Aoki Seminar Series, Professor Lorena Oropeza "The King of Adobe: Reies López Tijerina and the New Mexican Land-Grant Movement" Reies López Tijerina is best known for leading an armed raid on a county courthouse in northern New Mexico in 1967. He and his followers sought to draw attention to an injustice that, in Tijerina’s words “was stinking up the pages of New Mexico history,” namely that Spanish-speakers there lost 80 percent of their landholdings in the fifty years following the U.S.-Mexico war that occurred between 1846 and 1848. The drama of the raid instantly granted Tijerina a measure of fame as a Chicano movement action figure. The talk argues that Tijerina ought to be remembered instead as a man of ideas foremost, as someone who conceived of New Mexico as a colony within the continental United States and developed what I call an anti-colonial thesis about American westward expansion.