| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840–1900. By María E. Montoya. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. xvi, 299 pp. $50.00, ISBN 0-520-22744-1.)

There is a certain injustice to the fact that this fine book appeared before the Colorado Supreme Court (Case No. 00SC527) affirmed the existence among Hispano residents on the historic Sangre de Cristo Land Grant of "customary" rights to grazing, firewood, and timber on lands now known as the Taylor Ranch. María E. Montoya uses disputed property rights on the Sangre de Cristo Grant—in the litigation over which she served as an expert witness—to bookend her detailed treatment of the adjacent Maxwell Land Grant. The supreme court ruling might have allowed her to extend her insights on the ironies of American property law to show how—at the dawn of the twenty-first century—what had long been an instrument of domination and dispossession had become, if fleetingly, a tool for social justice.

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