Tierra y Libertad

Land, Liberty, and Latino Housing

Steven W. Bender

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814787229
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Property Law
• Index: Law

One of the quintessential goals of the American Dream is to own land and a home, a place to raise one's family and prove one's prosperity. Particularly for immigrant families, home ownership is a way to assimilate into American culture and community. However, Latinos, who make up the country's largest minority population, have largely been unable to gain this level of inclusion. Instead, they are forced to cling to the fringes of property rights and ownership through overcrowded rentals, transitory living arrangements, and, at best, home acquisitions through subprime lenders.

In Tierra y Libertad, Steven W. Bender traces the history of Latinos' struggle for adequate housing opportunities, from the nineteenth century to today's anti-immigrant policies and national mortgage crisis. Spanning southwest to northeast, rural to urban, Bender analyzes the legal hurdles that prevent better housing opportunities and offers ways to approach sweeping legal reform. Tierra y Libertad combines historical, cultural, legal, and personal perspectives to document the Latino community's ongoing struggle to make America home.

Part I
Loss

Over the past two centuries, Latino/as in the United States have undergone a transformation of ownership that embodies the theme of loss. Once owners of vast lands in the Southwest, Mexicans through a variety of catalysts lost much of their U.S. lands to Anglos in the second half of the nineteenth century. As illustrated in chapter 1 with the story of César Chávez’s childhood, the loss of ranch and farmland continued at least into the Great Depression era. Latino/as had once forged an identity as ranchers and farmers in the Southwest. Indeed, the history of the West could not be written without dozens of words derived from Spanish that reflect the identity of Mexicans as the original cowboys—words such as rodeo, corral, chaparral, desperado, bonanza, bronco, and even ranch (from the Spanish rancho).¹ Because of these losses, both the reality and perception of Latino/as shifted to that of migrant laborers adrift and struggling for a foothold in the American dream of home and land ownership. The current assessment of farm worker housing in chapter 3 reveals the extent of the transformation those of Mexican descent have undergone in the United States, from landowners to a renting class coping with overcrowded and dilapidated housing, for those fortunate enough to afford steady shelter. Given the transitory nature of the farm worker population and the significant numbers of undocumented laborers within its ranks, farm workers today experience loss of a different kind. Vulnerable as undocumented persons, many farm laborers tolerate the miserable housing provided by their employers or third-party landlords, knowing that if they complain they will lose their housing, either through termination of their employment or, worse, by being reported to immigration authorities.

In recent years, the experience of Latino/a housing shifted again when liberal mortgage lending policies in the 1990s and early 2000s opened the door to homeownership. By 2006, however, the predatory side of many of these loans emerged, as Latino/a borrowers faced foreclosure of loans that were misrepresented to them or otherwise designed for failure through teaser introductory rates or other artifices. During the last two centuries of Latino/a settlement in the United States, then, an overarching theme of home and land ownership has been loss and the fleeting chances of Latino/as to grasp the American dream.

1
Loss and Lettuce
The César Chávez Legacy

The history of loss of land and housing by U.S. Latino/as stretches from the broadscale usurpation of ranch and farmland in the 1800s to the heartbreak of the subprime lending implosion in the early 2000s, which cost thousands of Latino/as their fledgling piece of the American dream. This survey of recurrent loss, however, begins at the midpoint of the Latino/a experience in the United States—with the Depression-era loss by César Chávez of his family homestead in southern Arizona.

César Chávez (1927–1993), an inspirational union leader, is best remembered for his efforts centered in Delano, California, to organize the national grape boycott in the 1960s, as well as for co-founding, with Dolores Huerta, the union that became the United Farm Workers in 1972. But Arizona, lettuce, and land have a place in Chávez’s legacy too. Although some of the story’s intermediate details are unclear and contradicted by varying accounts, the beginning and end are clearly marked. In the late 1800s, Chávez’s grandfather acquired rural acreage near Yuma, Arizona, under federal homestead laws. After the Chávez family lost this farm during the harrowing economy of the 1930s, Chávez put down roots in California but was back in Arizona in 1993 defending a lawsuit brought against the United Farm Workers by Bruce Church, Inc. In a compelling bit of irony, the agri-giant Church company owned the land the Chávez family had lost in the 1930s. Here in Arizona, a few miles from where Chávez was born, he died in his sleep at age sixty-six while the lawsuit raged around him. The story of Chávez’s homestead is one of loss and pain, but as this book’s conclusion will reveal, there is hope for reclamation.

