New in Southwest 2020-2025

In the latter half of the nineteenth century a number of talented and industrious individuals immigrated to New Mexico in search of wealth and prestige. Among these enterprising newcomers was a young lawyer from Missouri named Ralph Emerson Twitchell. Shrewd, audacious, and driven, Twitchell quickly distinguished himself from the others as an attorney, an orator, a publicist, and a historian. From the moment he stepped off the train in Las Vegas, Twitchell entrenched himself in his adopted home, working tirelessly to promote progress and to broadcast its many virtues. A pillar of the New Mexico community, he spent more than forty years as a devoted civil servant. Inspired by the history, culture, and charm of old Santa Fe, he became one of the city's leading patrons and helped transform the ancient capital into a popular tourist destination. Yet he seems to be one of the most obscure and understudied figures in New Mexico history. Remembered solely for his achievements as a historian--his books articulated the idea of New Mexico for generations of Americans--Twitchell has otherwise been virtually ignored. Ralph Emerson Twitchell's influential role in the modernization and development of New Mexico is now expansively detailed in this revelatory work.

In January 1873, Secretary of War William W. Belknap authorized the Military District of New Mexico to enlist fifty Indian scouts for campaigns against the Apaches and other tribes. In an overwhelming response, many more Navajos came to Fort Wingate to enlist than the ten requested. Why, so soon after the Navajo War, the Long Walk and imprisonment at Fort Sumner, would young Navajos volunteer to join the United States military? Author John Lewis Taylor explores this question and the relationship between the Navajo Nation and the United States military in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

LOOKING FOR HUMBOLDT shines a light on the German-American experience. The book records a journey of exploration through the colorful landscapes and cultures of the American Southwest. It tells the stories of an adventure-rich past, and of the roles played by Alexander v. Humboldt and a handful of early German immigrant soldiers and settlers. From the regional the narrative expands to the larger world of social movements and geopolitics.

Right now someone is dreaming about moving to a mesa in northern New Mexico. Around here off the grid properties are astoundingly ominpresent. For several years my post, Caution: Off-Grid Solar Power Renters has appeared under Craigslist's Santa Fe/Taos rentals. This book, Utilities Nearby is a non-fiction account of my anecdotal experiences living off the grid near Santa Fe. It also compliles letters from Craigslist readers who shared their passionate thoughts with me on living (or not living) in northern New Mexico. Utilities Nearby fits perfectly in a nicho for it is a niche in Southwest reading that was under represented until now. This book is a conversation on the meaning of dwellings, living simply and the American West. May it provide you with useful insights in New Mexico's real estate, a "survival guide" if you will. Join me as we scratch beneath the adobe veneer that both enchants and exasperates. There are no guarantees, but upon completion of this book you might be able to convert watts into kilowatt-hours. The only free part is high voltage humor amped with personal experience. Utilities Nearby is for everyone near and far who holds a place in their hearts for New Mexico.

Between 1893 and 1903, Jesse H. Bratley worked in Indian schools across five reservations in the American West. As a teacher Bratley was charged with forcibly assimilating Native Americans through education. Although tasked with eradicating their culture, Bratley became entranced by it--collecting artifacts and taking glass plate photographs to document the Native America he encountered. Today, the Denver Museum of Nature & Science's Jesse H. Bratley Collection consists of nearly 500 photographs and 1,000 pottery and basketry pieces, beadwork, weapons, toys, musical instruments, and other objects traced to the S'Klallam, Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Havasupai, Hopi, and Seminole peoples.   This visual and material archive serves as a lens through which to view a key moment in US history--when Native Americans were sequestered onto reservation lands, forced into unfamiliar labor economies, and attacked for their religious practices. Education, the government hoped, would be the final tool to permanently transform Indigenous bodies through moral instruction in Western dress, foodways, and living habits. Yet Lindsay Montgomery and Chip Colwell posit that Bratley's collection constitutes "objects of survivance"--things and images that testify not to destruction and loss but to resistance and survival. Interwoven with documents and interviews, Objects of Survivance illuminates how the US government sought to control Native Americans and how Indigenous peoples endured in the face of such oppression.   Rejecting the narrative that such objects preserve dying Native cultures, Objects of Survivance reframes the Bratley Collection, showing how tribal members have reconnected to these items, embracing them as part of their past and reclaiming them as part of their contemporary identities. This unique visual and material record of the early American Indian school experience and story of tribal perseverance will be of value to anyone interested in US history, Native American studies, and social justice. Co-published with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science

When Geronimo and his warriors surrendered to the US Army, General Miles made a number of promises for the surrender terms that were in fact false. Geromino: Prisoner of Lies provides insights into how Chiricahua prisoners of war lived while held in captivity by the United States Army in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as seen through the eyes of their war leader Geronimo. The indignities and lies they suffered, and how they maintained their tribal culture in the face of great pressure to change or vanish entirely, are brought to life and provided new context through this book.

From the boundary surveys of the 1850s to the ever-expanding fences and highway networks of the twenty-first century, Border Land, Border Water examines the history of the construction projects that have shaped the region where the United States and Mexico meet. Tracing the accretion of ports of entry, boundary markers, transportation networks, fences and barriers, surveillance infrastructure, and dams and other river engineering projects, C. J. Alvarez advances a broad chronological narrative that captures the full life cycle of border building. He explains how initial groundbreaking in the nineteenth century transitioned to unbridled faith in the capacity to control the movement of people, goods, and water through the use of physical structures. By the 1960s, however, the built environment of the border began to display increasingly obvious systemic flaws. More often than not, Alvarez shows, federal agencies in both countries responded with more construction--compensatory building designed to mitigate unsustainable policies relating to immigration, black markets, and the natural world. Border Land, Border Water reframes our understanding of how the border has come to look and function as it does and is essential to current debates about the future of the US-Mexico divide.

