Between Two Rivers traces the lineage of a community land grant over three centuries, during the reigns of three different sovereigns: Spain, Mexico, and the United States. Joseph P. Sánchez draws on extensive historical documentation from archives in all three countries to complete this portrait, one of the most thorough to date of any landholding in the southwestern United States. In doing so, he seeks to raise the prominence of the Atrisco grant in New Mexico history. Importantly, he also presents a portrait of one of the few community land grants to survive U.S. occupation.

The roots of the Atrisco grant were typical of many such grants made during the Spanish colonial period: two tracts in the fertile valley near present-day Albuquerque were granted by Governor Diego de Vargas to Fernando Durán y Chaves in reward for his services in the reconquest of New Mexico after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. But as Sánchez shows, the story does not end with this gifting of land for military service. Much of the book is dedicated to showing how the Atrisco grant evolved from a scattered, informal settlement and a few private grants in 1700 to a full-blown community, spanning more than 82,000 acres and hosting a population in the several hundreds by the 1890s. This evolution was driven by the settlers themselves, who changed the boundaries and the meanings of Atrisco through a wide variety of land transfers and litigation. Sánchez convincingly demonstrates the settlers' knowledge of law and legal process, despite the distance of Atrisco from any major centers of population and governance in either the Spanish, Mexican, or U.S. eras. The settlers “evinced a high level of legal sophistication,” he writes, noting that they were familiar with legal terminology, knew the value of legal documentation, and did not hesitate to use legal process when necessary (70). Sometimes this legal process took the form of litigation against fellow atrisqueños or neighboring landholders, as residents sought to defend and expand their boundaries.

Over the course of its long history, the Atrisco grant has taken on multiple meanings. Sánchez does not shy away from the multiplicity of the grant itself—as he notes, at various times contemporaries referred to Atrisco as “a puesto (post), a sitio (place), a plaza (town square), an aldea (village), or ranchos” (32). Only in the U.S. era did Atrisco officially take on the legal title of a community land grant, thanks to the strong defense presented by residents of their long-standing claims to possession. They pursued two paths to legal legitimation: municipal incorporation under the laws of the territory of New Mexico and recognition by the federal Court of Private Land Claims. They prevailed on both fronts. Sánchez argues that it was the combination of their long residence on the grant and their penchant for saving documents that ultimately saved Atrisco's residents. As other scholarship has shown, few community land holdings in the former Mexican territories survived intact after U.S. occupation, due to a combination of fraud, outright land-grabbing, and unfavorable court rulings. Thus, Atrisco stands out as an important exception to the rule of U.S. conquest in the southwest.

Between Two Rivers departs from an older tradition of land grant histories by taking social history seriously. Sánchez looks not only at the legal and political significance of property but also at the relationships between property, identity, and community. His clear concern for social history is one of the most promising offerings of the book but also, unfortunately, one of the most unrealized. In many of the chapters, Sánchez presents an extensive legal record, complete with detailed genealogical information and primary source quotations, but he ends with only the briefest analysis of the story that he has told. The history of Atrisco could greatly benefit from being placed in the larger frameworks of colonial and postcolonial legal history. Because it is largely a local history without extensive analysis, we are left with some compelling, but unanswered, questions: Why did the villa of Albuquerque become the regional hub instead of Atrisco? How and when did residents develop a firm identity as atrisqueños? What were the governance and social structures that sustained the community? Did the success of atrisqueños before the U.S. courts really come down to their penchant for saving documents, or was there something else at work?

Despite leaving some key questions unanswered, Between the Rivers remains a strong and welcome contribution to western legal history. It is a thoroughly researched and compelling story that other historians can now build upon as they continue to explore the colonial and frontier dynamics of property ownership.