This unusual book, Fray Angelico Chavez's personal meditation on
his cultural heritage, is also a kind of spiritual autobiography of
the Hispano people of New Mexico. The spirit of New Mexico, he
feels, grows out of its dry mountain terrain whose hills and
valleys resemble those of Spain and of ancient Palestine. Just as
this kind of landscape helped the Hebrew shepherd Abraham to find
his God, so in Fray Angelico's view, have New Mexico's mountains
kept her people close to their God. In evoking this special
closeness between the divine and the human, the author returns
repeatedly to the Penitentes of New Mexico-the societies of men who
scourge themselves and replay the Crucifixion each Holy Week to
share the sufferings of their Savior. Some of his ideas will spark
controversy over the meaning of New Mexico's past, but Fray
Angelico Chavez's viewpoint, representing that of many native
Spanish Americans, deserves the attention of every reader with an
interest in the state's Hispanic heritage. No one can read this
book without gaining a new understanding of the world of the New
Mexican Hispano imbedded in the dry, hilly landscape of the
majestic Sangre de Cristo mountains. FRAY ANGELICO CHAVEZ has been
called a renaissance man and New Mexico's foremost
twentieth-century humanist by biographer Ellen McCracken. Any way
you measure his career, Fray Angelico Chavez was an unexpected
phenomenon in the wide and sunlit land of the American Southwest.
In the decades following his ordination as a Franciscan priest in
1937, Chavez performed the difficult duties of an isolated
backcountry pastor. His assignments included Hispanic villages and
Indian pueblos. As an army chaplain in World War II, he accompanied
troops in bloody landings on Pacific islands, claiming afterwards
that because of his small stature, Japanese bullets always missed
him. In time, despite heavy clerical duties, Fray Angelico managed
to become an author of note as well as something of an artist and
muralist. Upon all of his endeavors one finds, understandably, the
imprint of his religious perspective. During nearly seventy years
of writing, he published almost two dozen books. Among them were
novels, essays, poetry, biographies, and histories. All true
aficionados of the American Southwest's history and culture will
profit by collecting and reading the significant body of work left
to us by the remarkable Fray Ange1ico Chavez. Sunstone Press has
now brought back into print some of these rare titles.
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