Southwestern archaeology has long been fascinated with the scale and frequency of movement in Pueblo history, from great migrations to short-term mobility. By collaborating with Pueblo communities, archaeologists are learning that movement was--and is--much more than the result of economic opportunity or a response to social conflict. Movement is one of the fundamental concepts of Pueblo thought and is essential in shaping the identities of contemporary Pueblos. The Continuous Path challenges archaeologists to take Pueblo notions of movement seriously by privileging Pueblo concepts of being and becoming in the interpretation of anthropological data. In this volume, archaeologists, anthropologists, and Native community members weave multiple perspectives together to write histories of particular Pueblo peoples. Within these histories are stories of the movements of people, materials, and ideas, as well as the interconnectedness of all as the Pueblo people find, leave, and return to their middle places. What results is an emphasis on historical continuities and the understanding that the same concepts of movement that guided the actions of Pueblo people in the past continue to do so into the present and the future. Movement is a never-ending and directed journey toward an ideal existence and a continuous path of becoming. This path began as the Pueblo people emerged from the underworld and sought their middle places, and it continues today at multiple levels, integrating the people, the village, and the individual.  

2019 National Native American Hall of Fame Inductee This stirring memoir is the story of Ada Deer, the first woman to serve as head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Deer begins, "I was born a Menominee Indian. That is who I was born and how I have lived." She proceeds to narrate the first eighty-three years of her life, which are characterized by her tireless campaigns to reverse the forced termination of the Menominee tribe and to ensure sovereignty and self-determination for all tribes. Deer grew up in poverty on the Menominee Reservation in Wisconsin, but with the encouragement of her mother and teachers, she earned degrees in social work from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Columbia University. Armed with a first-rate education, an iron will, and a commitment to justice, she went from being a social worker in Minneapolis to leading the struggle for the restoration of the Menominees' tribal status and trust lands. Having accomplished that goal, she moved on to teach American Indian Studies at UW-Madison, to hold a fellowship at Harvard, to work for the Native American Rights Fund, to run unsuccessfully for Congress, and to serve as Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs in the Clinton administration. Now in her eighties, Deer remains as committed as ever to human rights, especially the rights of American Indians. A deeply personal story, written with humor and honesty, this book is a testimony to the ability of one individual to change the course of history through hard work, perseverance, and an unwavering commitment to social justice.

Volume 1 of this critical edition includes a note on the text from the Humboldt in English team, an introduction by editors Vera M. Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette, a preface to the first edition by Alexander von Humboldt, and the translation of Volumes 1 and 2 of Humboldt's Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne from 1825 to 1827.   Alexander von Humboldt was the most celebrated modern chronicler of North and South America and the Caribbean, and this translation of his essay on New Spain--the first modern regional economic and political geography--covers his travels across today's Mexico in 1803-1804. The work canvases natural-scientific and cultural-scientific objects alike, combining the results of fieldwork with archival research and expert testimony.   To show how people, plants, animals, goods, and ideas moved across the globe, Humboldt wrote in a variety of styles, bending and reshaping familiar writerly conventions to keep readers attentive to new inputs. Above all, he wanted his readers to be open-minded when confronted with cultural and other differences in the Americas. Fueled by his comparative global perspective on politics, economics, and science, he used his writing to support Latin American independence and condemn slavery and other forms of colonial exploitation. It is these voluminous and innovative writings on the New World that made Humboldt the undisputed father of modern geography, early American studies, transatlantic cultural history, and environmental studies.   This two-volume critical edition--the third installment in the Alexander von Humboldt in English series--is based on the full text, including all footnotes, tables, and maps, of the second, revised French edition of Essai politique sur le royaume de de Nouvelle Espagne from 1825 to 1827, which has never been translated into English before. Extensive annotations and full-color atlases are available on the series website.

Based on extensive research as well as on a career working for cultural institutions, historian Thomas E. Ch vez has created a historical novel about the American southwest, specifically in New Mexico and Arizona, a place where Europeans settled in 1598. Here is a historical narrative about one of those families. The story begins and ends with Edward Romero who became the United States ambassador to Spain and is prototypical of the thousands of young men and some women who sought a new life in the new world and became American. These were people taking risks, accepting fate, succeeding, failing, loving, and hating. The Romero story is an American odyssey shared by any number of families in a region and whose cultural legacy is part of the heritage of the United States that only recently has come to the fore in the United States' national consciousness. This story delineates a part of the heritage of every American and enriches an already beautiful history. A bibliographic essay, maps, and genealogical charts will assist the reader to differentiate places, names, and generations.

Spanning three hundred years and the colonial regimes of Spain, Mexico, and the United States, Maurice S. Crandall's sweeping history of Native American political rights in what is now New Mexico, Arizona, and Sonora demonstrates how Indigenous communities implemented, subverted, rejected, and indigenized colonial ideologies of democracy, both to accommodate and to oppose colonial power. Focusing on four groups--Pueblos in New Mexico, Hopis in northern Arizona, and Tohono O'odhams and Yaquis in Arizona/Sonora--Crandall reveals the ways Indigenous peoples absorbed and adapted colonially imposed forms of politics to exercise sovereignty based on localized political, economic, and social needs. Using sources that include oral histories and multinational archives, this book allows us to compare Spanish, Mexican, and American conceptions of Indian citizenship, and adds to our understanding of the centuries-long struggle of Indigenous groups to assert their sovereignty in the face of settler colonial rule.

A trailblazer in Native American linguistics and anthropology, Gladys Reichard (1893-1955) is one of America's least appreciated anthropologists. Her accomplishments were obscured in her lifetime by differences in intellectual approach and envy, as well as academic politics and the gender realities of her age. This biography offers the first full account of Reichard's life, her milieu, and, most importantly, her work--establishing, once and for all, her lasting significance in the history of anthropology. In her thirty-two years as the founder and head of Barnard College's groundbreaking anthropology department, Reichard taught that Native languages, written or unwritten, sacred or profane, offered Euro-Americans the least distorted views onto the inner life of North America's first peoples. This unique approach put her at odds with anthropologists such as Edward Sapir, leader of the structuralist movement in American linguistics. Similarly, Reichard's focus on Native psychology as revealed to her by Native artists and storytellers produced a dramatically different style of ethnography from that of Margaret Mead, who relied on western psychological archetypes to "crack" alien cultural codes, often at a distance. Despite intense pressure from her peers to conform to their theories, Reichard held firm to her humanitarian principles and methods; the result, as Nancy Mattina makes clear, was pathbreaking work in the ethnography of ritual and mythology; Wiyot, Coeur d'Alene, and Navajo linguistics; folk art, gender, and language--amplified by an exceptional career of teaching, editing, publishing, and mentoring. Drawing on Reichard's own writings and correspondence, this book provides an intimate picture of her small-town upbringing, the professional challenges she faced in male-centered institutions, and her quietly revolutionary contributions to anthropology. Gladys Reichard emerges as she lived and worked--a far-sighted, self-reliant humanist sustained in turbulent times by the generous, egalitarian spirit that called her yearly to the far corners of the American West.  

