Transcription
Specifically, if you would look at your New Mexico Constitution, Article 3, Section 5 of the New Mexico Constitution, it says this: The rights, privileges, and immunities, civil, political, and religious, granted to the people of New Mexico by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, shall be preserved inviolate.
And one of those provisions was that the land grants that were given to individuals by Spain, by Mexico, or by uh the Indian tribes, shall be given full force and effect regardless of their citizenship.
Sometimes it takes an explosion to bring about change. For every act of violence in the history of mankind, there has been an independence, a free. The US instigated the Mexican-American War in 1846, and in 1848, Mexico and the US signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in the name of God.
At that time, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was a forgotten document that that nobody knew about. So, the more we dug into it, the more we found out that it was for the protection of the Hispanic Mexicans in the Southwest that remained after the conquest of 1848.
In 1964, I met Reies López Tijerina by uh listening to his program on the radio, La Voz de la Justicia. I attended uh the meetings, every meeting that that that he had, and they were very exciting, and he had the whole full of people. Reies Tijerina was uh trying to generate the interest of the uh of the the people of northern New Mexico who were the ones who had uh this land taken from them.
"I would rather die on my feet than live a lifetime on my knees." - Emiliano Zapata. He got 20 men, 20 brave men, which are called valientes, uh to go and and attack the courthouse and liberate the wise men that were put in prison, the elders.
On June 5th, 1967, the Alianza attempted a citizen's arrest at the Tierra Amarilla courthouse. No one died in the raid, but Tijerina hid out in the mountains for 3 days before turning himself in to stand trial. Uh after the courthouse raid at Tierra Amarilla, in October, he he makes a an international conference, you know, and by that time, he was the man of the hour, you know, he was he was nationally and internationally known.
And Martin Luther King selected Reies López Tijerina as the leader of the Poor People's Campaign. Reies has got an ability that uh you don't find in in a lot of people. And he had a charisma about him that uh was kind of spellbinding. I could see people who didn't understand Spanish at all, and he had a tendency to really get arm waving and really into the get into whatever he was speaking about, and they would be riveted on everything that he had to say, not understanding a word of what he was saying.
In the war of words of the Neo-Chicano movement, Tijerina called for our people to refer to themselves as Indo-Hispanos. Indo-Hispano, it it stand for Indian, Spanish Indian. Uh so, since we live 300 years before the Anglos came here, uh we have much Indian blood, and we consider uh the the as as mother, we consider the Indians as our mother, and Spaniards as our father. Therefore, we are we are Indo-Hispanos. That's a full, complete name, not Chicano. I don't like that name. Uh uh Chicano was invented by uh by the media to any great off, and break us away from all South America, cut off out. And and and they're afraid of the name Indo-Hispano because they know that Indian and Spanish identify with that name, and they don't like that. So, that's why I consider since ever since I bought the laws of the Indies from Spain, and read them as I used to read the Bible, and I it it was there that I learned that we were Indo-Hispano. Yeah. Perfecto.