Alianza Federal De Las Mercedes - 40th Anniversary of the Courthouse Raid

News stories locally have been pointing out that tomorrow, June 5th, is the 40th anniversary of the armed raid on the Rio Arriba County Courthouse in Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico, by Reies Lopez Tijerina's Alianza Federal De Las Mercedes. The radio program Latino USA this week featured an extensive documentary on the subject.

We do have several books directly about the Alianza, and some clipping files dating from those days and stored in the Southwest Room reference cabinets. Tijerina has an autobiography, and there is a recent book, King Tiger: the religious vision of Reies Lopez Tijerina. Other pertinent reading would be about the Tierra Amarilla Land grant, other works about land grant history in New Mexico, Roxana Dunbar's study Roots of Resistance : land tenure in New Mexico, 1680-1980, Erlinda Gonzales-Berry and David R. Maciel's The contested homeland : a Chicano history of New Mexico and probably other material in general works about chicano (or latino or hispanic) political movements.