One method of American territory expansion in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands was the denial of property rights to Mexican landowners, which led to dispossession. Many historical accounts overlook this colonial impact on Indigenous and Mexican peoples, and existing studies that do tackle this subject tend to privilege the male experience. Here, Karen R. Roybal recenters the focus of dispossession on women, arguing that gender, sometimes more than race, dictated legal concepts of property ownership and individual autonomy. Drawing on a diverse source base--legal land records, personal letters, and literature--Roybal locates voices of Mexican American women in the Southwest to show how they fought against the erasure of their rights, both as women and as landowners. Woven throughout Roybal's analysis are these women's testimonios--their stories focusing on inheritance, property rights, and shifts in power. Roybal positions these testimonios as an alternate archive that illustrates the myriad ways in which multiple layers of dispossession--and the changes of property ownership in Mexican law--affected the formation of Mexicana identity.

New Mexico's harsh terrain, countless wars and epidemics were a challenging and fascinating environment for the many cultures and peoples who settled there. When tragedy struck, their faith and religious rituals allowed them to mourn, celebrate and commemorate their dead. From Pueblo Indians and Spanish colonists to Jewish immigrants and American veterans, many old traditions have endured and blended into modern society. The area is also home to many unique death sites, including the graves of Smokey Bear and Billy the Kid, and the largest contemporary collection of human bones in the world. Author Ana Pacheco guides you through the history of Christmas death rituals, roadside descansos, communal smallpox graves, Civil War memorials and more.

This thought-provoking book examines gang history in the region encompassing West Texas, Southern New Mexico, and Northern Chihuahua, Mexico. Known as the El Pasoâ?"Juárez borderland region, the area contains more than three million people spanning 130 miles from east to west. From the badlandsâ?"the historically notorious eastern Valle de Juárezâ?"to the Puerto Palomas port of entry at Columbus, New Mexico, this area has become more militarized and politicized than ever before. Mike Tapia examines this region by exploring a century of historical developments through a criminological lens and by studying the diverse subcultures on both sides of the law. Tapia looks extensively at the role of history and geography on criminal subculture formation in the binational urban setting of El Pasoâ?"Juárez, demonstrating the regionâ??s unique context for criminogenic processes. He provides a poignant case study of Homeland Security and the apparent lack of drug-war spillover in communities on the US-Mexico border.

Hiking New Mexico's Chaco Canyon is a guidebook for informed hikers who want a substantive yet accessible guide to hiking and camping at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, a World Heritage Site that the Zuni, Hopi, Acoma and other pueblos consider their ancestral homeland. The guide offers advice about what to bring to the canyon, information on camping at Chaco's Gallo Campground, and personal accounts of hiking "Downtown Chaco" and the longer, sometimes remote mesa trails. Included is a summary of the canyon's history before, during, and after the Ancestral Puebloan occupation, as well as an overview of current research in the canyon and a bibliography for those who want to learn more. One thousand years ago Chaco Canyon was a metropolis of massive stone structures at the center of Chaco culture. The book also includes maps and over fifty of the author's photographs.

In Forging Arizona Anita Huizar-Hernández looks back at a bizarre nineteenth-century land grant scheme that tests the limits of how ideas about race, citizenship, and national expansion are forged. During the aftermath of the U.S.-Mexico War and the creation of the current border, a con artist named James Addison Reavis falsified archives around the world to pass his wife off as the heiress to an enormous Spanish land grant so that they could claim ownership of a substantial portion of the newly-acquired Southwestern territories. Drawing from a wide variety of sources including court records, newspapers, fiction, and film, Huizar-Hernández argues that the creation, collapse, and eventual forgetting of Reavis's scam reveal the mechanisms by which narratives, real and imaginary, forge borders. An important addition to extant scholarship on the U.S Southwest border, Forging Arizona recovers a forgotten case that reminds readers that the borders that divide nations, identities, and even true from false are only as stable as the narratives that define them. 

Just as a basket's purpose determines its materials, weave, and shape, so too is the purpose of the essay related to its material, weave, and shape. Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology of essays by Native writers in the formal art of basket weaving. Using weaving techniques such as coiling and plaiting as organizing themes, the editors have curated an exciting collection of imaginative, world-making lyric essays by twenty-seven contemporary Native writers from tribal nations across Turtle Island into a well-crafted basket. Shapes of Native Nonfiction features a dynamic combination of established and emerging Native writers, including Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Terese Marie Mailhot, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Eden Robinson, and Kim TallBear. Their ambitious, creative, and visionary work with genre and form demonstrate the slippery, shape-changing possibilities of Native stories. Considered together, they offer responses to broader questions of materiality, orality, spatiality, and temporality that continue to animate the study and practice of distinct Native literary traditions in North America.

The essayist Adela Sloss-Vento (1901-1998) was a powerhouse of activism in South Texas's Lower Rio Grande Valley throughout the Mexican American civil rights movement beginning in 1920 and the subsequent Chicano movement of the 1960s and 1970s. At last presenting the full story of Sloss-Vento's achievements, Agent of Change revives a forgotten history of a major female Latina leader. Bringing to light the economic and political transformations that swept through South Texas in the 1920s as ranching declined and agribusiness proliferated, Cynthia E. Orozco situates Sloss-Vento's early years within the context of the Jim Crow/Juan Crow era. Recounting Sloss-Vento's rise to prominence as a public intellectual, Orozco highlights a partnership with Alonso S. Perales, the principal founder of the League of United Latin American Citizens. Agent of Change explores such contradictions as Sloss-Vento's tolerance of LULAC's gender-segregated chapters, even though the activist was an outspoken critic of male privilege in the home and a decidedly progressive wife and mother. Inspiring and illuminating, this is a complete portrait of a savvy, brazen critic who demanded reform on both sides of the US-Mexico border.

