In 1967, Reies Lopez Tijerina led an armed takeover of a New Mexico courthouse in the name of land rights for disenfranchised Spanish-speaking locals. The small-scale raid surprisingly thrust Tijerina and his cause into the national spotlight, catalyzing an entire generation of activists. The actions of Tijerina and his group, the Alianza Federal de Mercedes (the Federal Alliance of Land Grants), demanded that Americans attend to an overlooked part of the country's history: the United States was an aggressive empire that had conquered and colonized the Southwest and subsequently wrenched land away from border people—Mexicans and Native Americans alike. To many young Mexican American activists at the time, Tijerina and the Alianza offered a compelling and militant alternative to the nonviolence of Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr. Tijerina's place at the table among the nation's leading civil rights activists was short-lived, but his analysis of land dispossession and his prophetic zeal for the rights of his people was essential to the creation of the Chicano movement. This fascinating full biography of Tijerina (1926–2015) offers a fresh and unvarnished look at one of the most controversial, criticized, and misunderstood activists of the civil rights era. Basing her work on painstaking archival research and new interviews with key participants in Tijerina's life and career, Lorena Oropeza traces the origins of Tijerina's revelatory historical analysis to the years he spent as a Pentecostal preacher and his hidden past as a self-proclaimed prophet of God. Confronting allegations of anti-Semitism and accusations of sexual abuse, as well as evidence of extreme religiosity and possible mental illness, Oropeza's narrative captures the life of a man--alternately mesmerizing and repellant--who changed our understanding of the American West and the place of Latinos in the fabric of American struggles for equality and self-determination.

In New Mexico’s Moses, Ramón A. Gutiérrez dives deeply into Reies López Tijerina’s religious formation during the 1940s and 1950s, illustrating how his Pentecostal foundation remained an integral part of his psyche even as he migrated toward social-movement politics. An Assemblies of God evangelist turned Pentecostal itinerant preacher, Tijerina used his secularized apocalyptic theology to inspire the dispossessed heirs of Spanish and Mexican land grants fighting to recuperate ancestral lands throughout northern New Mexico and the Southwest. Using Tijerina’s collected sermons, Gutiérrez demonstrates the ways in which biblical prophecy influenced Tijerina throughout his life from his early days as a preacher to his leadership of the Alianza Federal de Mercedes. Tijerina sought justice for those who had lost their lands and was determined to eradicate the most egregious forms of racism and to valorize the language and culture of mexicanos. Translated into English for the first time here, Tijerina’s sermons serve as a blueprint for the religious origins of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement.

In this autobiography, Reies López Tijerina, writes about his attempts to reclaim land grants, including his taking up arms against the authorities and spending time in the federal prison system. They Called Me "King Tiger" is Reies López Tijerinas visionary autobiography chronicling his activities during a tumultous period in U.S. History. Along with César Chávez, Rodolfo "Corky Gonzales, and José Ángel Gutiérrez, Reies López Tijerina was one of the acknowledged major leaders of the 1960s Mexican-American Civil Rights Movement. Of these four, Chávez and Tijerina were the most connected to, and involved in, grass-roots community organizing, while the latter two were more dedicated to political change. But where Chávez consistently advocated non-violent protest, López Tijerina increasingly turned to militancy. He and his followers even took up arms against the authorities. And of the four, Tijerina was the only one to spend significant time in prison for his acts. Tijerina is also the only member of this historical group to have penned his memoirs, perhaps in an effort to explain the trials and frustrations that brought him and his Federal Land Grant Alliance members to break the law: reclaiming part of a national forest reserve as part of their inheritance; invading and occupying a courthouse, inflicting a gunshot wound on a deputy sheriff in the process; and challenging New Mexico and national authorities at every opportunity. But the acts that placed him in most danger were also the ones that won the hearts and minds of many young Chicano activists. Originally self-published, They Called Me King Tiger is now published as part of the U.S. Hispanic Civil Rights Series. What is clear from López Tijerinas testimony is his sincerity, his years of research on the issues of land grants and civil rights, and his persistent spiritual and political leadership of the disenfranchised descendants of the original colonizers of New Mexico. All of the passion and commitment, as well as the flamboyant rhetoric of the 1960s, is preserved in this recollection of a life dedicated to a cause and transformed by continuous prosecution. They Called Me King Tiger is an historical document of the first order, clarifying the motives and thinking of one of the Chicano Movements now-forgotten martyrs - a man who sought justice for those who have been treated like foreigners on their own soil.

