Poor Chupadero, so far from God,
so close to Santa Fe
By David Correia and Eric Perramond
In the strange world of New Mexico water politics, the
tiny Las Acequias de Chupadero north of Santa Fe may be the
strangest still. The 55 parciantes who irrigate nearly 110
acres of pastures, orchards, and fields in the narrow valley
at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains owe most of
the water in their ditches to an unusual 19th century
agreement hatched between residents of Chupadero and the
adjacent Rio en Medio valley. At the time, the Rio Chupadero
was no rio at all. The water that trickled through the
Chupadero valley each spring never lasted more than a few
weeks. Despite the lack of water, the Commissioners of Las
Acequias de Rio en Medio recognized the agricultural
possibilities of the valley. In 1897 a convenio was agreed
to and a splitter box at the headwaters begun. Together the
residents of both valleys constructed a transmountain
diversion that brought water from the Rio en Medio into the
Chupadero valley.
Splitter box in Rio en Medio
Where there was once a trickle, there was now a river.
The new waters increased the Chupadero growing season by
three months. The one-page convenio, an astounding
collective effort to build the diversion, and the ongoing
cooperation among parciantes of the two valleys continue to
serve as the political and ecological foundation of what is
today the Las Acequias de Chupadero. But the very existence
of the Rio Chupadero, its social and political origins,
challenges the reductive legal frameworks of water
adjudication in New Mexico. In the complicated political
economy of water in New Mexico, the Rio Chupadero poses
particularly difficult questions. If the 1897 agreement
literally created a new river and a local water economy, how
and in what way should new property owners be bound by that
agreement? And where does the Rio Chupadero fit in the
labyrinthine world of New Mexico water law? Is it a river?
Is it an acequia?
Until recently, these questions were the domain of the
State Engineer. And in the economic reductionism that
governs the logic of the State Engineer, the complicated
social and ecological history of the Rio Chupadero and the
interests of local parciantes would likely take a back seat
to the interests of commercial developers. But changes to
the New Mexico code in 2003 transformed acequia-State
Engineer relations and local water governance in New Mexico.
The new law now gives acequia commissions the power to deny
requests to move water rights out of a ditch if
commissioners determine that such a transfer "would be
detrimental to the acequias or community ditch or its
members." If the State Engineer once served as a rubber
stamp for developers to replace potato patches with
mega-mansions, local acequia commissions now control their
own fate.
But while the change granted local acequias new and
important authorities, it also imposed new standards and
requirements. When confronted with transfer requests,
acequia commissions now function as quasi-judicial bodies.
While this has always been true of acequia associations to a
certain degree, the new law holds acequia commissioners to
strict legal standards related to the holding of public
hearings and the drafting of judicial decisions. With these
new rules come new realities. Lay knowledge of community
politics and the ecology of local acequia function is now
less important than specialized legal knowledge-now acequias
need lawyers, not just mayordomos. In this new world,
commissioners must pay as much attention to the legal
landscape of water law as they do to the local landscapes of
ditches and drainages.
And into this new world came Santa Fe Properties (SFP).
This summer the group applied to the Chupadero commission to
transfer its recently purchased water rights out of the
acequia's drainage basin.
Soren Peters, son of the prominent Santa Fe restaurateur
and art and real estate mogul Gerald Peters, represented SFP
in a transfer request in front of the Chupadero
commission.
The first request by Peters was to transfer surface water
rights to an elevated mesa-a perfect site for ritzy houses,
many noted-that overlooked the Rio en Medio valley. Many
parciantes on the Chupadero ditches were concerned that this
was part of a water transfer from agriculture to residential
development. The 1897 convenio defined an agricultural water
sharing agreement, but the Peters transfer would have
displaced local water rights into a zone unsuited for
irrigated agricultural.
One of the central points in the original convenio was
that only commissioners from both communities could make
decisions that would affect the flow at the splitter box.