The third volume takes up the story of the continued struggle for the return of their Ojo Caliente reservation after Victorio's death at Tres Castillos. Led by Nana, the surviving Chihenne Apaches regrouped and, despite their losses, decided to continue the fight. In January 1881, these Apaches launched several attacks in southern New Mexico but, for the moment, avoided direct confrontation with the US army, choosing to evade their pursuers. Having returned to northern Mexico, Nana returned to New Mexico in July and August to lead one of the legendary raids of the Apache wars between 1860 and 1886. While this event deserves legendary status, the numbers of US troops deployed against the Apaches has been exaggerated. Moreover, the numerical advantage of the actual numbers of US troops deployed was usually offset by the scope and knowledge of the terrain traversed by the Apaches. Most importantly, this was the last time that Apaches would attempt to maintain their independent way of life within the USA. This volume will conclude with an evaluation of winners and losers, legacy of the campaign and lessons to be learned for today from the small wars of the nineteenth century.

For travelers passing through northern Navajo country, the desert landscape appears desolate. The few remaining Navajo trading posts, once famous for their bustling commerce, seem unimpressive. Yet a closer look at the economic and creative activity in this region, which straddles northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern Utah, belies a far more interesting picture. In Traders, Agents, and Weavers, Robert S. McPherson unveils the fascinating--and at times surprising--history of the merging of cultures and artistic innovation across this land. McPherson, the author of numerous books on Navajo and southwestern history, narrates here the story of Navajo economic and cultural development through the testimonies of traders, government agents, tribal leaders, and accomplished weavers. For the first half of the twentieth century, trading posts dominated the Navajo economy in northwestern New Mexico. McPherson highlights the Two Grey Hills post and its sister posts Toadlena and Newcomb, which encouraged excellence among weavers and sold high-quality rugs and blankets. Parallel to the success of the trading industry was the establishment of the Northern Navajo or Shiprock Agency and Boarding School. The author explains the pivotal influence on the area of the agency's stern and controversial founder, William T. Shelton, known by Navajos as Tall Leader. Through cooperation with government agents, American settlers, and traders, Navajo weavers not only succeeded financially but also developed their own artistic crafts. Shunning the use of brightly dyed yarn and opting for the natural colors of sheep's wool, these weavers, primarily women, developed an intricate style that has few rivals. Eventually, economic shifts, including oil drilling and livestock reduction, eroded the traditional Navajo way of life and led to the collapse of the trading post system. Nonetheless, as McPherson emphasizes, Navajo weavers have maintained their distinctive style and method of production to this day.  

Life in early New Mexico was often perilous. Geographic isolation attracted outlaws and ruffians, and skirmishes often arose between the indigenous tribes and settlers. In response, the U.S. government set up military forts and outposts to protect its new citizens. These strongholds include Fort Craig, where logs were made to look like cannons to fool Confederate troops. Kit Carson, John Pershing and Billy the Kid all called Fort Stanton home, before it became the first federal tuberculosis sanatorium and later a detention center for German prisoners of war. Author Donna Blake Birchell relates little-known yet highly important Civil War battles, the tragedies of the Navajo and Mescalero Apache internments and other dramatic frontier stories.

When the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo guaranteed previous Spanish and Mexican land grants, as well as rights for Native Americans to their ancestral homelands. However, organized property theft began soon after. People were methodically dispossessed of their homes through manipulation, conspiracy and even organized crime rings, leading to widespread poverty and isolation. Then in 1967, the Tierra Amarilla Courthouse Raid, led by charismatic civil rights leader Reies López Tijerina, brought the age-old struggle over these stolen lands to the national stage. Author Ray John de Aragón brings to light the suffering brought to New Mexico by land barons, cattlemen and unscrupulous politicians and the effects still felt today.

From 2004 to 2009, the Albuquerque Journal North ran the ¡ÓRALE! SANTA FE column by Santa Fe native and veteran journalist Arnold Vigil. The editor gave carte blanche to Vigil in his selection of topics ranging from encounters with locals and tourists to social commentary about changes that have taken place over the years. Vigil's local perspective and humorous insights about Santa Fe, its inhabitants, and visitors struck a chord with readers--native Nuevomexicanos and long-time residents alike. Despite its popularity, the column was discontinued as a result of the economic downturn. Santa Fe Different is a compilation of Vigil's favorite columns, mostly standing the test of time. Santa Fe is ever-changing but remains a little big town--a major arts center, tourist destination, and the seat of New Mexico government. People unfamiliar with the storied past of New Mexico's capital city may not realize that there is an established, local community with centuries-old lineage. Vigil's razor-sharp observances on life and culture in Santa Fe--including its politics and politicians--reveal both its strengths and downright weaknesses, which many will agree with (or not).

A collaboration between Native activists, professionals, and scholars, Re-creating the Circle brings a new perspective to the American Indian struggle for self-determination: the returning of Indigenous peoples to sovereignty, self-sufficiency, and harmony so that they may again live well in their own communities while partnering with their neighbors, the nation, and the world for mutual advancement. Given the complexity in realizing American Indian renewal, this project weaves the perspectives of individual contributors into a holistic analysis, providing a broader understanding of political, economic, educational, social, cultural, and psychological initiatives. The authors seek to assist not only in establishing American Indian nations as full partners in American federalism and society but also in improving the conditions of Indigenous people worldwide, while illuminating the relevance of American Indian tradition for the contemporary world as it faces an abundance of increasing difficulties.

