Heirs sue Texas, allege seizure of land grant
Galán heirs say state took Spanish land grant after endorsing claim.
After the Comanche raids ended a Spanish king’s ambitions for a thriving city along the Rio Grande, Palafox seemed like a place with very little to offffffffffffer. Unforgiving stretches of rocky landscape stretched for thousands of acres, with little water for those who ventured from the river banks.
“The land was pretty inhos- pitable,” said Tony Zavaleta, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Brownsville who helped a coal company survey the land in the 1980s, making sure it would not destroy any historical artifacts when it began excavation. “Who knew that it was sitting on a sea of minerals?
Those minerals recently led more than 600 heirs of Joaquin Galán, who received the massive Palafox land grant from the Spanish crown more than two centuries ago, to approach the state of Texas
with an unusual request.
The Galán Family Trust contends the state illegally took possession of the land in the 1870s, only a few years after the governor had endorsed the family’s claim to the tract. The state still owns about 40,000 acres of the land northwest of Laredo, according to Galán’s heirs, who say they are entitled to mineral revenue the state has been collecting for years, if not decades.
The discussions have been cordial, and the state is still conducting research into a situation that is rooted in the era when the sovereign flag flying over Texas changed numerous times, said Mary Garza, a spokeswoman for the Galán Family Trust. But the family has filed a lawsuit to ensure its interests are protected.
Garza said the family is still seeking answers to a pair of central questions: How much has the state made in mineral royalties since taking possession of the land? And why did the state reverse course and take the family’s land in the first place?
“We don’t know,” Garza said. “And they’re having to do research as well, because it’s been nearly 150 years.”
Treading different ground
Spanish land grants are both a point of pride and pain among the generations of Hispanics who say they have been swindled out of their heritage by unscrupulous people. Their claims, which have largely focused on the companies and individuals who ended up with the land, have not fared well in the courts.
“Your land may have been stolen, but it was a long time ago, and proving it with the right documents is really difficult,” said Lance Bruun, a South Texas oil and gas attorney who last year chaired a committee created by the Legislature to sort through a specific type of claim about Spanish landgrant inheritances.
Bruun said the committee hearings drew packed rooms of angry residents claiming land or mineral rights had been taken from them. In assessing numerous kinds of complaints, the committee pointedly rejected a legal argument advanced by Houston attorney Eileen Fowler, that Spanish landgrant recipients retained the mineral rights when the land was sold.
“I have received dozens of calls through the years from people saying they are entitled to these mineral rights,” said John McFarland, a lawyer with Austin firm Graves, Dougherty, Hearon & Moody who specializes in representing landowners and in oil and gas cases. “I just have to keep telling them, ‘I’m sorry, the law just doesn’t say that.’”
Bruun and McFarland say the Galán family lawsuit is a long shot, but they note this case is different because it challenges the state government directly.
A 141-year-old mystery
Garza, a McDonald’s corporate trainer who lives in Dallas, said she is an eighth-generation descendant of Joaquin Galán. She said the family, after research into what its ancestors had insisted was its rightful claim, began compiling evidence in the 1940s, but ran out of money.
The family’s lawsuit, filed in July in Travis County District Court, says the state commission formed in 1850 to sort through land-grant claims recognized the family’s ownership of Palafox. After the necessary research and surveying, Gov. Edmund J. Davis endorsed the family’s ownership in 1870.
But for some reason, the state canceled that endorsement four years later and took possession of the land. Garza said the state later passed pieces of the Palafox land to other owners, some of whom still live there. The state kept the 40,000 acres at the center of the family’s case, she said.
The office of General Land Office Commissioner George P. Bush, the lead defendant in the lawsuit, declined to comment per its policy for ongoing litigation, spokesman Jim Sudyam said.
Garza said the family is only interested in the mineral rights under the state-controlled land, not the property itself. She said dealing with the surface land could draw in other people who received pieces of the Palafox land over the years.
“We don’t want to uproot people,” Garza said. “They did nothing wrong.”
The most formidable obstacle to the lawsuit could simply be the passage of time.
For more than a decade, the Balli family of South Texas claimed in court that a New York lawyer had swindled them out of their rights to South Padre Island in the 1930s. A jury sided with the Ballis. But the Texas Supreme Court ruled in 2008 against the family, deciding that the suit had run afoul of the statute of limitations.
The Texas Supreme Court reached a similar conclusion in 2003 over the rights to a section of the iconic King Ranch, after the descendants of a former owner disputed an 1883 court judgment on the land.
“The heirs urge us to second guess, with benefit of hindsight, the wisdom of settling ancient litigation. We decline to do so,” the court wrote, adding that “we must apply a presumption in favor of ancient judgments, particularly those involving land titles, lest the passage of time destroy them.”