that the next few years may see New Mexico rise to higher levels of prosperity with all segments of the state participating. It is not certain, however, that such a breakthrough will take place. The depression of some areas may also spread to the rest of the state. The future is not only clouded by national and international problems but also by state problems. If the state, through adequate planning and federal assistance can resolve the more basic of these problems, then progress will continue.

As you are aware, the dramatic transformation of New Mexico from a rural state largely dependent upon livestock, agriculture, and mining into an urbanized commonwealth rests upon very fragile and insecure foundations. The creation of massive federal projects and bases and the discovery and expansion of oil and uranium have led to rapid urbanization and immigration. New Mexico, as a result, is today almost completely dependent upon the federal government and upon private corporations headquartered outside the state. Decisions made in Washington, D.C., in New York, or in Dallas, guided by factors extraneous to New Mexico could well lead to the termination of federal installations or the cutback in oil and uranium production. Such decisions would have very sharp and violent repercussions on the economy of the entire state. Unfortunately, very few New Mexican counties have other developed resources to fall back upon. Ours is a colonial economy in every sense of the word.

An even more fundamental weakness in our colonial economy is the formation during the past thirty years of chronically depressed and underdeveloped areas in northern and southwestern New Mexico and in isolated counties in other sectors of the state. The population of many of these counties is declining to such a level that they are experiencing difficulty in maintaining minimum public services. Their economies are stagnating or declining. They are marked by extremely high rates of unemployment, some of the highest infant mortality rates in the United States, increasing welfare burdens, deep-ending poverty, malnutrition, family breakdown, climbing rates of juvenile delinquency, the slow erosion of initiative and hope, and the spread of apathy and despair.

If these distressed areas had the good fortune to be located in Africa, Asia, or Latin America, they would be the recipients of foreign aid, peace corps groups, and a concerted effort to resolve their problems. As part of New Mexico since World War II, they have been forgotten by the national government, and conveniently ignored whenever possible by the state government. They are now a running abscess that if not lanced can poison the entire economic structure of New Mexico.

During the 1930's the basic problems of these counties were analyzed and outlined. Solutions were advocated. Many of them, if carried out, would have, in my opinion, substantially prevented the development of present conditions. The majority of programs that were adopted poured millions of dollars during this period into northern New Mexico and for the most part, failed. They succumbed to the inability of federal and state planners to adjust their programs or to develop programs consistent with local geographical conditions or cultural values or through an inability to communicate with the local people. They adopted the idea that the Anglo father knows best. Little was done to bring the local people into the planning and policy stage, to carefully maintain a two way communication process or to obtain their cooperation. The net results of this failure have been the development of suspicion and mistrust among the people and among the federal and state administrators, resentment, hostility, and contempt toward the local population. Many federal administrators in my experience are now almost unwilling to renew the struggle or to spend time and money to experiment with programs that might succeed in the northern half of the state. They are apparently resistant to finding out why their programs failed in the past or are not having the success at present that they had anticipated.

It is my considered opinion that all programs, state or federal, designed to assist the distressed areas in northern New Mexico will continue to fail until the following factors are considered: (1) The Spanish-American village is utilized rather than the individual small farmer as the basic unit of planning, research, and action; (2) the programs are based upon local needs as expressed and felt by the local villagers rather than by some Anglo or anglicized Spanish-American administrator; (3) a comprehensive and sustained effort is made to enlist the cooperation of village leaders and to make sure that the villagers understand the goals of the program. (It should be mentioned here that the real village leaders are not always those who are the most anglicized or who are believed to

be leaders by Angelo administrators); (4) administrators and originators of programs must always keep in mind, understand, and respect local cultural and linguistic values and adjust their programs to fit into social, geographical, and cultural conditions. Those who regard themselves as superior to the local village or farming population will not be able to work with them successfully. My own research experience in San Miguel County has led me to realize that there is often a tremendous fund of wisdom and knowledge among even the most illiterate non-English speaking villagers. (5) Programs based upon repayments in cash will have a high rate of failure and will but increase the total personal indebtedness of the area. Wherever possible, repayment provisions should be based upon the village and upon repayment in labor and in raw materials. (6) Local people should have the opportunity through their leaders to engage in planning, research, and policy making at all levels of planning for the programs. (7) A comprehensive program of education and information should be carried out in both Spanish and English among the people to be effected. Rumors should be studied and subsequent corrective educational efforts should be made as needed. Everything should be done to make sure that local people thoroughly understand the goals of the program, the techniques to be used, and are introduced to and accept all personnel to be used in the program.

