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Abstract
Located in southern Costilla County, Colorado, the mountain commons of the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant, known as “La Sierra,” is historically fraught with property-rights disputes between multigenerational Hispano residents and extralocal landowners. Despite the Colorado Supreme Court’s landmark 2002 ruling in Lobato v. Taylor, which sought to resolve these conflicts by restoring communal access-rights, ongoing disputes with Cielo Vista Ranch (CVR) persist. This capstone seeks to answer the question of why property disputes have continued post-Lobato. In it, I argue that by grafting communal use-rights onto private property, the Court institutionalized a ‘frontier’ on the Sierra where competing claims to authority and legitimacy persist. Through the multifaceted approach of ‘deep mapping’ – which combines historical, ethnographic, legal, and geospatial analyses – I explore the past property-rights struggles that led to the Lobato decision and created the ‘imperfections’ in the Court’s ruling. I then extend this deep map into the present to examine the ongoing conflicts between CVR and rights-holders over access, resource-use, and management along the Sierra. This capstone contributes to the scholarship on the Sangre de Cristo Land Grant by extending its analysis to the contemporary struggles, demonstrating the persisting friction between private-property rights and the Hispano residents’ locally-formulated understandings of resource-use and landscape governance. Furthermore, it aids the broader scholarship on resource frontiers in political ecology by demonstrating how frontier dynamics persist on landscapes where the erasure of communal property relations is no longer possible.