Reies López Tijerina (September 21, 1926 – January 19, 2015), was an American activist who led a struggle in the 1960s and 1970s to restore New Mexican land grants to the descendants of their Spanish colonial and Mexican owners. As a vocal spokesman for the rights of Hispanos and Mexican Americans, he became a major figure of the early Chicano Movement (although he preferred "Indohispano" as a name for his people) and founded the Alianza Federal de Mercedes. As an activist, he worked in community education and organization, media relations, and land reclamations. He became famous and infamous internationally for his 1967 armed raid on the Tierra Amarilla courthouse located on the Tierra Amarilla Land Grant whose lands, originally designated for Hispanic settlers, had largely been acquired by Anglo ranchers and land developers.
Early life Born in Falls City, Texas in 1926, Tijerina spent several years as a pastor starting in 1950 and later as an itinerant preacher.
Career
Kingdom of God In 1956, Tijerina and 17 families of his followers sought to purchase land in Texas on which to create their version of the Kingdom of God. Finding Texas land too expensive, they opted for 160 acres (647,497 square meters) in the Southern Arizona desert, which they bought with $1,400 in pooled funds. Situated just north of the Papago Tohono O'odham Indian reservation, the land was secluded and undeveloped, the perfect conditions for a community seeking to remove itself from the "vanity and corruption" of the cities. They especially sought to protect their children from the influence of public schooling.
At first, the families, referred to as "los Bravos" or the "Heralds of Peace", lived under trees, but they soon dug themselves subterranean shelters, covering them with automobile hoods recovered from garbage dumps outside the cities of Casa Grande and Eloy. Tijerina obtained a permit from the Arizona Department of Education to construct a school and to educate their children. He and the other men spent three months building the schoolhouse, only for it to be burned to the ground.
The members of the colony made friends with the neighboring communities, especially African Americans and Native Americans, particularly the Pima Indians. Tijerina soon found himself thrust into the role of bail bondsman for these minority communities. Officials from the Pima County school board began visiting the Valley of Peace early in the year, encouraging the settlers to send their children to public schools. Citing the recent rape and murder of a local eight-year-old girl who was waiting for the bus, Tijerina and the other parents requested police protection for their children, which was denied. As a result, the commune-dwellers retained the right to educate their own children.
On April 18, 1956, Tijerina delivered his daughter Ira de Alá, the first person to be born in the colony. He chose the name Ira de Alá, literally "Wrath of Allah", because he "knew that if there was a just God, he had to be angry and unhappy with those that managed our government and religion here on Earth". During the first year, a jet crashed on the property. Valley of Peace residents reported the crash, and officials came to take away the remains but neglected to ask about the condition of the property or the residents. Not long after the crash, a group of Anglo-American youths rode their horses over the tops of the settlers' subterranean homes, damaging them. Thinking that the pranks were but youthful mischief, the commune members simply repaired their dwellings and made no complaint. But shortly thereafter, they returned from work in the cotton fields to discover two residences destroyed by fire. Tijerina and two other men went to file a report with Sheriff Lawrence White. But when White found out the direction from which the horse tracks came, he refused to investigate. Don Pelkam, an FBI agent stationed in Casa Grande who had investigated the crash, also refused to investigate, claiming that the arson had occurred outside his jurisdiction.
Shortly after his daughter was born, a storm flooded the Valley of Peace. Devastated by his losses, Tijerina could not sleep. During the night he had a vision:
Following the vision, Tijerina felt that his life had purpose and direction, and his experience, which he interpreted as divine, gave him an unwavering conviction.
In the early 1950s, Tijerina was first encouraged to divert his religious energy into politics. After a sermon in Dallas one day, a man invited him home for lunch. As Tijerina recalls, "He said to my face, 'I don't like preachers, they take advantage of the people. What I think you should do is quit talking religion. What the Spanish-American people need is a Spanish-American politician, you may be that ... you should study law and history and help your people.'" In June 1956, Tijerina and a few bravos went to Monero, New Mexico, to visit a community that had previously welcomed him. There he learned about land grants, a controversial issue regarding Hispanic property rights. Zebedeo Martínez, Zebedeo Valdez, and other elderly men, all members of the Brotherhood of Jesus, shared the story of how their families were dispossessed of their lands. The next day, they took Tijerina's group to Chama, Tierra Amarilla, and Ensenada to meet with other unhappy heirs.
Tijerina empathized with their plight, and offered to do what he could to help them, on the condition that they unite to "re-gather the strength that the Anglos had taken from" them. But when he discovered that they held no titles to the land, having been turned over to Governor William Anderson Pile in the late nineteenth century, he resolved to go to Mexico to study the issue.
