Ysleta del Sur Pueblo is one of three federally recognized tribes in Texas, a nation of more than 4,000 enrolled members whose reservation lies in El Paso. Its people, the Tigua, trace their community to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and to the mission their ancestors built at Ysleta, and in 1751 Spain granted the Pueblo about 23,000 acres as a homeland. The Pueblo tells that beginning itself, at its cultural center. This is the story of what came after.
A grant ignored
Once Texas became a state in 1845, as the Supreme Court later summarized the record, it disregarded the Spanish grant, began incorporating a town on tribal land and issued land patents to outsiders. The Handbook of Texas puts it plainly: through acts of the legislature and unscrupulous land promoters, the Tigua lost all of their land. Some families held on to parts of the old homeland and kept their language and customs. In the late 1890s the Pueblo adopted a constitution to protect its ancient tribal organization. Its government still follows the Pueblo model, with a cacique chosen for life as religious leader, and a governor, lieutenant governor and war captain among its officers.
Recognized twice
Texas recognized the Tigua in May 1967, and Congress followed in 1968, handing its trust duties for the Pueblo to the state. That trust protected the roughly 100 acres the Pueblo still held. In 1983 Texas renounced it as inconsistent with the state constitution, and the Pueblo went back to Congress. The talks stalled over bingo. Texas would not support a new federal trust unless it could apply its own gaming laws on the reservation. The Restoration Act of 1987 restored the federal trust, and its section 107 banned on tribal lands any gaming "prohibited" by Texas law, while denying Texas regulatory jurisdiction there.
The word prohibit
For a quarter century the courts read that section the way Texas did. A 1994 appeals ruling held that all of Texas's gaming laws and regulations applied on the reservation as federal law, and the Pueblo's Speaking Rock Entertainment Center lived under one court order after another. When Speaking Rock closed during one of those disputes, tribal unemployment rose from 3 percent to 28. Its revenue came to fund 60 percent of the Pueblo's operating budget. In 2016 the Pueblo began offering bingo, and Texas went to court to stop it.
On June 15, 2022, the Supreme Court sided with the Pueblo, five to four. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch held that the act bars only games Texas prohibits outright. Texas regulates bingo rather than forbidding it, so the Pueblo's bingo answers to federal and tribal law. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the four dissenters.
Today the Pueblo runs its own police, court and enterprises. It calls Hueco Tanks, east of the city, a sacred place that its people still use for prayer and gatherings, and the state park there is open to visitors under its own rules. The Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Cultural Center tells the Pueblo's history in its own words, near the Ysleta Mission.