In northern New Mexico many of the federal programs now in existence were formulated in areas where conditions are very different. They are standardized programs with little flexibility or possibilities for adjustment to local conditions. They tend to stress the large commercial farmer, of the type not often found in northern New Mexico. I have come to feel that if these programs were based upon the Spanish-American village, they would have greater possibilities of success. The majority of the rural population throughout the world live in farm villages. The isolated farmstead, as we know it in the United States, is a rather unique development in rural life. The social, economic, and cultural advantages of the rural village over the individual farmstead are considerable. However, it must be admitted that there are some weaknesses also. None-the-less, the agricultural leaders of France, Israel, Spain, Mexico, India, and many other countries, are utilizing the village as the unit of planning and action with considerable success. We could learn much from rural programs designed for the villages in these countries.

An example of a program based upon the village and upon the factors mentioned above that has succeeded, although unfortaunately it has met a tenacious, selfish, and short sighted opposition from other parts of the state, is the recent state program set up to improve village dams and irrigation structures along the Pecos River in San Miguel and neighboring counties. The state provided initial financing and technical assistance. The local people supplied labor and raw materials. Every state dollar invested was matched by many more dollars of labor and materials. The economic and social benefits can already be seen in the villages involved. Although the program is suspended in the courts at the moment, it should be extended to all the villages along every stream in northern New Mexico.

It should also be accompanied by another program to expand the land basis of the villages by purchasing land once owned by the village people and now alientated from them and selling it to the village under repayment provisions that the village people can meet.

At this point it should be pointed out that many of the major irrigation and reclamation projects in the state such as the Elephant Butte Dam, the Conchas Dam, and the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District that have brought agricultural prosperity to other sections of the state, have been at the expense of the water rights of the villages of northern New Mexico and have frequently resulted in tremendous land losses among the sadly abused Spanish-American farmers.

Still another major economic and social difficulty in New Mexico is the persistence of cultural traditions and habits brought from the more humid and flatter lands of the east and the midwest. There is a tendency to assume that plans and programs that work in Texas, Oklahoma, or Nebraska should work in New Mexico. Also, urban planners in New Mexico labor under the assumption that plans and programs that are effective in New Haven, Los Angeles, or Cincinnati should automatically have the same result in Albuquerque or Santa Fe. Local Anglo leaders often fail to consider the peculiar and quite different geographical, climatic, social and cultural conditions of New Mexico.

One of the most glaring is the bringing in of the large rectangular county system into New Mexico that completely disregarded main lines of communication, topography, and social and cultural factors. The adoption of the municipio system from Mexico would have been far better for New Mexico than the county system.

Another example is the tendency in our cities and towns to plant large water consuming lawns and gardens. As water is in such short supply in New Mexico, one can sense the coming conflicts between cities and rural areas. Although perhaps industry should have precedence over agriculture, should lawns, swimming pools, and lavish gardens have an equal precedence over crops and livestock? A belief is spreading among many economists, state administrators, and others that the day of agriculture is ending in New Mexico. They assume that farmers of northern New Mexico should be encouraged to migrate to the cities. They fail to realize that there is no longer an economic position for them in the urban centers. Automation is rapidly destroying job opportunities for the poorly skilled segments of our laboring force. Even the employment of white collar and skilled workers is now threatened. Moving these people to the cities is but moving a social, economic, and cultural problem from one area to another. The problem still remains. It seems to many of us that the future of these people and the future perhaps of northern New Mexico rather rests in stabilizing these people on the land. A combination of agriculture and industrial employment based upon native skills, upon local raw materials, adjusted to limiting climatic and geographical factors, and able to compete with other parts of the country, may promise much in northern New Mexico.

There is need for considerable experimentation in this area. The section could well be used as an economic, social, and cultural laboratory for the development of programs specially designed to solve the problems of underdeveloped areas in all parts of the world. The United States could and should use New Mexico as a testing and training ground for programs, techniques, and personnel designed to assist similar areas in Latin America, Asia, or Africa. Not only would New Mexico benefit, but the United States could eliminate flaws and weaknesses in programs before they are exported over seas.

