New Orleans, Louisiana — Recently, mano-Y-ola’s team completed an enumeration of Hispanic forest landowners in the United States, and one significant finding revealed that many Hispanic landowners are struggling against land dispossession. The study, underwritten by the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities, projected over 17,000 forest landowners nationwide, with the majority concentrated in eight key states. The project will now transition into the outreach phase, where team members will interview landowners in these key states to understand the characteristics and needs of these diverse landowners. Most of these states are in the Southwest, with a long and complex history of Hispanic landownership and land loss, with New Mexico standing out among the rest.
This study identified that 29 percent of the state of New Mexico is forested, with many private forest landownerships located in the Northern Taos area. Many of these northern New Mexico counties have Latino populations well above the national average. For example, the Hispanic population in Mora, Guadalupe, and Rio Arriba is over 70 percent of the entire population. Additional data indicates a high presence of Hispanic forest landowners. Further review of literature on New Mexican land ownership reveals a pattern of minority land loss in the state and region.
Often the perception of Hispanics is as recent arrivals from another country, but that neglects the identities of legacy landowners in the Southwest before the Mexican American War. Before the Treaty of Hidalgo, the region from California to Texas was inhabited by title-holding settler communities in a sophisticated land grant system that traced its roots back to the Spanish colonial era. Following the Treaty, however, these communities saw five decades of rapid land loss, even though the Treaty specified that landowners’ rights would be honored and protected under United States law. In the case of New Mexico, 50 years after the signing of the Treaty, over 80 percent of settler lands were owned by individuals arriving from the East.
The Hispanic Forest-Landowner Study sees an opportunity to devote time and resources to work with the remaining Hispanic land grant forest landowners in the Southwest to understand the characteristics of their landownership and landownership goals. This project intends to learn how we can prevent and mitigate minority land loss to ensure the forestlands remain financial and cultural assets. For more information on this study, contact mano-Y-ola’s Adrian Parrott at adrian.parrott@mano-y-ola.com, or to receive updates, subscribe to our Press Room.
- written by Adrian Parrott