Reies López Tijerina, one of the Four Horsemen of the Chicano Movement, led the land grant struggle by Hispanos in the 1960s to recover the lands granted to their ancestors by Spain and Mexico and then guaranteed by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In his struggle, Tijerina became the target of local and state law enforcement officials in New Mexico and the FBI nationwide. José Angel Gutiérrez meticulously examines thousands of pages of FBI documents, interview transcripts, newspaper reports, and other written accounts on Tijerina and the Alianza Federal de Pueblos Libres, the organization of land grant claimants led by Tijerina in New Mexico. The primary source materials that document the U.S. government’s attempts to destroy Tijerina, his family, and his followers complement the secondary literature on Tijerina and his efforts as the premier leader of the land grant recovery movement. Threaded through the volume are glimpses into the special personal relationship between Tijerina and the author.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was just one of several new insurgent movements for democracy and social justice during the late 1950s and early 1960s, and it must be understood in the context of other causes and organizations--in the United States and abroad--that inspired its founding manifesto, the Port Huron Statement. In A New Insurgency: The Port Huron Statement and Its Times, a diverse group of more than forty scholars and activists take a transnational approach in order to explore the different--though often interconnected--campaigns that mobilized people along varied racial, ethnic, gender, and regional dimensions from the birth of the New Left in the civil rights and pacifist agitation of the 1950s to the Occupy movements of today. This volume features three never-before-published "manifesto drafts" written by Tom Hayden in early 1962 that generated the discussion leading to the Port Huron meeting. Other highlights include recollections from leading women in the Port Huron deliberations who, three years later, protested the subordination of women within the radical movements, thus setting the stage for the rise of women's liberation. A New Insurgency is based on the University of Michigan's conference commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement in 2012. Blurb "The fiftieth anniversary of the Port Huron Statement has drawn a great number of reflections and commemorations, but this carefully conceived volume offers an account of unrivaled ambition, exceptional breadth, and surprising insight. It both excavates the event itself--vividly, perceptively, exhaustively--and gives it the largest and most illuminating of contexts. A New Insurgency is as close to definitive as any volume of this kind can become." Geoff Eley, Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History, University of Michigan

Examines Mexican-American history from the time of the Spanish conquistadors to the Civil Rights movement and recent immigration laws.

Through a compelling story about the conflict over a notorious Mexican-period land grant in northern New Mexico, David Correia examines how law and property are constituted through violence and social struggle. Spain and Mexico populated what is today New Mexico through large common property land grants to sheepherders and agriculturalists. After the U.S.-Mexican War the area saw rampant land speculation and dubious property adjudication. Nearly all of the huge land grants scattered throughout New Mexico were rejected by U.S. courts or acquired by land speculators. Of all the land grant conflicts in New Mexico's history, the struggle for the Tierra Amarilla land grant, the focus of Correia's story, is one of the most sensational, with numerous nineteenth-century speculators ranking among the state's political and economic elite and a remarkable pattern of resistance to land loss by heirs in the twentieth century. Correia narrates a long and largely unknown history of property conflict in Tierra Amarilla characterized by nearly constant violence--night riding and fence cutting, pitched gun battles, and tanks rumbling along the rutted dirt roads of northern New Mexico. The legal geography he constructs is one that includes a surprising and remarkable cast of characters: millionaire sheep barons, Spanish anarchists, hooded Klansmen, Puerto Rican terrorists, and undercover FBI agents. By placing property and law at the center of his study, Properties of Violence provocatively suggests that violence is not the opposite of property but rather is essential to its operation.