Congress awarded millions of acres of U.S. land to soldiers who fought wars such as the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican-American War.¹ Moreover, pursuant to the federal Homestead Act of 1862, U.S. citizens and immigrants eligible for naturalization were entitled to acquire up to 160 acres on the condition they reside on and cultivate the land for five years. Before Arizona became a state, and a retirement haven for the wealthy, it lured Chávez’s grandfather, Cesario, for whom César was named. The elder Cesario came to the Arizona Territory from Chihuahua, Mexico, in 1888, obtaining citizenship and the rural homestead in pursuit of his American dream. In the early 1900s, Chávez’s father, Librado, and his mother, Juana, raised César on that same family homestead. Its terrain included a spacious adobe farmhouse built by the elder Cesario, his wife, Dorotea, and their children.² Among the crops grown on the farm were grapes, melons, squash, beans, tomatoes, chiles, and lettuce.³ While cultivating the family farm, the ambitious Librado purchased nearby land and operated a grocery store, garage, and pool hall that prospered until the Great Depression arrived and forced their sale.⁴

Librado had an early brush with loss when he purchased the forty acres surrounding his businesses in exchange for clearing eighty acres of stumps from the seller’s remaining property. When the seller refused to honor the bargain, Librado, on the advice of a lawyer, borrowed money and purchased the land. When Librado was unable to pay the loan, the same lawyer bought the land and eventually sold it back to the original seller.⁵

The Chávez family still had their agricultural homestead. But in the throes of the Depression and a crop-snuffing drought, unpaid property taxes mounted.⁶ Librado was entitled to a farm loan under a New Deal federal loan program, but the loan was blocked by a local bank president, who happened to own the land adjoining the Chávez property.⁷ United Farm Workers co-founder Dolores Huerta remarked more generally that “during the Great Depression, banks would lend to Anglos but not to Mexicans.”⁸ Hoping to save the family farm, the Chávezes headed west to California in 1938 to find work in the fields as migrant laborers. Trading the comfort of their own land and a thick-walled adobe home, they resided in a rickety shack while harvesting the fields of others. In the winter of 1939, they made camp in a water-logged tent or worse, living at times in the family’s Studebaker automobile or under a tree with a piece of canvas overhead.⁹

Unable to raise the money to save their Arizona farm, the Chávez family suffered its sale by public auction in 1939 to this same local banker. While the Chávezes packed up as many of their belongings as would fit in and on their car, the new owner bulldozed a corral. César Chávez lamented:

Our farm was good land. My father had worked it well. It was close to the Colorado River, and the new Imperial Dam was being built just north of us, which would make the surrounding land very valuable in the years to come.¹⁰

We were pushed off the land.… When we left the farm, our whole life was upset, turned upside down. We had been part of a very stable community, and we were about to become migratory workers. We had been uprooted.¹¹

Chávez remarked that his father, now cast adrift as a migrant laborer, never forgot the love of land: “He would get down and look at the ground, taking some dirt in his huge hands. ‘You could really raise things here!’ he would say.”¹² Chávez suggested later that his own memories of land ownership helped guide his efforts on behalf of migrant laborers in a campaign to restore land, liberty, and dignity to those who cultivated the land: “Some had been born into the migrant stream. But we had been on the land, and I knew a different way of life. We were poor [on the family farm], but we had liberty. The migrant is poor, but he has no freedom.”¹³

Years later, the former Chávez family homestead came into ownership of Bruce Church, Inc., a giant lettuce producer. In the 1980s, César Chávez and the farm union tried to alert the public to the dangers of pesticides in the lettuce fields. The Church company countered by suing the union in Arizona, seeking monetary damages for the union’s pickets and mailings to consumers and grocers that accused Church of using toxic pesticides and child labor. Although the judicial trial resulted in an annihilating jury verdict of $5.4 million against the union, the Arizona Court of Appeals overturned the verdict in 1991. The appeals court determined that the trial court had improperly applied Arizona state law prohibiting secondary boycotts (for example, striking a supermarket selling Church lettuce) to reach union activities outside Arizona, particularly campaigns in California, where labor laws were less tilted toward growers. Chávez returned to Arizona to attend the retrial of Church’s separate legal claim alleging wrongful interference with its business, and died there in his sleep at a friend’s house near Yuma.

