During the 1850s, Spanish-surnamed settlers arrived on the lands of the Mexican Sangre de Cristo Land Grant in Southern Colorado. Lured by offers of individual lands and use-rights to resource-rich communal lands, these settlers ventured to the isolated, arid San Luis Valley, where they founded the community of San Luis. In this environment, they shaped a culture based upon communal land rights to a mountain they affectionately named "la sierra." This communal environmentalism provided the foundation for the community's political resistance.

My study examines the history of social mobilization in the San Luis community. From the 1860s to the 1960s, the San Luis community jealously guarded its land rights by responding to challenges to them with spontaneous acts of resistance. While community activists enjoyed temporary successes, they experienced no lasting institutional change that would permanently protect their land rights. Nonetheless, these acts of resistance shaped a culture of opposition that enabled later activists to fashion a social movement which would eventually achieve institutional success.

Such success came at the hands of a group of politically-savvy, militant-minded activists in the 1960s and 1970s. Responding to the actions of a North Carolina lumberman, who had successfully challenged their community's rights, these activists capitalized upon the political climate of the era. The Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, the Catholic Church's Vatican II, and the increasing militancy of various civil rights movements—namely the Chicano and American Indian Movements—created an atmosphere in which the activists established a sophisticated and dynamic land rights movement.

The Land Rights Council emerged in 1978 as the political voice of the poor, rural ranchers of San Luis and led the land rights struggle from 1978 until 2002. During that time, the group proved adaptable—surviving twenty-four years of shifting political currents—yet it never wavered in its commitment to self-determination and its ultimate goal of regaining its community's lost land rights. In 2002 that persistence paid off when the Colorado Supreme Court reversed decades of in the lower courts and ruled in favor of the LRC, granting the community its historic land rights.