After a group visit to both sites proposed for the
transfers, the commissioners ruled against the surface to
groundwater move. Commissioners were concerned that the
transfer would undermine the time-honored relationship
between Chupadero and Rio en Medio.
The second part of the Peters request had to do with a
simpler surface water conveyance. Peters proposed to move an
existing water right downstream along the Rio Chupadero (a
right they purchased from Christian Brothers, the founders
of the now defunct College of Santa Fe). The commissioners
were more favorable to this request, but only if Peters was
willing to play by the acequia's rules. But Peters rejected
the acequia's jurisdiction on any and all of these matters.
Santa Fe Properties's intent, it seems, was to purchase
water rights for commercial purposes and move them as they
deemed fit along and between basins.
This idea that water is a "commodity" untied from local
community governance norms has become an all too frequent
reality for acequias throughout New Mexico. The conflicts
that erupt when developers with deep pockets invade small
valleys in places like Chupadero have come to define the
struggles over who gets to decide water issues in New
Mexico. The conflict offers a stark contrast between those
who self-interestedly understand water as a private
commodity versus those who see it as inherently part of an
ecological, cultural, and political landscape.
The SFP v Chupadero case is a microcosm of adjudication
conflicts throughout the state and the struggles that
acequia organizations face when individuals want the water
but not the local oversight that comes with them. That the
acequia is both a physical ditch and an institution has
turned out to be an inconvenient truth for many people not
wanting to be subject to community governance. It also
highlights a willful misunderstanding of both hydrology and
the local governance of acequias. As the historical
arrangements between Rio en Medio and Chupadero demonstrate,
some communities have figured out their own democratic and
ecological bypasses around the water and land bureaucracies
in the state. The question, of course, is whether meaningful
local governance will stand the legal onslaught now under
way.
Despite the commission's denial of Peters' request, the
story is far from over. Santa Fe Properties has appealed the
acequia commission's rejection to the District Court. Given
the location and history of the Chupadero acequia, the
transfer conflict, stuck as it is between the economics of
residential development and the social history of a river,
promises to be thornier and more difficult to settle than
most.
But this is really just one more chapter in a longer
Santa Fe story about how water not only flows uphill towards
money but even, on occasion, ignores gravity.
Editors Note: In a related case, the
commissions of the San Jose de Hernandez Community Ditch and
La Acequia del Gavilan in Ojo Caliente in 2007 denied water
transfer applications by Española mogul Richard Cook
(Peña Blanca Partnership), which have already been
challenged in court. The initial decision, questioning the
constitutionality of the state statute, was decided in favor
of the acequias. The case will now be decided on the merits
of the commissions' decisions to deny the transfer
applications (see the October 2007 and October/November 2008
La Jicarita News issues for more details).
Los Alamos National Laboratory
Update
By Joni Arends, Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety,
and Sheri Kotowski, Embudo Valley Environmental Monitoring
Group
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), which is the only
U.S. facility currently manufacturing the plutonium triggers
for nuclear weapons, continues to oppose efforts to protect
public health and the environment. The New Mexico
Environment Department (NMED) public hearing on the revised
draft hazardous waste permit for LANL is scheduled to begin
April 5, 2010 and we have several critical concerns.
First, LANL continues to oppose posting financial
documents that will provide funding for cleanup and
remediation when operations end at the various hazardous
waste facilities. These requirements ensure that cleanup
will be done. Former Senator Pete Domenici, a longtime
advocate of nuclear weapons expansion at LANL, was able to
pass a rider to exempt the other Department of Energy (DOE)
sites in New Mexico - Sandia National Laboratories and the
Waste Isolation Pilot Plant - from such requirements during
his tenure.
Second, the Inspector General of the DOE recently
released a report about the problems with fire protection at
LANL, a facility with "unique" hazards.
http://ig.energy.gov/documents/IG-0821.pdf. This is the
second report since June, indicating a heightened awareness
of the problems that have been documented for over a decade
by the Inspector General, as well as the Defense Nuclear
Facility Safety Board (DNFSB) and the DOE's National Nuclear
Security Administration (NNSA).
