Southwestern Historical Quarterly

Virginia Sánchez's Pleas and Petitions provides an extensive history of Colorado before statehood through what may be one of the first books that tells this history through a Hispano-centered perspective. In-depth historical research, including a wealth of archival materials, provides readers with a robust chronicle of southern Colorado history. The book includes a foreword by former U.S. secretary of the interior, U.S. senator, and Colorado attorney general Ken Salazar, a fitting choice considering Salazar's professional experience and ties to the San Luis Valley. Sánchez organizes the book into nine chapters addressing how racial issues, the law, and cultural opposition intersected in nineteenth-century Colorado. Sánchez also includes appendices with biographical information about Hispano territorial assemblymen and territorial governors and delegates, a timeline of Hispano Colorado, and a glossary of Spanish terms.

The first few chapters detail how the shifting border between Colorado and New Mexico incited conflict because of racial and cultural differences between Hispanos and Anglos; this conflict was largely driven by Anglo desire for land and separation from an Hispano population Anglos deemed inferior. As Sánchez describes, by incorporating the northern areas of New Mexico territory into Colorado territory without consulting Hispano delegates and their constituents, U.S. representatives caused major disruptions to familial and communal relationships and to traditional cultural practices. These interracial and cross-border struggles extended to inadequate congressional representation for Hispanos. Sánchez reveals that new territorial laws, subject to approval by Congress and territorial legislatures, were solely published in English and without adequately trained translators, meaning elected Hispano delegates who primarily spoke Spanish were essentially prohibited from taking full part in the legislative process. These acts of injustice trickled down to Hispano communities who, in turn, were not represented fully during a pivotal historical moment when important deliberations regarding territorial legislation were discussed and enacted.

The next sections tie Colorado territorial history to the Civil War, when miners, many of which were Confederate sympathizers, emigrated west, leaving an opening for Texas Confederate forces to attempt to secure access to gold in Colorado. Sánchez also succinctly addresses racial violence [End Page 101] during this period, first in how Anglo Indian agents withheld provisions provided by the federal government to the Utes, and then by identifying the significant number of lynchings of Mexicans that occurred in and around the Colorado-New Mexico borderlands because of speculative claims against Hispanos.

The book's last sections detail how Anglo legislators advanced institutional racism by continuing to suppress Hispano assemblymen through English-only language use and practices and by ignoring concerns from Hispanos who contested the Colorado push for statehood. This move, Sánchez argues, would incorporate Hispano-dominated areas of New Mexico into Colorado. Anglo delegates and their constituents saw this incorporation as a way to ensure domination over a rich land base that would result in Hispano dispossession and loss of political rights. Sánchez concludes by underscoring how Colorado's Anglo assemblymen ushered in new social, political, racial, and ideological structures that privileged a particular (White) group of citizens who did not have the same deep heritage and historical connections to the region as Hispanos in the area had established over time. Readers will recognize how the historical issues Sánchez details resurface today through ongoing legal battles over land and the reclamation of previously elided Native and Hispano histories.

Pleas and Petitions offers a generous historical account of Colorado territorial history. At times, the pace of the narrative felt rushed as the author attempted to cover a significant amount of historical information in many short sections. This breadth over depth left a gap in the level of in-depth analysis of key topics like institutional racism and racial violence. Readers may have been better served had the archival documents been incorporated into appendices and the biographical details of Hispano delegates placed in the narrative itself. Overall...