Results in Brief
Land grant documents contain no direct reference to community land grants nor do Spanish and Mexican laws define or use this term. We did find, however, that some grants refer to lands set aside for general communal use (ejidos) or for specific purposes, including hunting (caza), pasture (pastos), wood gathering (leña), or watering (abrevederos). Scholars, the land-grant literature, and popular terminology commonly use the phrase community land grants to denote land grants that set aside common lands for the use of the entire community. We adopted this broad definition in determining which Spanish and Mexican land grants can be identified as community land grants.
We identified 152 community land grants (or 52 percent) out of the total of 295 land grants in New Mexico. We divided these community land grants into three distinct types: 79 of these were
grants in which the shared lands formed part of the grant according to the original grant documentation; 51 were grants that scholars, grantee heirs, or others believed to contain common lands;
and 22 were grants extended to the indigenous pueblo cultures in New Mexico.
| Previous page |