Rituals and Sisterhoods reveals the previously under-studied world of plebeian single women and single-female-headed households in colonial Mexican urban centers. Focusing on the lower echelons of society, Amos Megged considers why some commoner women remained single and established their own female-headed households, examining their unique discourses and self-representations from various angles.   Megged analyzes these women's life stories recorded during the Spanish Inquisition, as well as wills and bequests, petitions, parish records, and private letters that describe--in their own words--how they exercised agency in male-dominated and religious spaces. Translations of select documents and accompanying analysis illustrate the conditions in which women dissolved their marriages, remained in long-lasting extramarital cohabitations, and formed female-led households and "sisterhoods" of their own. Megged provides evidence that single women in colonial Mexico played a far more active and central role in economic systems, social organizations, cults, and political activism than has been previously thought, creating spaces for themselves in which they could initiate and maintain autonomy and values distinct from those of elite society.   The institutionalization of female-headed households in mid-colonial Mexico had wide-ranging repercussions and effects on general societal values. Rituals and Sisterhoods details the particular relevance of these changes to the history of emotions, sexuality, gender concepts, perceptions of marriage, life choices, and views of honor and shame in colonial society. This book will be of significant interest to students and scholars of colonial Latin American history, the history of Early Modern Spain and Europe, and gender and women's studies.  

In 1912 boxing was as popular a spectator sport in the United States as baseball, if not more so. It was also rife with corruption and surrounded by gambling, drinking, and prostitution, so much so that many cities and states passed laws to control it. But not in New Mexico. It was the perfect venue for one of the biggest, loudest, most rambunctious heavyweight championship bouts ever seen. In Crazy Fourth Toby Smith tells the story of how the African American boxer Jack Johnson--the bombastic and larger-than-life reigning world heavyweight champion--met Jim Flynn on the Fourth of July in Las Vegas, New Mexico. The civic boosters, bursting with pride in their town, raised a hundred thousand dollars for the fight, pushing events like the sinking of the Titanic to the back pages of every newspaper. In the end, once the dust finally settled on the whole unseemly spectacle, Las Vegas would spend the next generation making good on its losses.

Quill and Cross in the Borderlands examines nearly four hundred years of history, folklore, literature, and art concerning the seventeenth-century Spanish nun and writer Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, identified as the legendary "Lady in Blue" who miraculously appeared to tribes in colonial-era New Mexico and taught them the rudiments of the Catholic faith. Sor María, an author of mystical Marian works, became renowned not only for her alleged spiritual travel from her cloister in Spain to the New World, but also for her writing, studied and implemented by Franciscans on both sides of the ocean.Working from original historical accounts, archival research, and a wealth of literature on the legend and the historical figure alike, Anna M. Nogar meticulously examines how and why the legend and the person became intertwined in Catholic consciousness and social praxis. In addition to the influence of the narrative of the Lady in Blue in colonial Mexico, Nogar addresses Sor María's importance as an author of spiritual texts that influenced many spheres of New Spanish and Spanish society. Quill and Cross in the Borderlands focuses on the reading and interpretation of her works, especially in New Spain, where they were widely printed and disseminated.Over time, in the developing folklore of the Indo-Hispano populations of the present-day U.S. Southwest and the borderlands, the historical Sor María and her writings virtually disappeared from view, and the Lady in Blue became a prominent folk figure, appearing in folk stories and popular histories. These folk accounts drew the Lady in Blue into the present day, where she appears in artwork, literature, theater, and public ritual. Nogar's examination of these contemporary renderings leads to a reconsideration of the ambiguities that lie at the heart of the narrative. Quill and Cross in the Borderlands documents the material legacy of a legend that has survived and thrived for hundreds of years, and at the same time rediscovers the historical basis of a hidden writer. This book will interest scholars and researchers of colonial Latin American literature, early modern women writers, folklore and ethnopoetics, and Mexican American cultural studies.

A dramatic, riveting, and deeply researched narrative account of the epic struggle for the West during the Civil War, revealing a little-known, vastly important episode in American history. In The Three-Cornered War Megan Kate Nelson reveals the fascinating history of the Civil War in the American West. Exploring the connections among the Civil War, the Indian wars, and western expansion, Nelson reframes the era as one of national conflict--involving not just the North and South, but also the West. Against the backdrop of this larger series of battles, Nelson introduces nine individuals: John R. Baylor, a Texas legislator who established the Confederate Territory of Arizona; Louisa Hawkins Canby, a Union Army wife who nursed Confederate soldiers back to health in Santa Fe; James Carleton, a professional soldier who engineered campaigns against Navajos and Apaches; Kit Carson, a famous frontiersman who led a regiment of volunteers against the Texans, Navajos, Kiowas, and Comanches; Juanita, a Navajo weaver who resisted Union campaigns against her people; Bill Davidson, a soldier who fought in all of the Confederacy's major battles in New Mexico; Alonzo Ickis, an Iowa-born gold miner who fought on the side of the Union; John Clark, a friend of Abraham Lincoln's who embraced the Republican vision for the West as New Mexico's surveyor-general; and Mangas Coloradas, a revered Chiricahua Apache chief who worked to expand Apache territory in Arizona. As we learn how these nine charismatic individuals fought for self-determination and control of the region, we also see the importance of individual actions in the midst of a larger military conflict. The Three-Cornered War is a captivating history--based on letters and diaries, military records and oral histories, and photographs and maps from the time--that sheds light on a forgotten chapter of American history.

During the Civil War, the Second Colorado Volunteer Regiment played a vital and often decisive role in the fight for the Union on the Great Plains--and in the westward expansion of the American empire. Christopher M. Rein's The Second Colorado Cavalry is the first in-depth history of this regiment operating at the nexus of the Civil War and the settlement of the American West. Composed largely of footloose '59ers who raced west to participate in the gold rush in Colorado, the troopers of the Second Colorado repelled Confederate invasions in New Mexico and Indian Territory before wading into the Burned District along the Kansas border, the bloodiest region of the guerilla war in Missouri. In 1865, the regiment moved back out onto the plains, applying what it had learned to peacekeeping operations along the Santa Fe Trail, thus definitively linking the Civil War and the military conquest of the American West in a single act of continental expansion. Emphasizing the cavalry units, whose mobility proved critical in suppressing both Confederate bushwhackers and Indian raiders, Rein tells the neglected tale of the "fire brigade" of the Trans-Mississippi Theater--a group of men, and a few women, who enabled the most significant environmental shift in the Great Plains' history: the displacement of Native Americans by Euro-American settlers, the swapping of bison herds for fenced cattle ranges, and the substitution of iron horses for those of flesh and bone. The Second Colorado Cavalry offers us a much-needed history of the "guerilla hunters" who helped suppress violence and keep the peace in contested border regions; it adds nuance and complexity to our understanding of the unlikely "agents of empire" who successfully transformed the Central Plains.  

