1860-1950 (American Territorial and Statehood periods) (Temporal Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kelly Jenks.

The rural community of Los Ojitos in Guadalupe County, New Mexico was settled in the late 1860s by the first generation of Hispanic homesteaders. Many of these founding families came from Spanish- and Mexican-era land grant communities where grantees shared the rights to common lands and the responsibility to build and maintain irrigation ditches and other public structures. In claiming homesteads in New Mexico’s Middle Pecos Valley, these families were forced to adapt some of their traditional...