The Inspector General cited recommendations found in the
1995 and 2004 Baseline Needs Assessments, which LANL has not
addressed. These include staffing, training, and the need
for pre-fire plans for facilities that handle hazardous
chemicals, explosives, and radioactive materials. Some of
the issues were resolved on paper at the end of September
2008 when Los Alamos County and the NNSA signed a
Cooperative Agreement for fire protection services, after 11
years of negotiations and temporary contracts. Although
issues, such as staffing, are addressed in the contract,
inadequate staffing remains a problem. Further, many of the
issues will not be addressed until 2010.
The Inspector General said, ". . . the challenges facing
NNSA, LANL, and the County are significant, especially given
the history of failed attempts to secure the appropriate
level of fire suppression services for LANL. We believe that
the recent initiatives taken by the NNSA under the
Cooperative Agreement are good first steps, but additional
actions are needed."
Kevin Roark, LANL spokesman, said, "Things are definitely
being done. We completely reorganized our fire-protection
system by creating a new division. We're hiring
fire-protection engineers. We're replacing many thousands of
outdated sprinkler heads. Things are happening."
Sheri Kotowski, Lead Organizer for the Embudo Valley
Environmental Monitoring Group (EVEMG), has been monitoring
emergency preparedness and has participated in the extensive
negotiations regarding the draft NMED hazardous waste permit
for LANL. She said that the DOE Inspector General and other
federal oversight agencies do not have enforcement powers so
they cannot require LANL to rectify the on-going
deficiencies. However, according to Kotowski, through the
hazardous waste permitting process NMED has enforcement
powers for emergency management and response, including
"fire protection" under the Contingency Plan. "In permits
issued by the Environment Department, there are enforcement
mechanisms so that the deficiencies must be corrected to
ensure that the facilities are in compliance. In the case of
the hazardous waste permit, the Environment Department needs
to step up and use their enforcement powers within the
context of the hazardous waste permit to keep the public
protected."
James Bearzi, Chief of the NMED's Hazardous Waste Bureau,
responded by saying, "There is no state or federal law that
would allow us to enforce the inspector general report. To
make a statement like the Environment Department should step
up . . . is ludicrous."
Kotowski would agree that NMED does not have the power to
"enforce" anything that the DOE Inspector General
recommends; however, as the regulator of hazardous waste,
NMED has the power to investigate whether the hazardous
waste operations under the existing permit- or those to be
permitted under the new permit- are operating safely and are
in compliance with the fire protection requirements. If the
inspection finds problems, then NMED has the authority under
the hazardous waste laws to enforce any violations.
But we may not have to wait and see. On October 14, there
will be a "functional exercise" at LANL that will test
emergency preparedness and communication between federal,
tribal, state, and local emergency responders. The exercise
grew out of community concerns about the lack of information
during the May 2000 Cerro Grande fire. EVEMG, Concerned
Citizens for Nuclear Safety, and others have been working
for years to bring the functional exercise to fruition and
will serve as "observers."
Bearzi said, "This type of exercise, bringing these
emergency managers from all these different counties, hasn't
happened anywhere else in the state. So, actually, I would
say the folks in northern New Mexico are getting the extra
attention they deserve."
Aamodt and Abeyta Water Settlement
Updates
The Taos Pueblo Indian Water Rights Settlement, or the
Abeyta Litigation Settlement Act, and the Aamodt Litigation
Settlement Act of the water rights claims of the Pueblos of
Nambe, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso, and Tesuque, recently passed
U.S. Senate and House committees. A review by the
administration, according to Representative Ben Ray Lujan's
office (Lujan introduced both bills in the House), raised
several concerns: that there be a clear cap on construction
costs for the regional water systems; that there be a 40%
non-federal cost share; and that some questions regarding
water rights be resolved. We haven't seen any proposed
amendments, and according to Paul White, of the Pojoaque
Basin Water Alliance, Representative Lujan declined to meet
with him or his group to discuss their long standing
concerns (which La Jicarita News has covered
extensively) regarding the Aamodt settlement.
