Back More
Salem Press

Table of Contents

Great Lives from History: American Heroes, 2nd Edition

Reies López Tijerina

by Thomas Tandy Lewis

Activist

Born: September 21, 1926; Falls City, Texas

Died: January 19, 2015; El Paso, Texas

Areas of achievement: Activism; social issues

During the 1960’s and 1970’s, Tijerina led a militant struggle to restore Spanish colonial land grants in New Mexico to the grantees’ descendants.

Early Life

Reies López Tijerina (RAY-ehz LOH-pehz TEE-heh-REE-nah) was born on September 21, 1926, near Falls City, Texas. His father, Antonio, was a cotton sharecropper; his mother, Herlinda, was a strong-willed woman accustomed to carrying heavy cotton sacks on her back. Tijerina had three brothers and three sisters.

The Great Depression was particularly hard on cotton producers, forcing the Tijerina family to join the massive stream of migrant farmworkers who moved almost constantly in search of employment. During summers, the family usually worked in Michigan, then scraped out a living in San Antonio during the winter months. Like other Mexican Americans, Tijerina experienced a great deal of prejudice and discrimination. By the age of fifteen, he had begun talking back to white employers, and he resented his father’s subservient behavior. As he matured, Tijerina became increasingly convinced that most Anglos were fundamentally unjust and hypocritical.

Like many children of migrant workers, Tijerina had limited opportunities for formal schooling and never graduated from high school. Influenced by his pious mother, however, he took a keen interest in religion, often reading the Bible during breaks in the field. Particularly attracted to the practical ethics of Jesus Christ, he had little concern for “otherworldly” doctrines such as the Trinity and the afterlife. Deciding to become a Protestant minister, Tijerina enrolled in 1944 at the Assembly of God Bible Institute in El Paso, Texas. His theological ideas were considered unorthodox at the school, and he withdrew in 1947 without graduating. Shortly thereafter, he married a fellow student, Mary Escobar, and for most of the next ten years, he traveled around the country as an itinerant minister. During this period, he developed close ties to many Mexican American communities and perfected his skills in public speaking and persuasion.

Life’s Work

Tijerina became convinced that Christian churches were either unwilling or unable to promote social justice, and he decided to leave the ministry. In 1956, he led a group of seventeen families to southern Arizona with the goal of establishing a utopian commune. After a flood destroyed most of the commune, Tijerina experienced a vision in which three “interplanetary messengers or angels” informed him that he had been chosen for a special mission. He wrote in his autobiography: “I believed in what I saw and planned on obeying, fulfilling the mission.”

In early 1957, Tijerina was accused of theft, and that July, he was formally charged with participating in a failed jailbreak scheme to free one of his brothers. Hearing rumors of an Anglo conspiracy to have him killed, he fled Arizona and was a fugitive for the next four years. By moving frequently, he successfully evaded law enforcement officers until the statute of limitations expired. The resulting stress, however, was particularly difficult on his wife, and the couple formally divorced in 1963.

While in northern New Mexico, Tijerina learned about the century-old grievance of poor Mexican American farmers in the region. In the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), which ended the Mexican-American War, the U.S. government had agreed to respect property ownership based on Spanish and Mexican grants but refused to recognize communal lands (ejido) assigned to groups of farmers. Some of the land had been annexed as national forests, and thousands of acres were purchased by speculators. Infuriated by these accounts of Anglo greed and theft, Tijerina promised to try to help the farmers to regain possession of their ancestral lands. In order to learn more about the grants, he spent several months in Mexico examining archives and discussing the matter with legal scholars.

“There is a powerful expression of our yearning. But now that we have the revolutionary spirit, we must not lose sight of the brotherhood awareness. Temper the revolutionary spirit. Culture identification is needed, but we must not let it lead us to hatred”

In 1963, Tijerina founded the Federal Alliance of Land Grants (La Alianza Federal de Mercedes), which grew to about fourteen thousand members in two years. He explained that its purpose “was to give the Indo-Hispanic people of the Southwest pride in their heritage, and to force the Anglo to respect him, just like we respect them.” For a number of months in 1965, Tijerina publicized the land issue with a daily radio program, The Voice of Justice. On July 2, 1966, he mobilized a nonviolent march from Albuquerque to Santa Fe with the goal of drawing attention to the issue of land grants. Although the governor and media expressed sympathy for the farmers, the march failed to prompt any change.

Tijerina decided that a more militant strategy was necessary. On October 15, 1966, three hundred alliance members occupied the Echo Amphitheater portion of the Kit Carson National Park, arguing that a section of the park had been included in the San Joaquín land grant. The occupiers made citizens’ arrests of two park rangers for trespassing. After five days, the occupation ended when government authorities moved in and arrested Tijerina and four others. The five men were charged with assault but released on bond. When the alliance held a meeting in Coyote on June 3, 1967, district attorney Alfonso Sánchez alleged communist influence and ordered that the meeting be disbanded. Although Tijerina escaped, eleven members were arrested and then jailed in Tierra Amarilla.

