Properties of Violence: Law and Land Grant Struggle in Northern New Mexico (Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation): 17

Properties of Violence is a smart, original, and vibrant retelling of the history of land struggle in northern New Mexico. David Correia, through rigorous archival and ethnographic research, raises compelling questions about the complicated relationships between colonialism, violence, and property that have broad and deep implications for land struggles around the world. Moreover, it is a refreshingly well-written book, nimbly walking the difficult terrain between meticulous scholarship and well-crafted prose that makes it ideal for both the seasoned academic and anyone interested in a riveting story of violence, political struggles, and the very meaning of property.

–Jake Kosek “author of Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico“

Correia has written a fast-paced, interesting, enjoyable, and academically rigorous book that tells a story of injustice in impeccably precise terms.

–Lorena Oropeza “author of ¡Raza Sí! ¡Guerra No! Chicano Protest and Patriotism during the Viet Nam War Era“

Correia’s remarkable book is not just about New Mexico, not just about land grants. Properties of Violence presents a way of conceiving of property as a mobile, fungible, plastic set of social relations. It offers a process legal geography, not one solely fixated on the ‘product’ of land grant injustices. . . . When will a serious effort on the New Mexican land grants issue pay material dividends? That’s impossible to predict, but for now, storytelling, familiar Nuevo Mexicano dichos, and work like Properties of Violence should help keep the issue alive, active, and relevant for decades to come. And changes in understanding property depend upon on-going stories conscious of the past but relevant now. This book does both.

–Eric Perramond “La Jicarita“

Property is a site for violence, whether implied or actual. Yet property is also positioned as the means by which violence is kept at bay. It is not for nothing that one talks of the “quieting” of title. David Correia writes against the grain, therefore, in his wonderful excavation of one site in New Mexico to reveal property as a site for struggle and ordering, crosscut with colonialism, race, and class. Property emerges as a live, active, and vitally important concept.

–Nicholas Blomley “professor of geography at Simon Fraser University”

What is important in this book is the deep historical detail coupled with Correia’s insistence, fully illustrated, that property is never settled, deeds are never quiet, resistance to new regimes of property is always present. . . . This is engaged, critical, historical geography as it ought to be done.

–Don Mitchell “Antipode“

Correia brings to the fore issues and actors that have been neglected in most scholarly works on the subject. The result is a well-grounded history of the social production of property claims, and the continual struggle over them in the context of colonial expansionism–both Spanish and Anglo-American–from the late eighteenth century to the early twenty-first.–Danna Levin Rojo “Hispanic American Historical Review”