This fully updated, comprehensive record of the original Spanish families of New Mexico in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries marks the two distinct periods of colonization.

He 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 aficionado's 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 is now bringing back into print some of these rare titles.

Fray Francisco Atanasio Dominguez, canonical inspector of the missions of New Mexico in 1776, compared most everything in New Mexico to Mexico City, "the delightful and alluring cradle of my birth, for which no praise is ever adequate." And hardly anything measured up. He disparaged the people of New Mexico and the religious art of Spanish immigrant Bernardo de Miera y Pacheco. Then, by an ironic twist later in 1776, Dominguez found himself on a five-month vision quest with Miera and Fray Silvestre Velez de Escalante. Dominguez likened New Mexican churches to hacienda granaries, wine cellars, or Mexican pulque parlors. He found fault with certain of his Franciscan brethren, calling them on their drunkenness, insubordination, or public scandal. Yet all the while, Father Dominguez maintained the keen eye and curiosity of a born observer. From no other document do we learn so much about daily life in raw and remote late colonial New Mexico. How much a nanny goat cost (2 pesos), a fat pig (12 pesos), a trade knife (1 buffalo hide), a captive Indian girl from twelve to twenty years old (2 good horses and assorted dry goods), or the funeral of a Spanish child with tall cross and cope (8 pesos); how to prepare atole or chocolate (not coffee); the resentment of the colony's merchants toward their Chihuahua creditors and the fatalism of New Mexican families living under constant threat of Comanche attack; or where to catch trout-such details abound. Dominguez's superiors, however, resentful of his unflattering wordiness and occasional wit, filed his commentary away unceremoniously and forgot it. Since its rediscovery in 1928 and now published in a new edition, the unparalleled Dominguez report has often been compared to the 1630 and 1634 memorials of Fray Alonso de Benavides. The contrast could scarcely be sharper. Benavides looked out hopefully upon a young colony bent upon the Christian conversion of the Pueblo Indians, and Dominguez saw realistically what an ever more secular world had wrought. Whereas Benavides condemned Pueblo Indian ceremonial kivas as dens of devil worship, Dominguez routinely inventoried them as men's club houses. For their timely views, we are deeply indebted to both men. The collaboration of Eleanor B. Adams-woman of letters, editor, and historian of colonial Latin America-and Fray Angelico Chavez-man of letters, priest, artist, and historian of Hispanic New Mexico-could not have been more fortuitous. Together, they polished for us this unique window on late-eighteenth-century New Mexico, providing a seamless translation as well as explanatory materials. It is more than fitting that by their art the words of the uncompromising Father Dominguez live on.

As the Spaniards were preparing to reconquer Santa Fe from the Pueblo Indians in 1692, Captain-General Don Diego de Vargas solemnly vowed to build a special chapel for his own favorite statue of Our Lady of the Rosary should he gain a quick victory, and also to hold a yearly procession in her honor. The image was carried into battle and the Spaniards gained an effective conquista, and thereafter this particular image came to be known as La Conquistadora. Other legends and practices grew around these bare essentials of the story. Many people have tried, in all sincerity, to evaluate the historic aspects of the tradition and to draw the best plausible conclusions therefrom, but Fray Angelico Chavez seemed best suited to detail the origins and development of America's oldest devotion to the Virgin Mary in a scholarly yet devout manner. Fray Angelico Chavez, in the decades following his ordination as a Franciscan priest in 1937, 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, some of which are published by Sunstone Press.

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.

Fray Angelico Chavez was an American Franciscan priest, historian, researcher, author, poet, and painter. This rare collection of writings combines Chavez's early fiction with his little-known novel "Guitars and Adobes", originally published in 1931-32 in serialised form. The novel presents an alternative Hispano vision to Willa Cather's famed "Death Comes for the Archbishop".