The Sociedad Protección Mutua de Trabajadores Unidos (SPMDTU) is an Hispano mutual aid society founded in Antonito, Colorado in 1900. For over a century, this organization has provided economic, social, and legal aid to Hispano members in Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. It was key in several major events in Colorado history, including the 1912 school desegregation case Francisco Maestas et al. vs. George H. Shone. Although membership in the organization has declined since the mid-twentieth century, the SPMDTU remains influential across Colorado and New Mexico and continues to hold a biannual convention and regular meetings at local councils.

History

Context

Hispanos are the descendants of Spanish-speaking settlers, often of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry, who settled in what is now the American Southwest when the territory was held by the Spanish Empire and the Republic of Mexico. This territory changed hands following the Mexican-American War of 1846—1848. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded over five hundred thousand square miles of territory to the United States. Mexican citizens living in that territory, which included the entirety of modern-day New Mexico and the southern third of Colorado, were given the choice to remain on the land or relocate to the remaining territory of Mexico. Those who remained were guaranteed United States citizenship and retention of their property by the treaty, leading to a large number of Hispano residents in the southwestern United States, including Colorado.

However, tensions rose as more Anglo American settlers arrived in the region from the East. Settlers routinely ignored Hispano property rights, and Hispanos faced discrimination from employers, businesses, and governmental representatives at the state and local level.

The American property and legal systems intentionally benefited Anglo Americans at the expense of Hispanos. Most of the relevant public documents were published only in English, which many Hispanos could not read, and the courts required Hispano landholders to produce original land-grant documents proving their title. Since most landholders were descendants of the original grantees and these original documents were in Santa Fe or even Mexico City, many Hispano land claims were rejected by the courts on the basis that they were unproven.

When railroads arrived in Colorado’s San Luis Valley during the 1870s, the local economy shifted from self-sustaining agriculture to mining and commercial farming and ranching. Railroad access drove up the price of land, and speculators from the United States and Europe paid lawyers and engineers to drum up legal challenges to Hispanos’ property rights. Those who retained property found they could no longer access treaty-guaranteed common grazing lands, as these were steadily purchased and fenced off by Anglo American cattle ranchers.

Additionally, with the development of county and local governments came assessors and property taxes. Most Hispanos had to work for American railroads or mines to earn the cash to pay taxes and buy goods and supplies, turning a population of self-sustaining farmers and shepherds into wage laborers.

Early Influences

The SPMDTU developed in a context of other groups formed for the mutual benefit or protection of Hispano communities, often with roots in much older European institutions. These included medieval tradesmen’s guilds and their descendants (called gremios in Spanish) and religious organizations such as the cofradías, Catholic confraternities that included lay groups like the Hermanos Penitentes, the Penitent Brotherhood. These groups often served as early sources of mutual aid and provided informal structures of support for their members.
Other organizations developed in the 1800s specifically to resist United States rule. Many of these groups participated in violent action. In the 1880s, a group called Las Gorras Blancas (“The White Caps”) formed in central New Mexico. This group launched retaliatory raids against Anglo-owned or government infrastructure, wearing white hoods to conceal their identity while destroying fences, barns, sawmills, and other structures. 

Nonviolent resistance took the form of early mutual aid societies, which also developed in New Mexico in the 1880s. These societies worked to unite local Hispano populations against United States corporations and individuals, allowing them to more effectively combat land speculation, labor exploitation, and mounting poverty. They provided a structure for pooling resources to provide greater financial and legal support for members.

Founding the SPMDTU

The Sociedad Protección Mutua de Trabajadores Unidos was founded in Antonito, Colorado on November 26, 1900 in the house of Celedonio Mondragón. 

Mondragón had been born and raised in the San Luis Valley before moving to Santa Fe to pursue jewelry as a career. While in Santa Fe, he was a member of an Hispano mutual aid society called La Orden de Caballeros de Protección Mutua por la Ley y Orden (The Order of the Knights of Mutual Protection by Law and Order). He returned to the Valley in the late 1890s, when he moved to Antonito and became a postmaster at nearby Cernicero, now Lobatos.

