Title: Reies Tijerina | American activist | Britannica
Headings: Reies Tijerina
Reies Tijerina
American activist

Content: Tijerina began working with his migrant family in farmers’ fields at age four. Stories of Texas Rangers ’ assaults on Mexicans and the near lynching of his grandfather by white racists shaped his political consciousness. At age 17 Tijerina met an itinerant preacher who enabled his attendance at an Assemblies of God Bible institute near El Paso, Texas. Upon his graduation as an ordained Pentecostal minister, Tijerina worked along the Texas-Mexico border, and in Arizona he helped establish a cooperative village, the Valley of Peace, with 19 other families in 1955. Accused of being the getaway driver in a failed attempt to free his brother from jail, Tijerina, with his family and some of his followers, fled to New Mexico in 1957. Two years later Tijerina joined families who had been dispossessed of their lands in the late 1800s in an appeal to the Mexican government to petition the United Nations to force U.S. compliance with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Although they were ultimately unsuccessful, that appeal served as a catalyst for Tijerina’s interest in land grants and the injustice he perceived in the historical dispossession of Chicanos and Latinos. After researching land-grant titles in Mexico City and Spain, Tijerina popularized the land-grant movement during the early 1960s on a daily radio program, The Voice of Justice, and in a regular column in Albuquerque, New Mexico’s News Chieftain. In February 1963 Tijerina established La Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants). La Alianza’s first convention included 800 delegates representing 48 New Mexico land grants and voted to focus on two major grants in northern New Mexico: