A closer look

Las Gorras Blancas

What does the story of Las Gorras Blancas reveal about land use and land rights in the territory annexed from Mexico?

by Pennee Bender, American Social History Project, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Mexicans Become Mexican Americans

With the end of the war with Mexico in 1848, the United States annexed over half of Mexico’s pre-1836 land and added over five hundred thousand square miles to the United States. Tens of thousands of Mexican citizens who lived and worked on this land suddenly found themselves living in a different country. As Mexican American activists have proclaimed ever since, “We did not cross the border, the border crossed us.” Many of the residents in the annexed territory were subsistence sheep and cattle ranchers practicing a Mexican-derived system of communal land use.

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war promised that everyone residing in the annexed territories would retain the rights to their property, language, and culture, as well as the right to choose U.S. or Mexican citizenship. The transition was not easy, however. U.S. expansionists, land speculators, and corrupt bureaucrats promoting Manifest Destiny opposed the Mexican system of communal land grants. In San Miguel County in northern New Mexico, the Las Vegas Land Grant comprised approximately five hundred thousand acres of land that residents shared for grazing, water resources, hunting, collection of wood for fuel, as well as small private plots for family farming. In order to take control of northern Mexico from its Indigenous inhabitants, Spain and later Mexico provided land grants to individuals or whole communities to populate the land with Europeans settlers and create a security zone to protect mining operations. Under the treaty, the United States was required to honor these communal land grants and in 1860 the federal government issued a patent for the land grant to the town of Las Vegas in San Miguel County. At that time, the population of the town and the county had changed little since the 1840s, but soon a larger transformation began.

Large-Scale Ranching Threatens Mexican American Land Rights

In the 1870s, the railroad arrived to connect northern New Mexico to national and international markets. At the same time, the invention of barbed wire transformed cattle ranching, allowing ranchers to enclose large grazing pastures and reduce costs of maintaining fencing and herds of cattle. As a result, commercial interest in unsettled grazing lands––including areas in the Las Vegas Land Grant––skyrocketed. East coast and European investors quickly began to accumulate land for large-scale ranching under homesteading and timber culture claims. State and federal investigations found that many of these new land claims were based on fraudulent homestead entries. One European investor consolidated over twelve thousand acres and controlled access to many of the springs and watercourses in San Miguel County. The rise of large-scale cattle ranching based on fenced-in grazing land imperiled the livelihood of small subsistence farmers and ranchers. The land enclosures restricted communal access to grazing land, water, and wood fuel, and disrupted travel routes that had connected long-time residents to churches and schools. Subsistence farmers and ranchers appealed to the law to prevent the privatization starting in 1873, a process that dragged on until 1889, when a final ruling permitted the enclosures.

Local Resistance to the Privatization Communal Lands

After legal recourse failed, groups of hooded horsemen began night raids against the large cattle ranches, cutting fences and destroying fence posts that enclosed grazing lands. They became known as Las Gorras Blancas or the White Caps. Protests against land speculators arose throughout the western United States, and the use of white hoods to conceal the identity of vandals was common. In some states, these protests evolved into the conservative and racist Ku Klux Klan, but in New Mexico, Las Gorras Blancas developed a radical direct action activism to fight for workers and land rights. Throughout the summer they dismantled miles of fences, targeting wealthy landowners and political leaders, including the county sheriff. Local officials and newspapers blamed the rise of the Las Gorras Blancas on new Knights of Labor chapters that sprang up rapidly in San Miguel County. The Knights of Labor was the most active national labor organization in the United States during the nineteenth century. Three Mexican American brothers, Juan José, Nicanor, and Pablo Herrera, organized over twenty chapters in San Miguel County in the late 1880s. The local sheriff and district attorney considered the new Knights chapters to be a front for Las Gorras Blancas, but the Herrera brothers denied the allegations.

In October 1889, the county indicted forty-seven men on charges of fence cutting and arrested twenty-three others, including two Herrera brothers. After three days, county officials were forced to drop charges because they could not find witnesses to support their case. When the prisoners were released from jail, hundreds of supporters paraded through the town in celebration. For months, masked horsemen made nighttime rides through the town of Las Vegas. In March 1890, Las Gorras Blancas distributed flyers proclaiming their “Nuestra Plataforma,” a platform that laid out their purpose and their commitment to keep the communal lands open to small farmers.

In early 1890, Las Gorras Blancas also targeted the railroad and timber companies, destroying six thousand railroad ties, cutting telegraph wires, and blocking teamsters who delivered railroad ties. They took up the cause of increased wages for the timber cutters and haulers working on the land grant by posting threatening notices to the companies. In response, territorial officials mounted a broad political campaign against Las Gorras Blancas and tried to get the national Knights of Labor to restrain the local chapters as well as to turn local workers against the night raiders. [document 4] But at public meetings with the governor, many residents expressed outrage at the “land grabbers” and sided with those who were defending the rights of the people.

Political Strategies Tried but Failed

Later that year, the Herrera brothers and other key organizers of the Knights of Labor shifted from labor organizing to party politics, joining the Partido del Pueblo Unido (the United People’s Party). Around the same time, Las Gorras Blancas attacks on fences and railroads abated, convincing some that Las Gorras Blancas and the Knights of Labor were one and the same. However, as historian David Correia argues, another possible explanation is that “by the fall of 1890 every single fence that enclosed the Las Vegas Land Grant had been cut and none had survived reconstruction.” The Partido del Pueblo Unido, promising to protect land rights, won four seats in the Territorial Assembly, including one by Pablo Herrera. The Spanish-language newspaper affiliated with the party, La Voz del Pueblo, sympathized with the goals of Las Gorras Blancas, if not with the acts of sabotage themselves. [document 5] But no political solutions could reverse the massive economic shifts that had occurred. Pablo Herrera resigned from the assembly in disgust after one session and was then gunned down without cause by a deputy sheriff in Las Vegas. His assassination, along with continued denunciations and legal campaigns against the Partido, the local Knights of Labor chapters, and Las Gorras Blancas by territorial officials, merchants, and newspapers squashed the nascent political movement. By the mid-1890s, barbed-wire fences again enclosed communal lands, and many local subsistence ranchers became paid laborers as ranch hands or railroad workers, forever losing their rights to communal land.

Reflection Questions

What brought land-grant families and large cattle ranchers into conflict?

Why would fence cutting and railroad tie destruction be used to oppose “land grabbers”?

How did Las Gorras Blancas reconcile being “law-abiding citizens” with their actions in the “Nuestra Plataforma”?

Why would Las Gorras Blancas affiliate with a national labor organization such as the Knight of Labor?

Additional Reading

David Correia, “‘Retribution Will Be Their Reward’: New Mexico’s Las Gorras Blancas and the Fight for the Las Vegas Land Grant Commons,” Radical History Review 108 (Fall 2010): 49–72.

Robert W. Larson, “The White Caps of New Mexico: A Study of Ethnic Militancy in the Southwest,” Pacific Historical Review 44, no. 2 (May 1975): 171–85.

Mary Romero, “Class Struggle and Resistance Against the Transformation of Land Ownership and Usage in Northern New Mexico: The Case of Las Gorras Blancas,” Chicana/o Latina/o Law Review 26, no.1 (2006), 87–110.

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