Antonito is in the center of Conejos County, the borders of which exactly match the original Sangre de Cristo Land Grant. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, the land grant acreage was being bought up by United States and British investors. To help combat the loss of private farms and access to public lands, Mondragón organized with other Hispano men in the area to found a new mutual aid society that could provide financial and legal support. The group was financed by member dues and required its all-male membership to be lawful and upstanding citizens in order to maintain its brand of passive, collective resistance known as mutualismo or mutualism.

The SPMDTU quickly spread from Antonito and developed councils in towns and cities across the San Luis Valley. By 1903 the organization had a presence in many communities, and that year established its Concilio Superior (high council) in Antonito. 

Expansion

The SPMDTU expanded rapidly across communities in a way that previous Hispano mutual aid societies had not been able to. It quickly spread beyond the San Luis Valley, and councils were organized across New Mexico, Colorado, and into Utah. The popularity of the organization within Hispano communities and the solidarity shown by members afforded the SPMDTU great influence in local politics, and several members of New Mexico councils went on to be elected to state legislature and executive offices.

In 1914 the SPMDTU was instrumental in helping win the Maestas case, a lawsuit that desegregated schools in Alamosa, Colorado. One of the nation’s first desegregation cases, the suit resulted in Hispano children being able to attend any school in the city instead of a designated school for Mexican Americans.

By the late 1940s, the SPMDTU counted sixty-five local councils and some 3,000 members across three states. The centralized structure and collection of dues created a fairly large treasury reserve that could be redistributed across the local councils, forging a reliable backbone of community support for Hispanos across the region.

Membership of SPMDTU dropped in the decades following World War II. However, its legacy and continuation remains an important feature of Hispano communities in Colorado and New Mexico. Many families count up to four generations as members in the organization, and many New Mexico local and state politicians have come out of the SPMDTU. Beyond its direct influence, it has left a lasting impact and legacy among the Hispano population of the region. 

Values & Structure

In its early days, the SPMDTU’s primary purpose was to pool resources to help orphans, women, workers, and other vulnerable community members. The group’s focus on labor came about due to the new Anglo-dominated industries that Hispanos were often forced to join around the turn of the century, including mines, railroads, and large-scale agriculture. These jobs did not pay very well, so workers could look to the SPMDTU for financial and community support. The organization also devoted money and other resources to defending Hispano land titles. Over time, as the insurance market developed and Mexican Americans were excluded from that industry, the SPMDTU began offering its own end-of-life and burial insurance to members as well. Its provision of essential money and services put the SPMDTU at the center of many Hispano communities for much of the early 1900s.

The SPMDTU laid out a constitution, modeled after the United States Constitution, in 1902. It divided governance into executive, legislative, and judicial branches, creating districts in which members would elect leaders for each branch. The constitution specified that only men could become members, but not just any men—prospective members needed a referral to be considered, and then a membership committee interviewed the person to determine whether he was the kind of morally upstanding citizen the SPMDTU sought. Membership hopefuls also had to pass physical examinations in order to be part of the organization’s insurance program.

Once membership was approved, most members remained for life, and it was common to have multiple generations of members in one council. The current Denver chapter, for instance, includes several descendants of the group’s original founders. In the days before phones and automobiles were common, the SPMDTU kept abreast of each council’s developments by having members attend the meetings of other local councils, and they designated local Spanish-language newspapers as official carriers of organizational news. Examples included La Aurora of Antonito, El Heraldo del Valle of San Luis, and La Victoria of Raton, New Mexico.

Although official SPMDTU membership was restricted to men for many decades, women’s auxiliary councils met separately and performed many of the same functions of the male councils. In 1978 the SPMDTU amended its constitution to allow women to become full members, and in 2015 the organization elected its first woman president, Vickie Vasquez, a member of the Denver local council.

Concilio Superior

The national headquarters of the SPMDTU is the Concilio Superior, a meeting hall located in Antonito, Colorado where the organization was founded.

In the early days of the SPMDTU, members held meetings in their homes. However, by 1920 it was clear that as membership grew the organization would require a permanent headquarters. To finance a building, members were initially assessed a one-time tax of seventy-five cents, then a second payment of five to ten dollars. Construction on the building began in 1923 and completed in 1925. The Concilio Superior is still in use by the organization, and has also served as an event venue for the San Luis Valley for generations. 

The Concilio Superior has been in the Colorado Register of Historic Properties and the National Register of Historic Places since 2000. In 2005, a State Historical Fund (SHF) grant financed restorations to the building, which were completed in 2024.