Pajarito in Albuquerque, NM

Pajarito is a historic land-grant community in Albuquerque's South Valley, strung along Pajarito Road between the Rio Grande bosque and the West Mesa, south of Atrisco and north of Los Padillas. Its plaza was one of three in the valley settled before the town of Albuquerque existed, and the grant traces to Josefa Baca, who ran sheep, cattle and goats on the Sitio de San Ysidro de Pajarito. Families here worked narrow strips of irrigated ground laid perpendicular to the ditch for more than two centuries, and that pattern still shows in the parcel lines along the valley floor.

Josefa Baca's son Antonio sold the Pajarito tract to Clemente Gutiérrez, and the title took two more centuries to settle. The Court of Private Land Claims confirmed the Pajarito Land Grant in 1894, and the patent followed in 1914.

The Pajarito Acequia still carries water, one of five ditches working the South Valley along with the Arenal, Armijo, Atrisco and Los Padillas systems. Bernalillo County keeps part of the old farm ground public at Pajarito Open Space, at Beck and Don Felipe roads: a small family dairy ringed by alfalfa fields, now three short trail loops running about a mile and a half under large old trees, with the West Mesa filling the western view.

Three areas sit beneath it. Pajarito Land Grant carries the historic name and the valley acreage that came out of the original grant. Pajarito Mesa is a different landscape, high ground between the Rio Grande and Rio Puerco valleys about ten miles southwest of central Albuquerque, settled from the 1970s onward and still largely without piped water, grid power or paved roads. Pajarito Village carries the name as well.