Next location: westbound eastbound
Garcia, Colorado and Costilla, New Mexico. There are only three other pairs of neighboring border towns or hamlets on the whole 37th parallel. Garcia touts itself as the oldest community in Colorado– excluding Native American communities that go back a few thousand years. The region’s legal history involves disputes about land rights that go back 180 years.
The Sangre de Cristo Land Grant was awarded to Narciso Beaubien and Stephen Luis Lee by the Mexican Government in 1843— approximately a million acres in the San Luis Valley now bisected by the Colorado-New Mexico border. The first non-Indigenous residents of the land grant were members of the Manzanares family who labeled their settlement La Plaza de los Manzanares in 1849, a year after the Treaty of Guadeloupe-Hidalgo transferred sovereignty of the region from Mexico to the United States. The community came to be called Garcia after the man who petitioned the United States government for a post office in the town.
No one here is living large; the Costilla resident on the left collects shipping pallets, the Garcia gentleman on the right keeps a couple of 60s Thunderbirds under a tin roof; their mobile homes have seen better times, but at least it’s dry here, so they won’t leak or rust much. Ute Mountain in the distance, orients everyone for twenty miles in all directions.
A third of a mile west we find Mile 138. Ute Mountain looms blue, west southwest of line.
Kidder’s monument at Mile 138, now as battered as its neighborhood.
The view east from the same location. Abandoned adobe derelict sits just on the Costilla side of the line; Garcia on the left.
