Spanish And Mexican Land Grants In The Chihuahuan Acquisition

That They May Possess the Land: The Spanish and Mexican Land Commissioners of Texas (1720-1836) by Galen D. Greaser (author) The grievances accumulated by Anglo-American settlers in Mexican Texas in the 1830s did not include complaints about the generous land grants the government had offered them on advantageous terms. Land ownership is central to the history of Texas, and the land grants awarded in Spanish and Mexican Texas are intrinsic to the story. Population in exchange for land was the prevailing strategy of Spain’s and Mexico’s colonization policy in what is now Texas. Population was the objective; colonization the strategy; and land the incentive. Spain and Mexico defined the formal procedures, qualifications, and conditions for obtaining a land grant. Colonization was a two-part process involving, first, the relocation of colonists from their place of origin to the new site and, second, the placement of colonists on the land in conditions that would enable them to become productive citizens. The colonization effort featured the use of private recruiting agents – empresarios - to assist with the first task. Government agents - land commissioners –oversaw the second objective. Title to some twenty-six million acres of Texas land, about one-seventh of its present area, derives from the land grants made by Spain and Mexico to its settlers. A land commissioner played a part in every case. The story of the empresarios who contributed to the colonization of Texas is a staple of Texas history, but an account of the land commissioners engaged in this process is given here for the first time. The cast of commissioners features, among others, a Spanish field marshal, a Dutch baron, a cashiered United States army colonel, a philandering state official, a self-serving opportunist, an Alamo defender, and a Tejano patriot. Drawn largely from primary sources and richly documented, this sometimes contentious story of the Spanish and Mexican land commissioners of Texas helps complete the narrative of the colonization of Texas and the history of its public domain. This study is a reminder of another lasting legacy of Spanish and Mexican sovereignty in Texas, their land grants.

Reinterprets borderlands history from the Mexican perspective.

From the end of the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, Spain (and later Mexico) made land grants to individuals, towns, and groups to promote development in the frontier lands that now constitute the American Southwest. In New Mexico, these land grants fulfilled several purposes: to encourage settlement, reward patrons of the Spanish government, and create a buffer zone to separate hostile Native American tribes from the more populated regions of New Spain. Spain also extended land grants to several indigenous pueblo cultures, which had occupied the areas granted long before Spanish settlers arrived in the Southwest. Under Spanish and Mexican law, common land was set aside as part of the original grant for the use of the entire community. Literature on land grants in New Mexico and popular terminology generally distinguish between two kinds of land grants: community land grants and individual land grants. Our research identified a total of 295 grants made by Spain and Mexico during this period. Appendix I contains a list of these grants.