Tigua Cultural Affiliation with Alamo Mountain and Otero Mesa

There are approximately 10,000 petroglyphs on Alamo Mountain.

Recognition of the original land grant of the Ysleta del Sur pueblo by the Mexican government in 1825 did not address the Tigua view of their cultural identity and landscape, but rather sought to partition tribal lands as a convenient administrative unit.  Walls and partitions are not always native to indigenous communities whose sense of land tenure often involves usufruct and family and community histories.  The use of shifting arable lands within the seasonal and punctuated channel avulsions and meanders of the Rio Grande was fluid and negotiated without “hard” boundaries; use of the community lands in the Bosque were also open and fluid, and “ownership” based on individual livestock rather than property title.  Likewise, the expansive Tigua use of the Rancho de Ysleta use-right in the Hueco Bolson, Franklin Mountains, Hueco Mountains, and further, was a matter of community and individual practice and not of cadastral survey and individual property title.  These practices have been documented in the ethnohistoric, ethnographic and archaeological record.  The discovery of Ysleta sand-tempered earthenware ceramics throughout this region indisputably documents Tigua travel and use of the lands within the Rancho de Ysleta grant and in the sacred terrain which links the Tigua grants with their former and ancestral homeland from West Texas to the Salinas region of southern New Mexico.

Furthermore, traditional puebloan imagery at Alamo mountain rock art panels is comparable to Hueco Tanks, Alamo Canyon and Jornada Mogollon ancestral pueblo iconography.  An image from Palomas Canyon in the Broke-off Mountains showing an historical “Mexican” figure on horse-back in an area immediately west of the Guadalupe Mountains and north of the Salt Flats, both part of historical Tigua use claims, suggests Tigua Tribe pictorial documentation of their territorial domain.  These ancestral puebloan and more recent historical period images document clearly the puebloan and recent Tigua use and use-rights in the region. Artifacts and iconography are definite markers of Tigua practice and land use.

The establishment of the formal boundaries of the Ysleta del Sur land grant was not a product of Tigua world view but instead was a hegemonic imprint by Spanish authorities in 1751 and later by the Mexican government in 1825.  The appropriation of Tigua lands beginning in the 1870s was not a product of Tigua abandonment, but rather a practice of patenting land title through the American system of land tenure in contravention to the traditional Tigua world view of shifting landscapes, expansive catchment areas and concepts of community land rights.  Through this process, where colonial powers successively partitioned the land base of the Tigua into smaller and ever more fragmented space, the Tigua lost their use rights to the Rancho de Ysleta grant, the sacred ceremonial riverine sites under what is now the channelized ditch under the Zaragoza bridge in Ysleta, Texas, and their ceremonial center at what was likely the original community center and pueblo in the area of the Old County Road where their annual Feast procession begins (significantly, for reasons that the tribe do not remember!).  This space has been recently the subject of TCP consideration by TXDOT, the THC and the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo in the alignment of expansion of Lee Trevino Ave toward the Zaragoza Bridge.  In these consultation sessions the Tigua continue to affirm their relation to the viewshed which includes the Cerro Alto near Hueco Tanks, and beyond that Alamo Mountain to the north and east from Cerro Alto.  As well as loss of ancestral land tenure and use-rights, they have also suffered from the encroachment on the spiritual integrity of their sacred landscapes by commercial and residential development.  The proposal to construct oil well pads, roads and pipelines in the Otero Mesa west from Alamo Mountain would have an extremely adverse effect on the viewshed of this sacred landscape.  It would be somewhat comparable to building oil and gas wells in the Capitol mall in Washington, D.C.  Such desecration should not be tolerated in either locale.

Petroglyphs on Alamo Mountain.

The Tigua are struggling to maintain their cultural and spiritual identity in a landscape which has been eroded considerably over the past 150 years of their 300+ year history in El Paso.  Despite continuing struggles to maintain their culture and ethnicity, the Tigua have demonstrated a resistant and persistent identity which is validated not only by state and federal recognition, but also by the broader American Indian community which has embraced the Tigua as an authentic ethnicity and which has encouraged and supported their association and engagement.  The Tigua have an enduring Indian identity which they have most recently expressed publicly through their emergence legally, socially and economically in the El Paso community.  Centuries of colonization have submerged their culture and altered it significantly.  Native American identity is tied integrally to the landscape of the natural world, and if deprived of areas such as Otero Mesa and Alamo Mountain where the landscape connections are vital, visible and significant, their culture will die.  This is not merely a nostalgic plea for cultural survival; rather, it is an assertion that the Tigua right to preserve their sacred landscapes is protected by United States law.  Destruction of the viewshed in Otero Mesa will desacralize the sacred landscape of the Tigua Tribe and will violate their religious practice within a Traditional Cultural Property (TCP) as defined by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, as amended and as implemented in federal regulations.  This concept affirms the claims of native peoples to natural as well as cultural landscapes and their rights to protect their access and their uninterrupted use of such properties.

April 12, 2003

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