Sec. 2. Findings
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Congress finds the following: From the 17th to the mid-19th centuries, the Governments of Spain and Mexico made grants of land to individuals, groups, and communities throughout the Southwest United States to promote settlement in frontier lands. The key land ownership feature for a land grants-merced was common lands, meaning lands that were not individually owned but were considered commons for use by all local residents to provide the necessary resources to sustain the entire community.
On February 2, 1848, the United States and Mexico ended the Mexican-American war by signing the Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits, and Settlement (commonly known as the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo), in which Mexico formally relinquished to the United States claims to over 790,000 square miles of land now constituting all or part of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo included provisions under article VIII for the protection of established property rights, including community land grants located in the new territories, and the United States and Mexico further affirmed these protections in the Protocol of Queretaro.
Although the Senate struck article X of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as negotiated, the United States clarified in the subsequent Protocol of Queretaro that these grants … preserve the legal value which they may possess and the grantees in the new territories retained their property rights. As noted by the Government Accountability Office in the 2001 report GAO–01–951, The Protocol specified the United States' position that land grant titles would be protected under the treaty and that grantees could have their ownership of land acknowledged before American tribunals. .
In the second half of the 19th century, the United States enacted various laws establishing processes to review property claims in the new territories, such as the Act of July 22, 1854 (10 Stat. 308; ch. 103), that created the office of Surveyor General of New Mexico and the Act of March 3, 1891 (26 Stat. 854; ch. 539), that created the Court of Private Land Claims. The established processes differed from State to State, and a history of problematic surveys and corruption may explain why there was so much acreage lost by community land grants and why so few survived into modern times as self-governing entities administering intact common lands.
Studies have concluded that for land grant communities and community members to survive in the non-cash economies prior to the mid-20th century, it was essential that they have access to the common land resources of their own private inholdings, which provided a complete resource base for successful small-scale family farming and stock-raising activities, upon which the local economy was based. New Mexico’s community land grants, now known as land grant-mercedes, are an important part of the State’s culture and history and have been recognized under the Kearny Code of 1846 and subsequent territorial laws of New Mexico and New Mexico State law.
Article 2, section 5 of the constitution of New Mexico states, The rights, privileges and immunities, civil, political and religious guaranteed to the people of New Mexico by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo shall be preserved inviolate , providing powerful constitutional protection for the rights of the State’s land grant communities. Water delivery systems known as acequias, or community ditches, are a centuries-old system used for water distribution, introduced to New Mexico by the Spanish in the 16th century, to allow for farming to sustain the needs of the community, creating a cultural landscape and way of life centered around local agriculture.
In New Mexico, acequias are governed by a centuries-old form of water governance, known as acequias, that are political subdivisions of the State and are composed of a board of private land owners that are responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of the acequias and for monitoring and administering surface water rights along the acequia. In New Mexico, acequias have created a cultural landscape and way of life centered around local agriculture, water governance, and a custom of sharing scarce water.
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