Once upon a time in the Mora Valley of northern New Mexico there lived a farmer named Ponciano Gutierrez. On a trip through the mountains he was taken captive by Vicente Silva and his gang of bank robbers. This tale of Ponciano's quick-witted escape has been a bedtime story for generations in the Paiz family.

New Mexico authors at the turn of the last century published many accounts of the crimes of Vicente Silva. This book is the first to present a Silva legend that has been kept alive by families in Mora since the 1890s. The Paiz family version is presented in English with a Spanish translation by A. Gabriel Melendez.

In the shadow of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, New Mexico's Mora Valley harbors the ghosts of history: troubadours and soldiers, Plains Indians and settlers, families fleeing and finding home. There, more than a century ago, villagers collect scraps of paper documenting the valley's history and their identity - military records, travelers' diaries, newspaper articles, poetry, and more - and bind them into a leather portfolio known as ""The Book of Archives."" When a bomb blast during the Mexican-American War scatters the book's contents to the wind, the memory of the accounts lives on instead in the minds of Mora residents. Poets and storytellers pass down the valley's traditions into the twentieth century, from one generation to the next. In this pathbreaking dual-language volume, author A. Gabriel Melendez joins their ranks, continuing the retelling of Mora Valley's tales for our time. A native of Mora with el don de la palabra, the divine gift of words, Melendez mines historical sources and his own imagination to reconstruct the valley's story, first in English and then in Spanish. He strings together humorous, tragic, and quotidian vignettes about historical events and unlikely occurrences, creating a vivid portrait of Mora, both in cultural memory and present reality. Local gossip and family legend intertwine with Spanish-language ballads and the poetry of New Mexico's most famous dueling troubadours, Old Man Vilmas and the poet Garcia. Drawing on New Mexican storytelling tradition, Melendez weaves a colorful dual-language representation of a place whose irresistible characters and unforgettable events, and the inescapable truths they embody, still resonate today.

Hidden Chicano Cinema examines how New Mexico, situated within the boundaries of the United States, became a stand-in for the exotic non-western world that tourists, artists, scientists, and others sought to possess at the dawn of early filmmaking, a disposition stretching from the silent era to today as filmmakers screen their fantasies of what they wished the Southwest Borderlands to be. The book highlights ""film moments" in this region's history including the ""filmic turn" ushered in by Chicano/a filmmakers who created new ways to represent their community and region. A. Gabriel Melendez narrates the drama, intrigue, and politics of these moments and accounts for the specific cinematic practices and the sociocultural detail that explains how the camera itself brought filmmakers and their subjects to unexpected encounters on and off the screen. Such films as Adventures in Kit Carson Land, The Rattlesnake, and Red Sky at Morning, among others, provide examples of movies that have both educated and misinformed us about a place that remains a ""distant locale" in the mind of most film audiences.

Hidden Chicano Cinema examines how New Mexico, situated within the boundaries of the United States, became a stand-in for the exotic non-western world that tourists, artists, scientists, and others sought to possess at the dawn of early filmmaking, a disposition stretching from the silent era to today as filmmakers screen their fantasies of what they wished the Southwest Borderlands to be. The book highlights "film moments" in this region's history including the "filmic turn" ushered in by Chicano/a filmmakers who created new ways to represent their community and region. A. Gabriel Melendez narrates the drama, intrigue, and politics of these moments and accounts for the specific cinematic practices and the sociocultural detail that explains how the camera itself brought filmmakers and their subjects to unexpected encounters on and off the screen. Such films as Adventures in Kit Carson Land, The Rattlesnake, and Red Sky at Morning, among others, provide examples of movies that have both educated and misinformed us about a place that remains a "distant locale" in the mind of most film audiences.

El feliz ingenio neomexicano is a bilingual recovery edition of Obras de Felipe Maximiliano Chacon, el Cantor Neomexicano: Poesia y prosa, the first collection of poetry published by a Mexican American author. Journalist and author Felipe M. Chacon, part of a distinguished and active family of nuevomexicano authors, published the book in 1924. El feliz ingenio neomexicano (that "inspired New Mexican wit") reestablishes Chacon's work and his reputation by making the text widely available to readers for the first time in nearly a century. With Nogar and Melendez's excellent translation of the text, this bilingual volume offers access to both English and Spanish editions for scholars and students from a variety of disciplines. Additionally, the in-depth introduction and appendix materials gathered by the editors place Chacon's book in the context of the time in which it was printed, offering a unique insight into the work. A welcome volume for scholars and literature lovers alike, El feliz ingenio neomexicano is a groundbreaking work of literary recuperation.

Eusebio Chacon, born in Pe-asco, New Mexico, is arguably one of the most significant and most overlooked figures in New Mexico's cultural heritage. He earned a law degree from Notre Dame and returned to practice law in Trinidad, Colorado. He served as a district attorney for Las Animas County, Colorado, and as a translator for the U.S. Court of Private Land Claims. In 1898, he began to write and edit for El Progreso, in which many of his articles exposed the unjust treatment of Hispanics in Colorado and New Mexico. He was also New Mexico's first novelist, and took pride in his pioneering efforts to establish a Nuevomexicano literary tradition. This collection of Chacon's writings brings together all published and written materials found, displaying his versatility with samples of his work as an accomplished orator, translator, essayist, historian, novelist, and poet.