Just as we were going to press, the results of a Brain
Sanderoff poll were released, showing that 59 percent of the
Pojoaque Valley residents polled "have negative feelings"
regarding the terms of the Aamodt settlement, and that
"those who have heard more about the Aamodt settlement tend
to have a more negative opinion of it and of the proposed
water system." Santa Fe Commissioner Harry Montoya, who
expressed surprise at the survey results, was quoted as
saying about the terms of the settlement, "I think it's as
good as it's going to get."
|
Help keep us
going
It's that time of year again when we ask our readers to
please send in their subscriptions for 2010, which will mark
La Jicarita News' 15th year of publication. This past
year several of our newspaper colleagues - Bill Whaley of
Taos' Horse Fly and Ed and Martha Quillen of Salida's
Colorado Central - sold their publications, which are about
the same age as La Jicarita. If we were to give up
the ghost there would be no sale of a non-profit newspaper,
so we'd like to hang in there for at least another year to
pay the bills and, to paraphrase Mark Twain, get our facts
first so we can then "distort 'em" as we please.
Thanks to everyone who contributed articles this year,
thanks to Vanguard Printing in Albuquerque for always
getting the paper out in a timely fashion, thanks to our
faithful funders the Healy and McCune foundations, and
thanks to all our loyal readers who send in money whenever
the spirit moves them.
Photos by Eric Shultz
Authors Dave Correia and Eric Perramond at the
diversion site
ANNOUNCEMENTS
• The Quivira Coalition's 8th Annual Conference will
be held on Wednesday, November 4th through Friday, November
6th at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Albuquerque. This year's
program is a celebration of the centennial arrival of Aldo
Leopold in the Southwest as a ranger with the fledging
Forest Service: "Living Leopold: The Land Ethic and a New
Agrarianism." A Water Symposium and Range School will be
held on Wednesday, and presentations, including Land Health,
Conservation, Sustainable Agriculture, Restoration, Beauty,
and The Land Ethic will be held on Thursday and Friday. You
can register online at www.quiviracoalition.org.
• Congress designated the Northern Rio Grande
National Heritage Area in 2006 to "respect, protect,
conserve, and celebrate the landscape and historical,
social, and cultural characteristics of communities in Rio
Arriba, Santa Fe, and Taos counties." NRGNHA is currently
developing a 10-year Partnership Plan and to that end is
sponsoring a Stakeholders Workshop on Friday, October 30
from 9:00 to 4:30 at the Oñate Center, 6 miles north
of Española on NM 68. If you would like additional
information contact Glenna Dean at 505 753-0937.
LETTERS
La Jicarita News received the following letter
from some guy in Albuquerque, via the internet, of course,
which just goes to show how COMPLETELY CRAZY some folks are
out there. Of course, we'd love it if Nancy Pelosi were
really a Marxist.
La Jicarita News:
Nancy Pelosi's Controversial Marxist
Connection
Speaker Nancy Pelosi who is second in the line of
succession to the presidency may be a security risk. There
is increasing concern about whether Pelosi has close
personal relationships with pro Castro Rep.
Barbara Lee and the Hallianan family of San Francisco
once under scrutiny by the California Senate Fact-Finding
Subcommittee on Un-American Activities for their pro-Soviet
propaganda efforts. Lee was a secret member of the
Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism a
spin-off of the Communist Party. Now think back to the
Soviet Union's staged collapse and compare it with our
imminent collapse and notice some of the similarities and it
easy to see that the same people are behind this
machination. http://sfr-21.org/collapse.html.
A Brief History of American
Imperialism, Part 1
By Mark Schiller
Editors' note: This is the first in a
series of articles that will explore the causes of
indigenous peoples' land dispossession in the United States
with particular regard to what occurred in New
Mexico.
