The public domain in Mexico refers to the demarcation of land in the territory that the USA acquired from Mexico at the end of the Mexican–American War. After the war in 1848, Mexico ceded a large swath of its territory to the USA through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Some of the ceded territories were reasonably organized, such as Texas and California. However, much of modern-day New Mexico and Colorado was convoluted as far as land was concerned (Klein, 1996). The public domain in New Mexico was exponentially complicated due to a combination of land issues inherited from Mexico and confusion about identity in the USA.
The inherited problem lay in the fact that in the New Mexico Territory, land allocation was per village as opposed to per individual. On the one hand, there were the larger tracts of land that initially belonged to the Native Tribes (Klein, 1996). On the other, within these land tracts, land the Spanish government had also allocated land to White settlers, also in groups. Through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the USA, received both the land and the residence. This created a need for the division of the land among its users, both the natives and the settlers.
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On the America side, two main issues plagued the Dominion process. For a start, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo came before the Civil War, at a time when the concept of American citizen primarily referred to white Americans (Klein, 1996). However, the US government undertook to receive all the people living in the domains bequeathed under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as American citizens with a right to vote. The only way to effectuate the right to vote was to treat everyone in the domains as white, yet they also include Native Americans. In America, Native communities resided in reserves under the Indian Removal Act (Celano, 2017). The complication occasioned by the issues inherited from Mexico and the issues prevalent in the USA complicated the Dominion process, which mainly stagnated until the 20 th century. As revealed by the case of United States v. Sandoval, 231 U.S. 28 (1913), as late as the early 20 th century, it was still hard to tell which land belonged to which community or group.
References
Celano, D. (2017). The Indian Removal Act: Jackson, Sovereignty and Executive Will. The Purdue Historian , 8 (1), 6.
Klein, C. A. (1996). Treaties of conquest: Property rights, Indian treaties, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. NML rev. , 26 , 201.
United States v. Sandoval , 231 U.S. 28, 34 S. Ct. 1, 58 L. Ed. 107 (1913).