In the powerful and haunting lands of the Southwest, rainbows grow unexpectedly from the sky, mountain lions roam the desert, and summer storms roll over the Colorado River. As a park ranger, Kristofic explores the Ganado valley, traces the paths of the Anasazi, and finds mythic experiences on sacred mountains that explain the pain and loss promised for every person who decides to love. After reconnecting with his Navajo sister and brother, Kristofic must confront his own nightmares of the Anglo society and the future it has created. When the possible deaths of his mentor and of the American future loom before him, Kristofic must find some new way to live in the world and strike some restless path that will lead back to hózhó--a beautiful harmony.

For 300 years, Franciscans were at the forefront of the spread of Catholicism in the New World. In the late seventeenth century, Franciscans developed a far-reaching, systematic missionary program in Spain and the Americas. After founding the first college of propaganda fide in the Mexican city of Querétaro, the Franciscan Order established six additional colleges in New Spain, ten in South America, and twelve in Spain. From these colleges Franciscans proselytized Indians in frontier territories as well as Catholics in rural and urban areas in eighteenth-century Spain and Spanish America. To Sin No More is the first book to study these colleges, their missionaries, and their multifaceted, sweeping missionary programs. By focusing on the recruitment of non-Catholics to Catholicism as well as the deepening of religious fervor among Catholics, David Rex Galindo shows how the Franciscan colleges expanded and shaped popular Catholicism in the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic world. This book explores the motivations driving Franciscan friars, their lives inside the colleges, their training, and their ministry among Catholics, an often-overlooked duty that paralleled missionary deployments. Rex Galindo argues that Franciscan missionaries aimed to reform or "reawaken" Catholic parishioners just as much as they sought to convert non-Christian Indians.

The Grass Shall Grow is a succinct introduction to the work and world of Helen M. Post (1907-79), who took thousands of photographs of Native Americans. Although Post has been largely forgotten and even in her heyday never achieved the fame of her sister, Farm Security Administration photographer Marion Post Wolcott, Helen Post was a talented photographer who worked on Indian reservations throughout the West and captured images that are both striking and informative. Post produced the pictures for the novelist Oliver La Farge's nonfiction book As Long As the Grass Shall Grow (1940), among other publications, and her output constitutes a powerful representation of Native American life at that time. Mick Gidley recounts Post's career, from her coming of age in the turbulent 1930s to her training in Vienna and her work for the U.S. Indian Service, tracking the arc of her professional reputation. He treats her interactions with public figures, including La Farge and editor Edwin Rosskam, and describes her relationships with Native Americans, whether noted craftspeople such as the Sioux quilter Nellie Star Boy Menard, tribal leaders such as Crow superintendent Robert Yellowtail, or ordinary individuals like the people she photographed at work in the fields or laboring for federal projects, at school or in the hospital, cooking or dancing. The images reproduced here are analyzed both for their own sake and in order to understand their connection to broader national concerns, including the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. The thoroughly researched and accessibly written text represents a serious reappraisal of a neglected artist.    

From prominent outdoorsman and nature writer Mark Kenyon comes an engrossing reflection on the past and future battles over our most revered landscapes--America's public lands. Every American is a public-land owner, inheritor to the largest public-land trust in the world. These vast expanses provide a home to wildlife populations, a vital source of clean air and water, and a haven for recreation. Since its inception, however, America's public land system has been embroiled in controversy--caught in the push and pull between the desire to develop the valuable resources the land holds or conserve them. Alarmed by rising tensions over the use of these lands, hunter, angler, and outdoor enthusiast Mark Kenyon set out to explore the spaces involved in this heated debate, and learn firsthand how they came to be and what their future might hold. Part travelogue and part historical examination, That Wild Country invites readers on an intimate tour of the wondrous wild and public places that are a uniquely profound and endangered part of the American landscape.

A 160 page collection of remarkable full color photographs of landscapes and wildlife taken over the last 15 years in and around the area encompassed by the newly created Rio Grande del Norte National Monument. Geraint Smith is one the Southwest's most renowned nature photographers. Born in Wales and raised in a coal mining towns in Wales and Yorkshire, Geraint employs his Welsh storytelling gift illuminating the poignant, piquant, heart stopping details of life though story into this visual record of light, place and wildlife in the northern Rio Grande corridor. Introduction by John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War, Nirvana Blues, The Sterile Cukoo and seventeen other books.

Hiking New Mexico's Chaco Canyon is a guidebook for informed hikers who want a substantive yet accessible guide to hiking and camping at Chaco Canyon in New Mexico, a World Heritage Site that the Zuni, Hopi, Acoma and other pueblos consider their ancestral homeland. The guide offers advice about what to bring to the canyon, information on camping at Chaco's Gallo Campground, and personal accounts of hiking "Downtown Chaco" and the longer, sometimes remote mesa trails. Included is a summary of the canyon's history before, during, and after the Ancestral Puebloan occupation, as well as an overview of current research in the canyon and a bibliography for those who want to learn more. One thousand years ago Chaco Canyon was a metropolis of massive stone structures at the center of Chaco culture. The book also includes maps and over fifty of the author's photographs.