Modern scholarship has demonstrated that the
American Revolution was not an anticolonial liberation
movement as it has traditionally been portrayed, but rather
the process by which the American mercantile elite threw off
the yoke of the British mercantile elite (See William
Appleman Williams, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Ann Laura Stoler,
Amy Kaplan, and R.W. Van Alstyne to name just a few scholars
whose work supports this thesis). It was, in essence, a
battle between two rival factions within the British Empire
for control of the land, resources, and markets of North
America that resulted in a bifurcation of that empire.
Cultural historian Stanley Cavell states the argument
bluntly, ". . . America's revolution never happened. The
colonists fought a war against England all right, and they
won it. But it was not a war of independence that was won,
because we are not free; nor was even secession the outcome,
because we have not departed from the conditions England
lives under, either in our literature or in our political
and economic lives."
In point of fact, the "founding fathers" were English
ancestored, white male slave owners who employed a rationale
of white supremacist entitlement to initiate a policy of
colonial expansion that drove the national boundary west to
the furthest limit of the North American continent and
dispossessed or murdered everyone in its way. As early as
1751, Benjamin Franklin counseled the English Crown, ". . .
the Prince that acquires new Territory, if he finds it
vacant, or removes the Natives to give his own People Room .
. . may be properly called Fathers of their Nation . . . ."
By 1783 George Washington was referring to the United States
as a "rising empire" and in 1809 Thomas Jefferson wrote
James Madison, ". . . I am persuaded no constitution was
ever so well calculated as ours for extensive empire . . .
." The expansionist drive gained such momentum that in 1823
when President James Monroe famously declared to Congress
that "the occasion has been judged proper for asserting, as
a principle in which the rights and interests of the United
States are involved, that the American continents, by the
free and independent condition which they have assumed and
maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects
for future colonization by any European powers . . . ."
(quoted from Monroe's December 2, 1823 speech before
Congress later known as the "Monroe Doctrine"), he was not
seeking to protect the western hemisphere from further
colonization but proclaiming the United States' hegemony
over the region.
That hegemony exacted a terrible toll on the Native
American and Indo-Hispano people who resided on the lands
into which the United States expanded. As the eminent
American historian William Appleman Williams has noted, the
"assertion that Americans enjoyed free security as well as
free land throughout most of their history, and that these
factors explain the nation's development is hardly half the
story. What is missing is the pattern of total war developed
and put into operation against the Indians and then
transferred to later opponents."
This series of articles will try to shed some light on an
aspect of that "war," which has not been as thoroughly
documented as the wars against Native Americans. By closely
examining government policy I argue that the injustices that
occurred during the adjudication of Spanish and Mexican land
grants by federal agents and courts were not primarily legal
issues - although the courts were often the arena in which
the dispossessions and disenfranchisements were enacted -
but part of a colonialist policy that the government
implemented, both explicitly and covertly, in order to make
land and resources available for Anglo capitalist
exploitation. The United States federal government never had
any intention of "inviolably respecting" (as the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo asserts) the property or human rights of
the Mexican citizens it incorporated as a result of the
Mexican-American War. Its real concerns were economic and
political, and the legal proceedings were, by and large, a
dog and pony show to disguise that fact. I further contend
that the official narrative (the most recent iteration of
which is the 2004 General Accounting Office Report on
community land grants in New Mexico) constructed by the
government to chronicle and explain this era not only
attempts to justify the land theft but cover up a legacy of
racial hatred and brutality.
As a result, thousands of legitimate Mexican landowners
were dispossessed of their land. At least 14,000,000 acres
were lost in New Mexico alone. This has had devastating
social, economic, cultural, and environmental consequences
that have contributed to New Mexico becoming one of the
poorest, most environmentally exploited states in the
country.
Before detailing the specifics of my argument, it's
essential to establish that an undercurrent of imperialist
aggression pervades American history prior to these
adjudications. Early expansionist policy, predicated on the
dispossession of Native Americans, was clearly the model
upon which later colonialist schemes directed at
Indo-Hispanos and others were based.
Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts: "Thomas Jefferson
. . . was the real architect of the genocide and
confiscation of the land of indigenous peoples. . . ." An
1801 letter to James Monroe outlined Thomas Jefferson's
Anglo-centric expansionist vision. "However our present
interests may restrain us within our own limits, it is
impossible not to look forward to distant times, when our
rapid multiplication will expand itself beyond those limits,
and cover the whole northern, if not the southern continent,
with a people speaking the same language, governed in
similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate
with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface
[emphasis added]." This "blot or mixture" Jefferson
could not "contemplate with satisfaction" included Native
Americans, blacks (as free men), and Indo-Hispanos.
Jefferson both vilified and elegized Native Americans in
a schizophrenic attempt to, on the one hand, justify their
extirpation and obtain their lands and, on the other, salve
his pious conscience. Historical anthropologist Anthony F.C.
Wallace suggests, " . . . Jefferson appears both as the
scholarly admirer of Indian character, archaeology, and
language and as the planner of cultural genocide, the
architect of the removal policy, the surveyor of the Trail
of Tears." In the Declaration of Independence Jefferson
refers to Native Americans as ". . . the merciless Indian
savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished
destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." By contrast,
in a 1797 letter to James Wikinson Jefferson wrote, "When we
contemplate the Fortunes of the Aborigines of our Country,
the Bosom of Philanthropy must heave with sorrow, and our
sympathy be strongly excited -what would not that man, or
that Community merit, who reclaims the untutored Indian -
opens his mind to sources of happiness unknown, and makes
him useful to society? Since it would be in effect to save a
whole race from extinction, for surely - if this people are
not brought to depend for subsistence on their fields
instead of their forests, and to realize Ideas of distinct
property, it will be found impossible to correct their
present habits, and the seeds of their extinction, already
sown, must be matured."
The notion that "untutored" native communal populations
must yield to the "enlightened" institutions of western
civilization, particularly yeoman husbandry and its
corollary, private property, would be repeatedly invoked as
a rationale for their dispossession. It formed, as I shall
demonstrate, the basis upon which judicial decisions and
Congressional acts that legitimized and institutionalized
land theft and racism were predicated.
Jefferson's expansionist agenda included not only
aggressively encouraging settlement of the land west of the
Alleghenies (which had been forbidden under British rule and
in which he had a personal investment), with its consequent
dispossession of thousands of Native Americans, but the 1803
acquisition from France of the land from the Mississippi
River to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Gulf of Mexico to
what became the Canadian border through the Louisiana
Purchase. Astonishingly, though he himself questioned the
constitutionality of the purchase, he managed to finesse the
treaty that authorized this enormous land acquisition
through Congress despite vehement opposition from the
federalists. Regarding his "democratic" political ideals,
which have been held sacrosanct by revisionist historians,
Jefferson himself remarked, "what is practicable must often
control what is pure theory." His immediate successors,
Madison, Monroe, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson also
embraced Jefferson's oxymoronic credo that the government
was constructing an "empire for liberty" predicated on the
dispossession of indigenous peoples.
Monroe and his Secretary of State John Quincy Adams
solidified the United States' hold on the eastern portion of
North America with the acquisition of the "Spanish Floridas"
from the crumbling Spanish colonial empire, severely
weakened by continental wars in 1819. As early as 1786
Jefferson had shrewdly spelled out the government's long
range intentions for the Spanish colonies in the western
hemisphere: "Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest,
from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled.
We should take care too, not to think it for the interest of
that great continent to press too soon on the Spaniards.
Those countries cannot be in better hands. My fear is that
they [the Spanish] are too feeble to hold them till
our population can be sufficiently advanced to gain it from
them piece by piece."
