Horizon

Still not over

Here's an unexpected find in the normally dry output of the U.S. General Accounting Office: a report that explains some continuing property disputes in New Mexico through a legal/scholarly history of land claims in what's now the Southwestern U.S., from the conquistadors to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the present. The period photos and documents alone are worth a glance, and then there's the frisson of watching frontier-era dramas still playing themselves out in the America of the mini-mall and the SUV. (If the above link is balky, try clicking through from this one, where you can also download the text in Spanish if you like.)