Barreiro, Antonio (c. 1780–1835)

Antonio Barreiro (b. ca. 1780; d. after 1835), assessor (legal adviser) of New Mexico during the 1830s. Barreiro was sent by the Mexican government in 1831 to establish a judicial system. After a year in the territory, Barreiro published his report, Ojeada sobre Nuevo-México. The work synthesized data collected earlier in the century by Alexander von Humboldt, reports of soldiers of the presidio of Sante Fe, and the reports of the representatives to the first National Congress in Mexico.

Barreiro's Ojeada represents a plea for Mexico City to provide a modicum of investment in the rich territory he described. Government support to aid in the building of stone bridges, for example, would ease the difficult conditions for transport and export. Strengthening the powers of the governor and New Mexican courts of first instance could aid in the punishment of petty crime and greater deliberation on matters of import to the citizens. National warehouses, an adequate building in which to house the public treasury, and stronger defenses along the New Mexican frontier would increase and secure tariff revenues, encourage and streamline trade, and dissuade both the raids of "wild Indians" and the grasping Americans interested in extending "the boundary of Louisiana to the left bank of the Bravo or North River" (Rio Grande). Barreiro concluded, "Only the attention of the government toward this country, which is worthy of a better fate, will remove all the obstacles to its welfare. Only an extraordinary effort on the part of the government will develop the valuable elements which lie submerged there and which will some day raise it to the height of prosperity."

Partly due to the publication of his report, Barreiro won election in 1834 and 1835 as New Mexico's deputy to the Mexican Congress. With a printing press imported from Missouri in 1834, Barreiro published the first New Mexican newspaper, El Crepúsculo de la Libertad.

See alsoNew Mexico .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Pedro Bautista Pino, Antonio Barreiro, and José Agustín De Escudero, Three New Mexico Chronicles, translated and edited by H. Bailey Carroll and J. Villasana Haggard (1942).

Frances Leon Swadesh, Los Primeros Pobladores: Hispanic Americans of the Ute Frontier (1974).

Pearce S. Grove, Becky J. Barnett, and Sandra J. Hansen, New Mexico Newspapers: A Comprehensive Guide to Bibliographical Entries and Locations (1975).

David J. Weber, The Mexican Frontier, 1821–1846: The American Southwest under Mexico (1982).

                                      Ross H. Frank