After the United States annexed Northern parts of Mexico in 1848, a novel legal code was imposed on a region that had a distinct property system. Mexican and Spanish land grants were not afforded the same protections under this imposed code of law, which led to extensive land dispossession. Communal lands were particularly vulnerable, and many lost access to critical resources when these lands were deeded to become private property. La Sierra, a historical commons that is part of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant, although it shares this same fate, diverged from other cases of communal land loss in a unique and unprecedented way, when in 2002 the Colorado Supreme Court awarded back particular historical use rights to the heirs of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant. The victory was significant and the result of decades of commitment and struggle by the heirs of the land grant. The decision did have its shortcomings, however, one being that use rights were awarded back to individual land owners, leaving the heirs of the land grants to reconfigure communal land governance with out the support of a legal infrastructure that underpinned the historic commons. Despite these legal flaws, this thesis examines how members of the land grant community are working to "re-perform" La Sierra, in ways that allow it to behave like a commons despite its legal classification. This examination rests on the assertion that a unique connection to landscape, land ethic, systems of communal governance, and ultimately conceptions of property are connected and need to be understood in a context in which property is not just an object, but a performance.