Costilla County | Land, water, race, and local governance | Part 1 of 3

Mexican border colonia. Photo
courtesy of Texas
A&M University.

Moderator’s Note: In this three-part series, I present a detailed report on a conflict
brewing in Costilla County between the heirs and successors of the Colorado
portion of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant, who are standing with their county
government, and the property rights demands accompanying the arrival of mostly working-class and dispossessed white settlers
who refuse to abide by county land use and zoning regulations that we fought
hard for in the 1990s because we wanted to protect our land and water and the
integrity of acequia culture. Many of the newcomers appear to be working with
groups, or at least embrace the ideology, of the white ‘sovereign citizens’
movement, which the FBI considers the most serious domestic terrorist threat to
the U.S.

Part I provides the
historical background on colonias, defined as subdivisions lacking access to
water, electricity, and other utilities. I note that all the reporting on this
conflict by the Denver Post and Colorado Public Radio has so far failed to provide
this essential historical and cultural ecological context. I also present
background on the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant and the acequia communities and
their land and water ethics.

Part II focuses on the
newcomers: who are they? Who are their leaders (as they are apparently well organized)?
What are their ideological perspectives? What are their reasons for coming to
settle in a high altitude cold desert that is, even under normal conditions, an
environment that lacks sufficient water resources to sustain a burgeoning
population? I also examine the impact they are having on the environment,
school district, and county social services. Part III offers a set of policy
recommendations for addressing the roots of this conflict, the ruthless
subdivision of Costilla County by unscrupulous land speculators, who promised
mountain homes to the unsuspecting and plopped them in the middle of a desert,
some twenty miles from the mountains and even farther away from reliable
sources of water.

¿Las
colonias gringas?

SWELLING
POPULATION OF ‘SOVEREIGN CITIZENS’ ON HISTORIC MEXICAN LAND GRANT REVEALS NEW CLASS
& RACE CONTRADICTIONS; CULTURAL, ECOLOGICAL, & HISTORICAL IGNORANCE

Subdivision plot outside Blanca, CO. The
realtor’s selling point:

“Enjoy the fantastic San Luis Valley…Let
the wild horses

and antelope be your daily visitors!”
Not mentioned is a lack of water

or the fact that the wild horses are nowhere near this locale.

Photo courtesy of Lands
of Colorado.

Devon G.
Peña | Viejo San Acacio, CO | September 23, 2015

When I think of colonias the first thing that comes to mind
is the unregulated subdivision of vacant desert-like lands that began to appear
in the 1950-60s along the U.S.-Mexico border, especially in the borderlands of Texas.
I grew up and went to school with friends who hailed from colonias. Our own El
Three Points— the barrio in Laredo, Texas where I grew up—did not have sewer
service, storm drainage, paved streets, or any of the other amenities that most
middle class city-dwellers in the USA were by then already accustomed to.

Like the borderlands colonias
of today, El Three Points was an ‘internal colony’ – a place where mostly
Mexican-origin and low-income families lived because it was the only place we
could afford or the locale where working class and dispossessed families were
allowed to reside in. I’ll never forget my grandfather having to call the plumber
to service the septic tank; the persistent dust from the cotton gin and dirt
roads; the loud metallic and shuddering noise issuing from the Texas-Mexican
Railroad Co. line close by; or evacuating our home whenever the natural gas
transfer station release valve a block away went off into emergency mode. Like
I said, an internal colony filled with environmental risks.

The border colonias continue
today as largely nonmetropolitan and unincorporated rural enclaves that lack
basic infrastructure (water, sewage, electricity, paved roads) and are also
largely destinations for displaced populations fleeing violence, repression,
poverty, and hunger in Mexico and Central America. The largest concentration of
colonias is in Texas along the border with more than 2,294 communities with a combined
population in excess of 400,000; see Secretary of
State-Texas (2015).

To this day a good portion
of the borderlands colonias still lack basic infrastructure including adequate and
reliable sources of potable water or sewage and a majority of the homes lack
for proper indoor plumbing. The residents of these semi-rural settlements lack
access to paved roads, storm drainage, and other basic utilities (electricity,
phone, cable).

The borderland colonias lack
their own schools and have little to no access to medical/health services or grocers
for fresh produce and dry goods. The borderland colonias are isolated and deeply
impoverished. We can understand these as communities born of the legacies of
structural violence unleashed by decades of racist and neoliberal policies that
promote corporate power and 1% wealth accumulation at the expense of humanity
and the planet (Hanna
1995-96; Garcia
1995; Peña
2005).

The residents of the border
colonias are resourceful and have worked hard over decades to cooperatively build
their homes and engage in limited self-provisioning of services. They are doing
the best they can under conditions my colleague Michelle Tellez describes as
“the spaces of neoliberal neglect”.  

There is one thing that to
this very day bedevils most efforts at sustaining the health and wellbeing of
these communities: Water. There usually is none, or at best very little, and
certainly insufficient sources for sustainable health, sanitation, and general community
wellbeing.

In the context of the desert
Southwest this type of water crisis seems somewhat unsurprising and is perhaps
best understood by recognizing first that the potable water crisis faced by
colonias is a result of the unsustainable extension of subdivision sprawl promoted
by legislators’ apparently unrestrained and demagogic regard for developers’
unscrupulous right to profit from the misery produced by neoliberal maldevelopment.

In this setting, border colonia
residents were compelled to fulfill the demand for the private potable water services
provided by piperos, self-employed persons,
sometimes from the colonias themselves, who truck-in water bought from other
sources (often municipal water districts) to sell to the residents at prices
that would impress the worst of today’s corporate water privateers.

How did these Third World
[sic] conditions of the colonias come about? The advent of the border colonias
was ultimately rooted in the political power wielded by land developers who
ruthlessly subdivided huge portions of the desert Southwest to make millions
from fraudulent sales to people desperate for a place to build a home away from
lives subject to endless violence and dispossession produced by, you guessed
it, U.S. foreign and trade policies.

The greedy land speculators
and developers took advantage of weak or nonexistent land use laws and the lack
of subdivision regulations to create rural ‘slum’ areas while driving the newly
arriving and desperate residents into ever more pernicious deprivation and
indebtedness. We note that in many cases, the Texas borderland colonias are
located in flood plains that were unscrupulously sold by agribusiness interests
or cash-strapped farmers (see Jepson
2012) under the watchful eye of state legislators who tolerated or defended
this as a matter of so-called property rights, a historic Texas Anglo tradition.

An important and widely
cited federal government study completed in 1990 found that the colonias exist because
local, state, and federal governments failed to protect homeowners from a
massive land speculation mess (see General Accounting Office 1990)
that was made possible by an anarchic market environment in which regulations
to protect homeowners and property values were nonexistent or left unenforced.

The underlying problem of the
borderlands colonias is rooted in the lack of rigorous subdivision regulations
under state laws, and what little has been done, for e.g., under a 1989 Texas
statute or NAFTA side agreements, is largely unenforced due to a lack of
funding and staff at the county level.

So, the proliferation of borderlands
colonias has continued as a consequence of policies that protect the interests
of land speculators and especially the property rights of the developers to
sell land that, ecologically speaking, should
not be inhabited by people.
Sometimes open space should remain just that, especially since it often also
serves vital ecological functions for wildlife habitat and movement corridors.

What does this have to do with
Costilla County?

There is now a new group of colonias
rising up out of the desert prairies of Costilla County in Colorado. These are
not populated by Mexican- or Central American-origin people and are located
some 300 miles from the U.S.-Mexico border in the heart of the southern Rocky
Mountains.

Costilla County is located
in south central Colorado’s San Luis Valley (SLV) and is considered the heartland
of the Indo-Hispano culture area that is a focus of the cultural, historical,
and environmental conservation work initiated four years ago under the Sangre
de Cristo National Heritage Area (SCNHA). The heritage area was created under
the leadership of Secretary of the Interior and SLV native, Ken Salazar.

The mostly nontribal
indigenous residents of the acequia villages along the Culebra River are widely
celebrated as an example of a sustainable adaptation of human beings to the arid
conditions of life in a high altitude cold desert environment.

The southeastern third of
Costilla County is within the historic boundaries of the Sangre de Cristo Land
Grant, issued in 1844 when the area was still part of the Republic of Mexico.
Many historians and pundits refer to the County Seat of San Luis as “The Oldest
Town in Colorado” (1851), but it is actually the “Last Town in Mexico.”

Anyone that has spent any
considerable time in this part of the SLV is immediately impressed by two
things: First, the area’s native residents, and especially the
multigenerational acequia farmers of the Culebra River villages, have an
astoundingly intense attachment to their watershed.  One scientist, the ecologist and hydrologist Robert
Curry (1995), once wrote that:

The
farmers of the San Luis Valley depend upon the runoff to keep their alluvial
basins full to subirrigate their meadows, and to supply the very long-standing
system of irrigation ditches [acequias] that provide, in essence, the
socio-political focus of their entire culture…community interest [in watershed
protection] is high and the public is well informed. These farmers know their
watersheds...

In an interview conducted in
1996 with Dr. Curry, he told me that the acequia farmers could be described as
having a uniquely deep “watershed consciousness”. He believed this is due to the
multiple generations of living and working in a high altitude cold desert
environment. I am not an environmental determinist so I believe that the
indigenous and mestizo/o culture of this region chose to exercise established
and proven patterns of inhabitation based on respect for the ecology of place
and this is the source of our watershed consciousness.

Regardless, the second thing that Curry and many
other scholars and advocates of acequia farming and ranching cultures have appreciated is the strong land and water conservation ethics sustaining our
communities. Anyone concerned with environmental sustainability should be able
to appreciate that the acequias are a living example of what I call  “the arid sensible way of life”.

Which brings me to a new and
profoundly disturbing conflict that is brewing in Costilla County: The new
‘gringo’ colonias of Costilla County signal the arrival of a class of latecomers
consisting of mostly white residents, many of whom seem eager to proclaim
themselves “sovereign citizens”. Some even wrap themselves up in the presumably
virtuous garb of the sustainable “off-the-grid” movement.