On June 5, 1967, Tijerina led three carloads of armed supporters to the courthouse in Tierra Amarilla. Their intent was to free their comrades and to make a citizens’ arrest of Sánchez, who was not in the courthouse at the time. During the raid, a prison guard, Eulogio Salazar, and a sheriff’s deputy were wounded. Tijerina and several followers escaped into the mountains. The National Guard, state police, and local officers conducted the largest manhunt in New Mexico’s history. Five days after the raid, Tijerina was taken into custody when he was recognized by a gas station attendant. Salazar, who swore in a hearing that Tijerina was the one who shot him, was brutally murdered on January 2, 1968, but the crime was never solved. While awaiting trial, Tijerina was elected to lead the Chicano delegation of the Poor People’s Campaign, and he helped plan many of the demonstrations. In May and June, he marched with major civil rights leaders in Albuquerque, Denver, Kansas City, Louisville, and Washington, D.C

Tijerina’s first trial for the Tierra Amarilla shootout was held in Albuquerque in late 1968. He was allowed to defend himself with the help of two court-appointed lawyers. The judge was sympathetic, instructing the jury that a citizens’ arrest included the right to use reasonable force. Acquitted of all charges relating to the raid, Tijerina was at the height of his popularity and held several large rallies.

Tijerina’s problems with the law, however, continued. In March, 1969, his second wife, Patsy, with his encouragement, protested by burning a large federal sign at the Santa Fe National Forest. When armed forest rangers suddenly appeared, Tijerina threatened a ranger with his M-1 rifle, claiming the right of self defense. He was arrested and released on bail. A few months later, he traveled to Washington with the intention of placing Warren Burger, nominee for chief justice of the Supreme Court, under citizens’ arrest; however, as Tijerina waited outside the Senate chamber, Burger dodged the arrest by exiting through a back door. Tried in federal court in September, 1969, for the Tierra Amarilla courthouse raid, Tijerina was found guilty and sentenced to nine years in prison. In October, New Mexico prosecuted him a second time for various charges relating to the Tierra Amarilla shootout, and this time the jury found him guilty of assaulting Salazar.

Tijerina’s prison sentences added up to a combined twenty-six years. On July 26, 1971, however, the federal government released him on the condition that he not hold any leadership position in the Federal Alliance of Land Grants. Although he still faced prison time from his New Mexico convictions, the state kept him imprisoned for only six months in 1974. After his final release, Tijerina retained symbolic importance but no longer was a major activist leader with a large following. In 1994, he moved to Mexico, only to return to the United States in 2006. As he aged, Tijerina became less confrontational and emphasized the need for Anglo-Latino reconciliation.

Tijerina died in El Paso, aged 88, on January 19, 2015.

Significance

During the 1960’s, Tijerina was a militant spokesman and skillful organizer in the struggle for Latino pride and civil rights. Although he did not achieve his goal of winning legal recognition for preconquest communal land grants, his crusade promoted awareness of a historical injustice that affected thousands of poor farmers and ranchers. His extremist and violent tactics, however, detracted from his effectiveness, causing most of mainstream society to disregard the idealist ends that he espoused.

Further Reading

1 

Acuña, Rodolfo. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. New York: Pearson Longman, 2004. A standard work in the Chicano studies field that emphasizes anti-Latino discrimination in the Southwestern U.S.

2 

Blawis, Patricia Bell. Tijerina and the Land Grants: Mexican Americans in Struggle for Their Heritage. New York: International Publishers, 1971. Clearly written and well organized, this history casts Tijerina and his actions in a positive light.

3 

Ebright, Malcolm. Land Grants and Lawsuits in Northern New Mexico. 3d ed. Santa Fe, N. Mex.: Center for Land Grant Studies, 2008. Scholarly historical study of Spanish and Mexican land grants in New Mexico.

4 

Nabokov, Peter. Tijerina and the Courthouse Raid. Berkeley: Ramparts Press, 1970. Interesting and balanced account by a journalist who interviewed Tijerina, but its organization is rather confusing.

5 

Rosales, F. Arturo. Chicano: The History of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 1997. Provides a historical context for Tijerina’s life and career.

6 

Tijerina, Reies. They Called Me “King Tiger.” Translated by José Angel Gutiérrez. Houston, Tex.: Arte Público Press, 2000. Fascinating memoir in which Tijerina clearly and frankly describes his ideology and version of events.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Lewis, Thomas Tandy. "Reies López Tijerina." Great Lives from History: American Heroes, 2nd Edition, edited by D. Alan Dean, Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=AmHero_0304.
APA 7th
Lewis, T. T. (2019). Reies López Tijerina. In D. Alan Dean (Ed.), Great Lives from History: American Heroes, 2nd Edition. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Lewis, Thomas Tandy. "Reies López Tijerina." Edited by D. Alan Dean. Great Lives from History: American Heroes, 2nd Edition. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2019. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.