'New Mexican' covered Miguel H. Trujillo's fight to get Native voices down on paper

Jan. 7—Eloy Garley knew exactly what Miguel H. Trujillo wanted when the Marine veteran walked into the Valencia County registrar's office all those years ago.

"We know why you're here, Mike," Garley, then the county registrar, told Trujillo, a member of Isleta Pueblo. "You know you can't vote here in New Mexico."

The year was 1948 — 36 years after New Mexico became a state; three years after the detonation of the world's first atomic weapon; a year after Jackie Robinson broke big-league baseball's color barrier.

Denied the right to vote by a provision in the state constitution, Trujillo's stand on that day in Los Lunas is the stuff of history. Not long afterward, he sued Garley for the right of a Native to cast a ballot — and in the process, changed New Mexico forever.

"Anybody who has been involved with the issue from a Native American perspective, they would want to live up to his legacy," said Rep. Derrick Lente, D-Sandia Pueblo. "He fought the good fight."

In what by today's standards would be a lightning-quick result, Trujillo won a landmark case two months after filing it — stamping an indelible, if sometimes overlooked, mark on the history of a nation just coming to grips with the concept of voting rights for minorities. Just as important to people here, he forever changed the reality of Native people in a land they'd lived in for many centuries.

The New Mexican reported on the August 1948 decision, made by three federal district judges, noting the court "voided a provision of the state's constitution dis[en]franchising 'Indians not taxed.' This ban, the court found, contravenes the 14th and 15th amendments to the U.S. Constitution, being discriminatory on account of race."

Stunningly, in most circles, Trujillo's name is largely forgotten by many — including those who now benefit from his battle to win voting rights.

That may be because the humble educator and World War II veteran didn't play up his role in what would be a monumental step toward attaining a measure of equity for the state's Indigenous people.

"People involved in Indian affairs and voting rights movements may know his name and the significance of that [action], but, otherwise, no," Trujillo's son, Michael, said in a recent interview, during which he recalled the exchange between his father and Garley, a friend, at the registrar's office.

State historian Rob Martinez said the elder Trujillo's legacy is "historically significant not only to the pueblo people and Native American people but in New Mexico history. His name rings up there with Popé as someone who stood up for his people against a dominating government.

"In 1680 it was the Spanish government," Martinez continued. "And in 1948 it was the United States government."

Sadly, he added, Trujillo's legacy "has faded into the mist of time. Not many people know his name."

The New Mexico History Museum has been trying to address that by paying homage to Trujillo's court battle and victory with the exhibition, Miguel Trujillo and the Pursuit of Native Voting Rights, which opened last summer and runs through Feb. 15.

The exhibition, which includes a recreation of a 1940s-era voting booth, helps paint a "wider lens on communities that did not have voting rights," said Patrica Perea, instructional coordinator for the museum.

She said his story brings "attention to the complexity of race and racism" since Trujillo was a byproduct of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school system that often deprived Native Americans of their cultural identity, language and history.

Yet the boarding school experience opened his eyes to the power of education, Perea added, noting Trujillo later attended and graduated from the Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas and the University of New Mexico. He spent most of his post-World War II career as an educator.

As such, he was of a generation of Native Americans that saw both the benefits and drawbacks of being a U.S citizen, particularly after he came back from serving his country in uniform and found that, while he could fight for his country, he couldn't cast a vote in it, Perea said.

Whether Trujillo was aware he would alter the trajectory of voting rights movements in the state when he first tried to register to vote remains unclear, she and others said.

"He knew it was important; he wanted to go through with it," Michael Trujillo said of his father's decision to file the lawsuit known as Trujillo v. Garley. "I'm not sure he was really aware of the large scope and importance of it. He did it because he felt it was good to do, right to do, one of the things he believed in."

A champion is born

Miguel H. Trujillo was born in Isleta Pueblo in 1904. His own education fired a passion for educating others as he grew up, but World War II interrupted his career as a teacher and principal.

His son said his father was in his late 30s when he joined the service in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

Though the elder Trujillo did not talk much about his service record to his children, he did say he was once marched onto a troopship anchored off California that was headed into the Pacific theater. But for some reason — perhaps his age — Trujillo was called back and given a job as a recruiter, his son said.

Among his duties was to recruit Native Americans to join the military, including some who later became Navajo Code Talkers. When the war ended and he returned to life as a civilian, Trujillo decided he had earned the right to vote, his son said.

At the time, New Mexico did not agree. Though the Indian Citizen Act of 1924, also known as the Snyder Act, gave citizenship to the country's Native Americans, it did not offer the right to vote.

According to the Library of Congress website: "Even with the passing of this citizenship bill, Native Americans were still prevented from participating in elections because the Constitution left it up to the states to decide who has the right to vote. After the passage of the 1924 citizenship bill, it still took over forty years for all fifty states to allow Native Americans to vote."

As Perea put it, Trujillo "served in World War II and came home to find this very real injustice."

Trujillo enlisted the aid of a lawyer — Felix Solomon Cohen, a Jewish American from New York who was born in 1907, according to a 2023 story in El Palacio magazine. While serving as a government attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, he contributed to the creation of the Handbook of Federal Indian Law (also known as Felix S. Cohen's Handbook of Federal Indian Law).

Cohen and Trujillo met sometime in the 1940s, perhaps through a mutual acquaintance at the University of New Mexico. The lawyer had been involved in other lawsuits involving voting rights and Native Americans in the Southwest at the time. Cohen, Michael Trujillo said, "felt this was a very important case to pursue in New Mexico."

The constitutional provision about "Indians not taxed" being ineligible to vote was tied to a theory that since Native Americans lived on tribal lands, they did not own property and therefore did not pay property taxes, Michael Trujillo said. Cohen made the case that while that might be true, those New Mexico residents surely paid all other forms of tax and thus there was "no reason for them not to have the vote based on them not paying taxes," he added.

A three-judge panel in U.S. District Court agreed, moving surprisingly quickly to side with Cohen and Trujillo in the case.

There was no appeal from Garley, Valencia County or the state of New Mexico. Native Americans suddenly had the right to cast a ballot. Oddly, a 1962 state Supreme Court opinion extending voting rights to members of the Navajo Nation notes there is no written record of the final decision in Trujillo v. Garley. The New Mexican's report may be one of the few on record within the state.

Cohen died in his mid-40s in 1953. Trujillo worked as an educator for the Bureau of Indian Affairs until about 1960 before going to work for the Social Security Administration. He died in 1989 of natural causes.

His son later served as director of the U.S. Indian Health Service under former President Bill Clinton.

"When he got something in his mind, he would go forward with it," Michael Trujillo said of his dad. "He believed in certain things and ideals and certainly equity and recognition of others and the legal rights of American Indians."

Perea said Trujillo was one of the civil rights activists of the postwar era who was "caught between the brutal campaigns of the Jim Crow era and the Indian boarding schools and the 1960s civil rights movement." As such, he is among "the forgotten" rights activists, she said.

However, his legacy lives on, even beyond the voting booth. Just ask Lente, a Native who notes that thanks to Trujillo he can not only vote in a polling place, but on the floor of the New Mexico House of Representatives.

"We are the dreams our elders dreamt, right?" Lente said. "Somewhere along the way his elders dreamt of being treated equally the same as he thought that someday not only would people like me be able to vote, but to serve. It would have never been possible without you."