The author of more than twenty books and a revered contributor to numerous national publications, Charles Bowden (1945-2014) used his keen storyteller's eye to reveal both the dark underbelly and the glorious determination of humanity, particularly in the borderlands between the United States and Mexico. In America's Most Alarming Writer, key figures in his life--including his editors, collaborators, and other writers--deliver a literary wake for the man who inspired them throughout his forty-year career. Part revelation, part critical assessment, the fifty essays in this collection span the decades from Bowden's rise as an investigative journalist through his years as a singular voice of unflinching honesty about natural history, climate change, globalization, drugs, and violence. As the Chicago Tribune noted, Bowden wrote with the intensity of Joan Didion, the voracious hunger of Henry Miller, the feral intelligence and irony of Hunter Thompson, and the wit and outrage of Edward Abbey. An evocative complement to The Charles Bowden Reader, the essays and photographs in this homage brilliantly capture the spirit of a great writer with a quintessentially American vision. Bowden is the best writer you've (n)ever read.

Lately Nizhoni has been able to detect monsters, like Mr. Charles, her dad's new boss at the oil and gas company. He's also alarmingly interested in Nizhoni and her brother, Mac, their Navajo heritage, and the legend of the Hero Twins. Nizhoni knows he's a threat, but her father won't believe her. When Dad disappears the next day, leaving behind a message that says 'Run!', the siblings and Nizhoni's best friend, Davery, are thrust into a rescue mission that can only be accomplished with the help of Dine Holy People and their weapons. But it will take more than weapons for Nizhoni to become the hero she was destined to be...

A FINALIST FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD From Willy Vlautin,  award-winning author of Lean on Pete and The Motel Life, comes a powerful exploration of identity and loneliness pulled from deep within America's soul. Don't Skip Out On Me is going to make your heart crumple into a little wad of paper and then open it back up into a perfect paper airplane sailing the skies from the hand of a boy. How does a bi-cultural man find a self when he's been abandoned by his parents? He invents it, that's how, with his hands, his fists, and that fist-shaped muscle, a heart. No one anywhere writes as beautifully about people whose stories stay close to the dirt. Willy Vlautin is a secular--and thus real and profoundly useful--saint." --Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Book of Joan   Horace Hopper has spent most of his life on a Nevada sheep ranch, but dreams of something bigger. Mr. and Mrs. Reese, the aging ranchers, took him in and treated him like a son, intending to leave the ranch in his hands. But Horace, ashamed not only of his half-Paiute, half-Irish heritage, but also of the fact his parents did not want him, feels as if he doesn't belong on the ranch, or anywhere. Knowing he needs to make a name for himself, he decides to leave the only loving home he's known to prove his worth as a championship boxer. Mr. Reese is holding on to a way of life that is no longer sustainable. He's a seventy-two-year-old rancher with a bad back. He's not sure how he'll keep things going without Horace but he knows the boy must find his own way. To become a champion Horace must change not just the way he eats, trains, and thinks, but who he is. Reinventing himself as Hector Hildago, a scrappy Mexican boxer, he heads to Tucson and begins training and entering fights. His journey brings him to boxing rings across the Southwest and Mexico and finally, to the streets of Las Vegas, where Horace learns he can't change who he is or outrun his destiny. A beautiful, wrenching portrait of a downtrodden man, Don't Skip Out on Me narrates the struggle to find one's place in a vast and lonely world with profound tenderness, and will make you consider those around you--and yourself--differently.

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST * Latinas of Indigenous descent living in the American West take center stage in this haunting debut story collection--a powerful meditation on friendship, mothers and daughters, and the deep-rooted truths of our homelands.  "Here are stories that blaze like wildfires, with characters who made me laugh and broke my heart."--Sandra Cisneros FINALST FOR THE STORY PRIZE * LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE FOR DEBUT SHORT STORY COLLECTION Kali Fajardo-Anstine's magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado--a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite--these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force. In "Sugar Babies," ancestry and heritage are hidden inside the earth but tend to rise during land disputes. "Any Further West" follows a sex worker and her daughter as they leave their ancestral home in southern Colorado only to find a foreign and hostile land in California. In "Tomi," a woman leaves prison and finds herself in a gentrified city that is a shadow of the one she remembers from her childhood. And in the title story, "Sabrina & Corina," a Denver family falls into a cycle of violence against women, coming together only through ritual. Sabrina & Corina is a moving narrative of unrelenting feminine power and an exploration of the universal experiences of abandonment, heritage, and an eternal sense of home. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Public Library * Kirkus Reviews * Library Journal  "Sabrina & Corina isn't just good, it's masterful storytelling. Fajardo-Anstine is a fearless writer: her women are strong and scarred witnesses of the violations of their homelands, their culture, their bodies; her plots turn and surprise, unerring and organic in their comprehensiveness; her characters break your heart, but you keep on going because you know you are in the hands of a master. Her stories move through the heart of darkness and illuminate it with the soul of truth."--Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents "[A] powerhouse debut . . . stylistically superb, with crisp dialogue and unforgettable characters, Sabrina & Corina introduces an impressive new talent to American letters."--Rigoberto González, NBC News

"Over the past few years, Elizabeth Jacobson has become one of my favorite American poets. Her work is original, deep, serious, and sensuous in ways that surprise me repeatedly. In the way of true inquiry, Jacobson's poems unearth genuinely new feelings and knowledge in a clean, mature and fully achieved style. These poems carry heavy water, fetched from deep nature, in human hands. I love this book." --Tony Hoagland "This wild, remarkable book begins in painstaking definition, via what isn't--to strange and dazzling discoveries of the natural world, to instinct and melancholia and surprise. This poet wanders through a range of poetic architecture--an eight-sectioned poem which begins with a woman removing her body parts, epistolary poems, prose poems, small strange lyrics of love and bewilderment. Genuine curiosity fuels this book and (can we bear it?) a true savoring of the world. Elizabeth Jacobson starts in clarity and ends in mystery, two points of imaginative departure. Beware and rejoice: this is how a very original brain thinks itself into poems." --Marianne Boruch "Snakes, birds, insects, and all manner of strange encounters: Elizabeth Jacobson is a true observer immersed in the natural world. These poems arise out of a deep questioning; they are puzzles, tangled road maps we can't help but follow. It takes some wisdom to abide, as Jacobson's work does, so effortlessly in paradox. I am moved to wonder, to breathe and slow down, experiencing how, as she says--the whole world is in me. Through her love of the particular a great expanse opens within us. These are the poems we need and long for right now." --Anne Marie Macari Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air is a collection of poems wealthy with the speaker's intimacy with nature and with the philosophical and spiritual insights that emerge from a deep practice of close observation. In a manner that is wonderfully relaxed and conversational, Jacobson's poems enter into the most venerable and perennial of our human questions.