There is a definite need in New Mexico for a well structured, adequately staffed, properly financed, State Planning Office or a Department of Development, completely free of political or sectional pressures. Such an office could halt the present and long lasting inertia and state drift. It could carry on state wide development programs, assist local planning and regional agencies, and carry on or contract basic social, economic, and cultural research. Such planning departments in other states have played magnificant roles in the continuing progress of their states.

Another serious difficulty that has handicapped economic and cultural development in northern New Mexico is the lack of an adequate progressive regional capital providing leadership and assistance for the entire region. Thinking about regional capitals almost automatically brings Denver to mind. The rapidly grow. ing cultural and industrial complex stretching from Fort Collins down to Pueblo is a magnificent example of what progressive business, intellectual, professional, and political leaders can do toward the creation of a strong regional center supported by thriving subordinate communities cooperating together for their common welfare. To a lesser degree, Salt Lake City, Utah and Phoenix, Arizona also are achieving the position of regional centers supported by prospering hinterlands.

Unfortunately, the leaders of Albuquerque have shown little awareness of the potential of Albuquerque as a regional leader and little insight into the responsibilities and advantages of a regional center. Unable to deal effectively with problems created by its rapid urbanization, Albuquerque still tries to absorb what industries the depressed communities in its hinterland might still have and to display hostility and opposition to the attempts of these communities to secure new industry. The leaders of northern New Mexican communities have had virtually no encouragement, assistance or guidance from Albuquerque groups of the type that Denver provides for its surrounding towns and counties. Local leaders working with the problems of their distressed areas have had to endure the opposition from Albuquerque to such federal programs as the food stamp program, the area redevelopment, and the rural development programs that promise much to northern New Mexico. They furthermore have had ab solutely no assistance from Albuquerque in the forming of adequate local pro

grams to submit to Santa Fe and to Washington. Albuquerque seems quite aloof from the rest of northern New Mexico.

This is unfortunate both for northern New Mexico and for Albuquerque. Albuquerque is locked in a silent economic and social struggle with regional centers in Colorado and western Texas to maintain, and if possible, to expand its marketing and shopping area. The urban centers grouped around Denver are already casting long shadows down the northern highways leading into New Mexico. Unless Albuquerque awakens to both its danger and its potentialities, it may follow other communities in northern New Mexico such as Las Vegas, that also had the potentiality of becoming regional centers but through deplorable leadership, cultural conflicts, disunity, and lack of vision lost that opportunity.

As I have tried to point out, the majority of so called economic problems in New Mexico have a social and a cultural component. They cannot be solved by unilateral approaches. However, there is a cluster of what can be called predominantly cultural or social problems. These have to do with the position and the future of the Spanish-Americans and the Indians in the state. During the past few years it has become rather impolite to insist that these problems exist. What might be called a conspiracy of silence has come into New Mexico under which the conditions of the Spanish-Americans and to a lesser degree, of the Indians, have deteriorated.

The cultural problems to a large degree have been created by the cultural arrogance of certain Anglo-groupings, many of them newly arrived, in the state. It is the same type of cultural arrogance that has done us so much harm overseas. These Anglo-Americans tend to assume that Americans who may possess a different culture and who may speak in their homes a different language from the dominant Anglo-Middle class culture, are somehow not acceptable Americans. This attitude is infectious and at times is passed on to numbers of the minority groups struggling for acceptance by the dominant group.

Increasing numbers of social scientists are pointing out the deplorable cultural losses and the acute social problems created by this lack of tolerance. They point out the many advantages of an open plural society that accepts cultural and linguistic differences. They emphasize that a cultural minority may well serve as a cultural bridge of understanding between the Anglo culture of the United States and other cultural areas.

In former days in New Mexico there existed an awareness and an appreciation of the values of cultural pluralism. Today, this awareness has diminished considerably under the impact of new immigrants from outside the state. Today, the major cultural, educational, intellectual, and economic forces in the state as expressed through the means of education, communication, urbanization, industrialization, and subtle cultural and social pressures are moving toward a monolithic anglicization. New Mexico is in danger of losing its uniqueness and becoming no worse than such states as Idaho, Montana, Oklahoma, or Kansas, and no better.

