Abstract

In 1882 a family of five moved onto a piece of land that would become known as Ojo del Caballo, named after the spring where the family took their horses for water. Today, Barbarita and Joce Abeytia’s great-great-great-great grandchildren can be found picking piñon nuts, feeding horses, and visiting with their tias and tios on the same land their ancestors built the first adobe house on in the late nineteenth century. This thesis demonstrates that the Abeyta family remember and understand the many struggles the family have been forced to undertake to keep this land primarily in terms of property relations and temporality. Each generation of owners has had to deal with at least one instance of the land nearly having been lost, and each of these instances is the result of an encounter with private property relations. These moments are theorized as chronotones, or as instances of colliding temporal logics, where the linear and synchronizing temporality of capital collides with the Abeyta family’s own nonsynchronous temporal terrain. This is achieved primarily through the analysis of oral history interviews and photographs. On a continent beset by increasingly rapid, fragmentary, and often violent change, theirs is a story of rare continuity won through committed, if costly, struggle. Through stories of mysterious human encounters, of struggle in the face of capitalist property relations and incessant accumulation, and of conflicting temporalities, this thesis honors the family’s commitment to their land and to each other.