Article II of The 1819 Treaty of Amity, Settlement, and
Limits between the United States and His Catholic Majesty
ceded ". . . all the territories that belong to him [the
King of Spain], situated to the eastward of the
Mississippi, known by the name of East and West Florida" and
fixed the boundary between Spain and the United States west
of the Mississippi at the Sabine River, which ultimately
became the boundary between the states of Louisiana and
Texas. Although the United States accepted this limitation,
according to historian Richard Van Alstyne, Jefferson
maintained that the the land he had procured [through
the Louisiana Purchase] extended westward to the Rio
Grande and politicians, including Henry Clay and Thomas Hart
Benton asserted that the United States had actually given
away territory with the treaty. It would only take a
generation, however, to "correct" this mistake.
Spain's increasingly tenuous hold on its colonies in the
new world, coupled with the Mexican mercantile's
dissatisfaction with the Spanish colonial system draining
the wealth of Mexico, led to an insurrection culminating in
Mexico declaring its independence in 1821. In an effort to
protect its northern territorial frontiers from further
incursion by the United States, the newly established
Mexican government began issuing what it termed "empresario"
grants to Anglo land speculators. These grants, which
included enormous tracts in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado,
were made with the understanding that the empresarios, who
included, among others, Stephen Austin in Texas and Charles
Beaubien, Gervais Nolán, Ceran St. Vrain, and Charles
Bent in New Mexico and Colorado, would import settlers whose
communities, theoretically, would act as buffers against
United States' expansion.
Austin's colony, which was located in the fertile river
bottom between the Brazos and Colorado rivers south of the
El Camino Real, offered free land in a temperate climate
while the United States government was charging $1.25 an
acre for land in much harsher environments. Thus, Austin was
able to induce an enormous influx of Anglo settlers, who
quickly outnumbered the indigenous population, while
maintaining their allegiance to the United States.
Now, with an established Anglo population, the United
States renewed its efforts to acquire the territory.
President John Quincy Adams, still stinging from the
political controversy that festered over the western
boundary of the Louisiana Purchase he helped negotiate in
1819 with Spain when he was Secretary of State, offered the
Mexican government $1 million for the Texas territories,
which included much of New Mexico and southern Colorado, in
both 1825 and 1827, to no avail. Adam's successor, Andrew
Jackson, raised the offer to $5 million but was also
unsuccessful.
The Mexican government, realizing the United States was
intent upon annexing Texas, attempted to stem the flow of
Anglo immigration by statute in 1830 and, when that proved
ineffective, it tried to crush Anglo Texans' efforts for
self-determination by force of arms. Santa Ana's victory at
the Alamo in February of 1836 was short lived, however, as
the cry of "Remember the Alamo" ignited a wave of xenophobic
support that allowed for a quick reprisal. Led by Andrew
Jackson's protégé and James K. Polk's close
friend, Sam Houston, an army of eight hundred Texans
decimated Santa Ana's forces at the Battle of San Jacinto
six weeks latter, resulting in the independent Republic of
Texas. While Mexico refused to acknowledge the new country's
sovereignty, it was powerless to intervene.
Annexation of Texas by the United States then became a
hotly debated subject with the northeastern manufacturing
interests fearful that the addition of Texas would
strengthen the southern slave based agricultural interests
in the economic and political tug of war that had developed
between the two capitalist factions. Northern opposition,
however, was tempered by fears that the Britain wanted to
maintain an independent Texas as a potential market for
British goods, free from American protective tariffs as well
as a source of cotton for its textile mills. In the
meantime, the Republic of Texas was being deluged by
American immigrants seeking free or cheap land, and the
annexation debate was ultimately decided by the overwhelming
support of the land hungry residents of the established
western states. Running on a platform that endorsed the
annexation of Texas and the Oregon Territory, James K. Polk,
a man who would acquire more territory during his four year
presidency than any other president before or after, managed
a slim victory over Henry Clay, who opposed both
acquisitions. The debate fueled the mounting frenzy of
jingoistic support for expansion, which was given moral and
judicial justification through the racist conceit of
"Manifest Destiny," and the stage was set for the
Mexican-American War.
Next month's article will focus on the theoretical and
legal underpinnings of Manifest Destiny.
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