The expression of this cultural imperialism is found in the implicit assumption underlying the New Mexican school system that bi-ligualism is responsible for the more serious difficulties faced by Spanish-American school children in northern New Mexico. A whole raft of master's theses and educational articles have come into existence proving that bi-lingual children, an interesting euphemism in itself, do not perform as well as mono-lingual English speaking children in the school. Therefore, every effort should be made to eradicate Spanish and replace it with English. If all our school children were nice middle-class Englishspeaking children, our educational opportunities would be solved. As a result, children who have incompletely learned their native language are dumped into an English speaking school, where many of them never completely learn English. The New Mexican school system, in spite of the heroic endeavors of many devoted teachers and administrators, has the unique honor of graduating children who are functionally illiterate in two languages, not just one.

It is my impression that bi-lingualism has been made a convenient scapegoat and whipping boy for the many inadequacies of our school system. This convenient escape mechanism permits the state leaders to overlook the deplorable financial condition of the northern schools, the need for complete equalization of educational opportunities in New Mexico, the development of specially trained English teachers to teach bi-lingual children, the provision of teachers who understand and respect the cultural values of the children whom they teach, and the redesigning of the school curriculum to meet the special needs of bi-lingual children.

82-388-67-15

THE LAND QUESTION IN NEW MEXICO (BY DR. CLARK S. KNOWLTON, DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO)

In this article, the traditional land settlement patterns of the Spanish American inhabitants of northern New Mexico are described. An analysis is then made of the conflicting concepts of Spanish-American and Anglo-American land ownership and land utilization. This presentation is followed by a discussion of the complex causes of land loss among the Spanish Americans. For the convenience of analysis, these causes have been grouped into other major categories, (1) political and legal, (2) economic, (3) violence, and (4) miscellaneous. And finally, material is presented on the impact of land loss on the culture and social structure of the Spanish-American people.

TRADITIONAL SPANISH-AMERICAN SETTLEMENT PATTERNS

Spanish-American Origins.-The Spanish-American inhabitants of New Mexico are somewhat different in origin, culture, racial composition, dialect of Spanish spoken, rural-urban residence, and degree of involvement with Anglo-American society from other Spanish-speaking groups in the Southwest. They are the descendants of early Spanish and Mexican colonists who entered New Mexico from the 16th to the 19th century. Living in almost complete isolation from other European groups for almost three hundreds years, they gradually evolved a distinctive rural village culture well adjusted to their natural environment.

Land Settlement Patterns.-Under Spanish and Mexican rule in New Mexico, land passed from the government into private and communal ownership through the mechanism of the land grant. Although there were three basic types of land grant, the community land grant, the sitio, and the proprietary land grant, the community land grant was far more important than the other two in the settlement of northern New Mexico. The community land grant was a grant of land by the Mexican or Spanish government to a petitioning group of at least ten village families for the purpose of establishing a rural farming community. When the grant was made, the village site was first selected, centering on a central plaza. The petitioning families drew lots for their house sites in the village. Working together, they then constructed an irrigation system, built a church, and divided the irrigable farming land among the village families. Around the village site and the irrigated farming lands stretched the village “ejido”, the commons used communally for grazing, hunting, firewood, and timber by the village inhabitants. The grand boundaries were rather vague and indefinite.

The sitio and the proprietary grants, although found in every part of the state, were perhaps more important in the southern and eastern parts of New Mexico than it was in the northern mountainous sections. The sitio was a large grant of land given to a single individual for the establishment of a livestock ranch. The proprietary grant was a grant of land made to a prominent individual who in exchange for the land and other economic privileges promised to attract settlers, build a village community, erect a church, put in an irrigation system, secure a priest, and provide military protection. This type of land grant was often made to settle strategic locations or to deepen the zone of settlement. With the passing of time and the increase in population, it frequently came to resemble a community land grant.

Along the isolated northern and eastern frontiers of New Mexico, groups of villagers moved out of overcrowded villages seeking land for farming and livestock operations. This squatter type of village increased fairly rapidly during the period of early American occupation. The Spanish and Mexican system of land grants had ceased to exist. No American system for registering or granting land has as yet replaced it. As the Indian menace gradually increased, these villages began to spread out into the plains of Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. The eastward moving frontier screen of Spanish American villages and ranches has received little historical attention. It encountered the violent westward moving cattle frontier and was rapidly rolled back toward the mountains of northern New Mexico.

The American occupation of New Mexico found the majority of the Spanish Americans living in small self-sufficient farm villages engaged in subsistence agriculture, the raising of livestock, handicrafts, and barter. The village by definition included not only the village and its inhabitants, but all of the land owned or used by village members as well.