Pueblo between Empire and Nation: A Borderlands Story of Land Dispute and Legal Maneuver

The transition from the colonial to the national regime in present-day New Mexico impacted the capacity of the Pueblo Indian communities to maintain control over their tribal territories. In the early 19th century, as the former viceroyalty of New Spain achieved its independence, they became Mexican citizens, thereby loosing, like every other Indian in the new nation, the protection of communal rights over land that Spanish laws offered to indigenous peoples as corporate subjects of the Crown. This paper discusses a decades long land dispute between the community of Sandía Pueblo and some Spanish-mestizo residents of Bernalillo that was initially litigated at the local New Mexico courts and, by 1829, the Indians brought before Mexico’s Supreme Court of Justice but was not resolved during the Mexican period of the region’s history. Through the revision of the legal documents resulting from this case between 1829 and 1841 it will address the difficulties confronted by frontier peoples in the context of changing sovereignties and geopolitical transitions. It will also discuss how corporate indigenous communities in the borderlands of New Spain maneuvered the language of both Imperial and National ideologies to defend their property rights, appealing to their condition of faraway frontier residents as well as to the services that their ancestors lent as vassals in the distant past and their own patriotic acts as citizens in the present.