Our village was once a Tewa Pueblo…we believe that descendants of this Pueblo were among the first Land Grantees who received 48,000 acres of land in a grant by the Mexican Governor Manuel Armijo in 1841, and then again petitioned to the United States Government in 1857 by Inez Armenta.
The Treaty of Guadalupe de Hidalgo guaranteed all of the land grants that had been made by the Spanish and Mexican Governements until the take-over by the United States, however the Senate struck out Article X of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which said that vast land grants in New Mexico (thought to be nearly always gifts by the local authorities to their friends) would all be recognized. The treaty promised to protect the ownership rights of the heirs of the land grants. The decision to strike down Article X eventually led to court cases in which the US removed millions of acres of land, timber, and water from Mexican-issued land grants and placed them back in the public domain.