Tigua Cultural Affiliation with Alamo Mountain and Otero Mesa

By Dr. John A. Peterson

Viewshed Depiction by Mark D. Willis

John A. Peterson and Associates, Inc.

The Tigua Tribe of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo has a significant, long term, cultural, spiritual and historical affiliation with the landscapes of the Otero Mesa and Alamo Mountain, and as such have legal standing and concerns in consideration of oil and gas leasing and development on U.S. Bureau of Land Management lands in southern New Mexico. Ancestral puebloan territory of the Tigua Tribe includes the Otero Mesa as well as the Salinas and Rio Abajo regions of New Mexico from where they migrated following the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, and, since then, the area of El Paso and West Texas as well as southern New Mexico. Legal standing for Tigua affiliation with these areas is based on land grants from the King of Spain and the Republic of Mexico, and more recently, the Tigua Tribe has been federally recognized by the United States Government. Their land claims include the Ysleta del Sur grant in Ysleta, Texas, as well as the more expansive Rancho de Ysleta Grant which extends from the Franklin Mountains eastward to the Guadalupe Mountains, south into northern Chihuahua, and north into the Alamo Mountain and Otero Mesa area. The Tigua Tribe has historically and continues to practice ritual and sacred engagement with the region. This is demonstrated by oral testimony and oral history as well as archaeological discoveries. The documentation is included in several volumes of tribal history and testimony which is available in public repositories in Texas and New Mexico.

I have been a consulting archaeologist to the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo for the past twelve years and have also coordinated alternative energy studies through funding from the Environmental Protection Agency. Many members of the Tribe have been my students in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at UTEP, and several remain as friends and colleagues. I have focused my own archaeological and anthropological research on the El Paso region since 1991 and much of that effort has included intensive study of the Proto-historic and Spanish and Mexican colonial periods in the region, as well as contemporary analysis of culture, environment and development processes in El Paso. I have closely collaborated with Dr. Rick Hendricks and Nick Houser, Tribal historical consultants, in various historical research projects since 1991. From this association and these involvements I have direct and extensive knowledge of the Tigua Tribe and their history, archaeological background and contemporary ethnology. My research supports many of the knowledge claims made formally and informally by the Tribe, and also affirms their deep sense of indigenous identity and long historical connection to native peoples and lifeways in the American Southwest. The historical and archaeological record of the region clearly supports the puebloan affiliation of the Tigua Tribe of Ysleta del Sur Pueblo with pueblos in the Rio Abajo, including Ysleta Pueblo, Socorro Pueblo, and the Salinas Pueblos in the southern Manzano Mountains of New Mexico, and their migration to the El Paso region en masse following the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. The record also clearly supports their tenacious maintenance of tribal and indigenous identity throughout the periods of Spanish, Mexican, Texas and American colonization in the region. Archaeological, ethnohistoric and ethnographic investigations also support the genetic and ideational maintenance of indigenous ethnicity, as well as their deep and long-standing connection to the larger physical and spiritual landscape of the West Texas and southern New Mexico region around El Paso, Texas. Members of the Tigua Tribe relate that they still conduct hunting and ritual activities in Otero Mesa and Alamo Mountain as they did when children under the tutelage of their parents and grandparents. This knowledge has been transmitted for generations by elders to youth in the Tigua tradition.

My research also considers the acculturation and transformation of Tigua lifeways and identity as a product of colonization and post-colonial processes. During the Spanish period many significant shifts occurred, not least of which was their imposed migration. Ceramic forms and technology shifted from middle Rio Grande puebloan traditions to the adoption of new clay and temper materials as well as new forms such as comales, candlesticks, cups and platos in response to the demand for European forms and styles. Red on brown decorated vessels integrated what has been interpreted as European heraldic emblems as well as other traditional puebloan designs. There was a shift from household production to commercial production at least as early as the 18 th century, and by the 19 th century Tigua potters were traveling to trade fairs such as those at Carrizal in northern Chihuahua to sell their wares. The distinctive sand-tempered earthenwares of the Ysleta del Sur and Piro pueblos of El Paso are a marker for puebloan pottery production in the region and they are widely distributed, from the military sites such as Fort Quitman, in the assemblages from Spanish places such as Carrizal, and throughout the network of trails and sites in the Hueco Bolson and the Rio Grande valley north and south from El Paso. Ysleta brownware is ubiquitous in the region around Ysleta, Texas from the period 1680 to the early 1900s. Jack Hedricks documented the making of Ysleta brownware pottery by Tigua women potters up to the 1950s. The gathering of clay and temper from the arroyos in the escarpment above the pueblo was also recorded by Hedrick. Sherds from the type can be found along the Ysleta-Hueco Tanks historical road, in the Hueco Bolson and from the Otero Mesa and Alamo Mountain which documents the dispersion of distinctly Tigua artifacts throughout the region and in the area of the proposed gas and oil leases.

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.

 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.