Although the Chávez family lost their home and farm during the Great Depression, their story mirrors the systematic loss of expansive rancho properties in the Southwest in the second half of the nineteenth century. Then, holders of Spanish and Mexican land grants lost their lands and their liberty through a variety of perils that included greedy lawyers and foreclosure for unpaid real estate taxes. In a process repeated for the Chávez family in Arizona, proud Latino/a land and homeowners gave way to migrant, landless workers toiling outside the American dream.

2
Southwest Ranchos
Land Grants and Land Loss

The beneficiary of several land grants in 1800s California, Don Julio Verdugo saw his land fortunes collapse, along with those of most other Mexican land holders there, after California came into U.S. hands. In 1861 he mortgaged his sprawling Rancho San Rafael (which encompassed the entire present-day Southern California city of Glendale and part of Burbank) in order to pay real estate taxes (required in California after 1850) and make improvements to his home. Accruing interest at 3 percent monthly, the $3,445 loan eventually swelled beyond reach, prompting a foreclosure sale of the rancho by public auction at which Don Julio’s lawyers purchased the property. Don Julio traded his remaining lands for the 6,600-acre Rancho Los Feliz, but sold off parcels to pay debts until twenty Anglos and lawyers owned that rancho and he was left in 1871 with just 200 acres from his previous land fortune.¹

In the present-day U.S. Southwest, Mexicans once held vast lands granted to them by the Spanish and later the Mexican government. The annexation of Texas and the Mexican-American War together brought more than half of Mexico’s territory into U.S. control during the mid-nineteenth century, and within fifty years Mexican landholders lost most of their extensive tierra to Anglos. Although all or part of the Western states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming once fell under Spanish and then Mexican control, the discussion below centers on California, New Mexico, and Texas. These states were home to the most significant population of Mexicans, and thus to the largest land grants, and they ultimately experienced the biggest shift in ownership away from Mexican hands. Although some areas conquered by the United States had few or no Mexican settlements of consequence, California was then home to about 7,500 so-called Californios (Mexicans residing in California), and Texas to about the same number of Mexicans. New Mexico had the largest number of Mexicans, with about 60,000.²

Varying somewhat by region, diverse forces accomplished the divestment of Spanish/Mexican land grants from Mexicans to Anglo settlers and the U.S. government. Explanations differ as to the root causes of divestment. Although most historians and legal commentators decry the abusive role of law and lawyers, among other causes, in the divestment, others attribute the transfer to potentially legitimate factors such as voluntary sale, loss of land in foreclosure of debts incurred through improvidence, or judicial denial of land claims that were procured by fraud. These possibilities are explored below. Regardless of its cause, however, the experience of Latino/as in the Southwest has been one of a dramatic loss of land that still today evokes a rallying cry for Tierra y Libertad among some.

Land grants from Spain and then Mexico took two primary forms—individual and community. In New Mexico, for example, land grants to individuals were customary in the eighteenth century, but in the first half of the nineteenth century community grants became more prevalent. These community grants usually conferred individual plots for construction of homes and maintenance of vegetable gardens and orchards, which could be sold as private property, as well as substantial community (ejido) land, not subject to individual sale, for grazing, hunting, fishing, firewood, logs for building, drinking water, and other uses.³ Surrounding the individual plots of land, which were often situated along rivers, the community land constituted the major share of these grants, typically 90 percent of the total area.⁴ Land grants were awarded for military service as well as to help populate these northern territories controlled by Spain and then Mexico, and thereby to protect them from colonization by others. Large land grants were common. Some rancho grantees in California acquired several hundred thousand acres.⁵ Only thirty-four grants were awarded to Californios during Spanish rule, but the brief period (1821–48) of Mexico’s control of California witnessed the award of several hundred land grants, some to the same owner.⁶ According to an 1849 estimate, two hundred Californio families owned fourteen million acres.⁷ About 295 land grants were issued in what is now New Mexico, of which 141 went to individuals, with the rest made as community land grants.⁸

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, ratified by the United States and Mexico at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War in 1848, ostensibly protected these land grants in the territory ceded to the United States. As originally drafted, the treaty explicitly honored the land grants, providing in Article X, “All grants of land made by the Mexican government or by the competent authorities, in territories previously appertaining to Mexico, and remaining for the future within the limits of the United States, shall be respec...