"Yellow Boy, Killer of Witches, returns wounded from a cat-and-mouse chase and rifle duel with Blood of the Devil, the giant Mexican-Comanche witch whose head is painted like a skull, his body covered with black spiral and flame tattoos. The witch, also wounded, disappears into the dry plains across the Rio Grande, knowing the Apache he left bleeding in the sand will one day reappear. With the Army occupation ended Yellow Boy, Juanita, their new baby daughter, and his Mescalero band return to the reservation. Better days come with the arrival of a strong but fair Indian agent, W.H.H. Llewellyn, who the Mescaleros call "Tata Crooked Nose." Yellow Boy joins Llewellyn's tribal police, and for a time becomes an Army Scout participating in General Crook's Sierra Madre Campaign returning Apaches to the San Carlos Reservation. He finds and faces Blood of the Devil, but later loses his daughter to pneumonia sweeping the reservation. Warned of his destiny by Geronimo, he dreams of a young boy he will one day save from murder. Blood of the Devil, Book 2 of the Life and Times of Yellow Boy, Mescalero Apache, continues Killer of Witches's powerful story; truth told with fiction that transports the reader to a different background, culture, history, time, and religion. It is the other side of Apache history lived by a people fighting the tsunami of Americans migrating west and the terrors of their supernatural insights as their White Eye overseers attempt to change their culture"--

The Last Warrior, The Life and Times of Yellow Boy, Mescalero Apache, Book 3, continues the powerful story of the Mescalero Apaches fighting for tribal survival against determined ignorance from autocratic government overseers, countering attacks from those misusing their supernatural powers, and choosing sides in White Eye conflicts. Yellow Boy, the last warrior, stands in the turmoil helping to save his tribal culture, destroying a witch seeking blood vengeance, and bringing justice to an American crime. It is truth told with fiction that transports the reader to different times and places, cultures and religions, histories and backgrounds disappearing with the passing of the old Apaches, the other side of Apache history lived by a people who survived the battle for their life-ways.

A long simmering Tularosa basin range war between big cattle companies and small operators boiled over when the famous attorney for the Southeastern New Mexico Livestock Association, Albert Fountain, and his eight-year-old son Henry, disappeared 1 February 1896 and were never found again. Republicans immediately assumed Oliver Lee, small rancher, fast gun, and a leading Democrat, murdered the Fountains. Three years later Lee and friend James Gililland were brought to trial in the little mining town of Hillsboro for the murder of Henry Fountain. Quickly morphing into a political donnybrook, with leading Republicans for the prosecution and leading Democrats for the defense, the trial swore seventy-five witnesses, lasted eighteen days, and went to the jury at midnight. After deliberating eight minutes, the jury voted not guilty.

Blanche Harriman, with her red pixie haircut and an eye for fashion, defies the conventional image of a 78-year-old as she becomes involved in affairs surrounding the murder of the headmistress at an elite girls' school in Santa Fe. She's managing a contentious search for a new head when questios arise about the school's valuable art collection. Blanche forges ahead fearlessly despite the warnings from Detective Enrique Otero of the Santa Fe Police Department who cautions her about taking unnecessary risks. She enists help from classy Esther Zamora, a friend knowledgeable about New Mexico art. Frank Sanders, retired banker, helps soothe her frazzled nerves with an outing to Tent Rocks, a magical landscape that will leave readers Googling for directions. Death of The Head has loads of local color, Santa Fe style, and mouthwatering New Mexico cuisine.

Before Willa Cather turned primarily to the fiction that made her reputation, she produced striking poems that were collected in April Twilights. It was her literary debut, preceding the publication of O Pioneers! by nine years. In her introduction distinguished Cather scholar Bernice Slote notes that this edition of April Twilights restores what had been "an almost lost, certainly blurred, portion of the creative life of a great novelist." Among the thirty-seven selections are the much-anthologized "Grandmither, Think Not I Forget" and the highly evocative "Prairie Dawn." This printing includes a new introduction by Robert Thacker that provides new insights into Cather and her poetry.    

Named a "Best Poetry Book of 2019" by Electric Literature, Entropy Mag, and Auburn Avenue Named a "Favorite Book of 2019" by Lit Hub Named a "Best Queer Book of 2019" by BuzzFeed and Book Marks Selected by Kathy Fagan as a winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series,Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers is a debut collection of poems by a dazzling geologist of queer eros. Drunktown, New Mexico, is a place where men "only touch when they fuck in a backseat." Its landscape is scarred by violence: done to it, done on it, done for it. Under the cover of deepest night, sleeping men are run over by trucks. Navajo bodies are deserted in fields. Resources are extracted. Lines are crossed. Men communicate through beatings, and football, and sex. In this place, "the closest men become is when they are covered in blood / or nothing at all." But if Jake Skeets's collection is an unflinching portrait of the actual west, it is also a fierce reclamation of a living place--full of beauty as well as brutality, whose shadows are equally capable of protecting encounters between boys learning to become, and to love, men. Its landscapes are ravaged, but they are also startlingly lush with cacti, yarrow, larkspur, sagebrush. And even their scars are made newly tender when mapped onto the lover's body: A spine becomes a railroad."Veins burst oil, elk black." And "becoming a man / means knowing how to become charcoal." Rooted in Navajo history and thought, these poems show what has been brewing in an often forgotten part of the American literary landscape, an important language, beautiful and bone dense. Sculptural, ambitious, and defiantly vulnerable, the poems ofEyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers are coal that remains coal, despite the forces that conspire for diamond, for electricity.

Living in El Paso, just a mile from the Rio Grande, Octavio is a skinny brown kid on the border, riding his bike out into the desert, growing up among those who live there and those passing through on their way North. Rituals of childhood and rites of passage are remembered as singular, dramatic events, moment of trauma and transformation with life-changing reverberations.