He left in the fall of 1956 and stayed in Mexico until the new year, researching at the General National Archive and meeting with lawyers and other influential people. One of the most important documents he studied was the Laws of the Indies, which had governed the American portion of the Spanish Empire for more than 300 years. Another was a re-drafted version of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo containing a protocol that guaranteed land grants to descendants of the original grantees, which he obtained in the Tepito barrio for twenty-five cents. On this trip to Mexico, Tijerina realized that the biggest obstacle to his success was "the fear the Anglo had placed in [the land grant-heirs'] hearts through their foreign education." While education had been a key factor in the founding of the Valley of Peace, it now took on an even more important dimension in the life of Tijerina and in the struggle for the land.
In January 1957, officials from the Arizona State Department of Education threatened Tijerina and the other parents with jail time if they did not send their children to public school. Even when confronted with the Supreme Court cases defending the right to home-schooling, the officials would not back down. Tijerina claims to have later found out that the real reason for the harassment was "Rockefeller money was planning to build a model city about a mile from the Valley of Peace." As a last resort, Tijerina took his case to the Phoenix press. However, neither of the two major papers covered the story of the persecution.
On March 19 of the same year, Tijerina was charged with the grand theft of six feed-trailer wheels. The case was thrown out for lack of evidence, but the next month, he was charged with another theft, this time for hardware discovered in the Valley of Peace. During the investigation, officials found out that Margarito Tijerina, who had joined the commune, was wanted in Indiana and took him into custody.
Reies was accused of being the getaway driver during a failed attempt to free his brother from Pinal County Jail. During a recess at his hearing, he left the courthouse, becoming a fugitive.
Tijerina and the other families with children sought refuge in New Mexico. They arrived in the ghost town of Gobernador in early 1957 and took refuge in a church. Desperate for food, Tijerina and his brother Margarito set out to find help. They met Don Manuel Trujillo, a local rancher. Tijerina later called Trujillo his "first and best teacher on the question of land grants in New Mexico." In New Mexico, Tijerina got the idea to organize the heirs of the New Mexico land grants into a corporation that could compete with "the great corporations of the Anglos". But realizing that survival came first, Tijerina and two other bravos returned to the Valley of Peace to look for work. They were arrested and imprisoned in Florence, Arizona for ninety days. Margarito, who had violated the conditions of his parole, was not released. While in prison, Margarito asked Tijerina to help the wife and child of a fellow inmate. Commune members clothed and fed the woman and child, and Tijerina secured the man's release. Two days later, he was imprisoned and charged with attempting to free his brother. Released on bond, his court-appointed attorney urged him to flee the state for his own safety. After consulting with the other families, Tijerina decided to risk losing the Valley of Peace and flee.
Tijerina spent the next seven years as a fugitive in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico. By this time he had seven children and had to leave them with his wife. While on the run, Tijerina continued to research communal land rights, the U.S. Constitution, and the rights guaranteed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The biggest weakness he saw in U.S. law was its failure to provide specific protection for the family.
In May 1958, he was invited to speak in front of a group of land grant heirs in Chama, New Mexico. During his speech, he was attacked and struck over the head with a club. In the ensuing melee, Tijerina was removed to safety and his brother, Anselmo, was arrested for assaulting Tijerina's attacker.
In 1959, Tijerina went to an archive in Guadalajara, Jalisco. When he requested the documents concerning the New Mexican land claims, the attendant was unable to locate them. His nephew from Pleasanton Texas then hid the files in his house in the closet. The last person to access the documents was an American commissioned by the Mexican government to convert them to microfilm.
The authorities came close to apprehending Tijerina many times, and he was maligned in the local press as a "Communist" and a "bandit". In September 1959, he organized a strike in Shamrock, Texas, in protest of unequal working conditions for Mexican laborers. When thus confronted, the cotton farmer gave in to the strikers' demands.
Tijerina secured housing in Ensenada, New Mexico, where he came into further contact with members of the Brotherhood of Jesus, who told him of Thomas B. Catron's leadership of the Santa Fe Ring, a group of ranchers, and government officials who systematically dispossessed the land grantees and their heirs of their claims from 1848 until 1904. He also became aware that the federal government itself had claimed portions of the Tierra Amarilla grant in the name of the Forest Service.
When Tijerina's brother Margarito was released from prison in Michigan City, Tijerina took advantage of the opportunity to meet with Elijah Muhammad. They met daily over the course of a week, during which time they discussed the need for unity among the minority groups of the United States.