A New Kind of Frontier: Hispanic Homesteaders in Eastern New Mexico
Author(s): Kelly Jenks
Year: 2017
Summary
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 practices to meet the requirements of new American land tenure laws and an unfamiliar physical environment. Recent archaeological and historical research at this site has focused on understanding this transition, tracking these families from their arrival in the 1860s to their eventual departure in the mid-twentieth century. This paper reflects on this research, considering the evidence of and reasons for shifts in agricultural and domestic practices.
Cite this Record
A New Kind of Frontier: Hispanic Homesteaders in Eastern New Mexico. Kelly Jenks. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Fort Worth, TX. 2017 ( tDAR id: 435455)
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Keywords
General
Culture Change
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Hispanic
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Homestead Act
Geographic Keywords
North America
•
United States of America
Temporal Keywords
1860-1950 (American Territorial and Statehood periods)
Spatial Coverage
min long: -129.199; min lat: 24.495 ; max long: -66.973; max lat: 49.359 ;
Individual & Institutional Roles
Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology
Record Identifiers
PaperId(s): 463