It is this identity location
– comingling white sovereign citizen ideology with a professed commitment to off-the-grid
presumably more sustainable lifestyles – that the new colonists are assuming in
order to disingenuously accuse our local government of “violating their
property rights” because county officers are seeking to enforce legitimate, long
fought for, county land use and subdivision regulations that the acequia
farmers and other local citizens enacted to prevent damage to our cultural and
ecological landscapes and historic communities.

What is really happening in
Costilla County? I’ll continue by noting that it is really more complicated and
has a much deeper history than the arrival of so-called off-the-grid colonists
and illegal marijuana grow operations.

The history of the enclosure
of the 1844 Sangre de Cristo Land Grant is really at the root of this conflict.
By enclosure I am referring to the theft and privatization for speculative gain
of what was one of the last ejido community grants and common lands, established
under the laws of the Republic of Mexico, and confirmed (and patented) by the
U.S. Congress in 1860 (I will discuss this point further in
Part 3).

The Sangre de Cristo Land
Grant included all of what is today’s Costilla County, including the desert
prairies sprawled across the western half of the county. It is worthwhile
noting that, under land grant law, it was never intended that the dryland prairies
should be used as sites to build homes or to pursue farming. Some local
ranchers used the dryland pastures as fall and winter grazing range for sheep
and later cattle for more than 100 years.

However, as the late Estevan
Arellano often reminded us: The establishment of Indo-Hispano villages and
farms was confined to places with ready access to water and the first task of
the villagers was to build their acequia irrigation systems. The desert prairies
lack access to water as there are no creeks or lakes and the groundwater aquifer
is many hundreds of feet below the surface.

Fast forward to the 1970s:
It was during this decade that the State of Colorado adopted laws that allowed
for the type of rampant subdividing of land into small five-acre lots and this
is what has happened to Costilla County. Because of the effects of the
enclosure of the land grant common lands (1960), our county now has the most number
of subdivision lots of any county in the state – more than 40,000. Most of
these remain vacant, but a few clusters of ramshackle homes are being built by
the newcomers along the edge of the Rio Grande and in the open prairies between
the Rio Grande and the acequia communities on the eastside of the county.

Local people are concerned for
many reasons not the least of which is the refusal by the newcomers to abide by
county land use regulations (permits for construction, septic tanks, etc.). The
conflict started when county code enforcement officers started visiting the
newcomers’ lots to issue fines for their failure to obtain the required building
permits. A disgruntled settler called one of our enforcement officers, “a dirty
Mexican,” revealing the racial biases that many of the newcomers have obviously
internalized. This set in motion a series of events that led to another
confrontation in front of the County Commissioners building on Main Street in
San Luis last week after a meeting with the commissioners to discuss the conflict.

Local acequia and land grant
community residents are angry because the newcomers are literally, factually,
stealing scarce water resources from us. They have been seen and confronted by
locals while using water pumps to fill 400-500 gallon tanks resting in the back
of their pick-up trucks. This theft of water has happened on Culebra Creek and
its tributaries; right out of the acequias themselves (during irrigation
season); and even from the Rio Grande (as shown in the photograph below).

Two men pump water from the Rio
Grande into a 400-gallon tank

at a site by the Lobato Bridge. Photo
by Devon G. Peña.

For the local people it is
the theft of water – for whatever purpose including unauthorized marijuana grow
operations – that is the most serious source of the conflict. From our vantage
point, this shows a great deal of cultural and historical ignorance about the
area and a profoundly disturbing disrespect for the local environment and the historical
cultures and Native citizens of the county.

One of the greatest ironies
underlying this conflict is that many of the newcomers proclaim themselves to
be part of the off-the-grid movement and yet exploit and appropriate our
adjudicated water rights without regard for the impact this has on the historic
acequia farm and ranch communities. They proclaim themselves to be seeking a
sustainable way of life free of government interference but are the first to
seek public assistance from the very same local government they seek to
abolish, applying for food stamps, health care, and placing their children in
the public schools, as well they should, but then in what sense are you really
a ‘sovereign citizen’?

In Part II of this series, I
will explain who the new ‘sovereign citizens’ of Costilla County are. This is
also a complicated issue and it would be unjust to characterize all of the
newcomers as white and racist; many are to be sure. There is a profound
structural violence problem underlying this conflict: Many of the newcomers are
displaced people themselves; they are cash poor and desperate to find some form
of freedom from governmental oppressors. But the fact is that they are here
because the policies of the federal and state governments have created the
greatest wealth inequality the nation has seen since before the days of the
Great Depression.

I am tempted to say that the
newcomer colonists are economic refugees of the “Great Recession” and we
therefore have a formidable challenge: How to reach out to and support the
newcomers while refusing to cede ground on the environmental and cultural protection ethics we have fought for since the 1960s. I can envision a cooperative
relationship but it requires that the settler colonists “Go Native” and
recognize the environmental limits of their circumstances and develop some
respect for the deep-rooted acequia culture of the Valley.  That is a necessary condition to open up the possibility of cohabiting our precious, water scarce, landscape.