New Mexico Books

From El Planeta Platica Lawrence Taylor and Maeve Hickey's The Road to Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 1997) offers a delicious narrative and evocative photos on the blue highways stretching from Tucson, Arizona to Magdalena de Kino, Sonora. "The Old Nogales Highway is a road, like the fabled Route 66, shares in an American romance different from that of that of the interstate. Here, the up-to-date sits awkwardly, unstylishly cheek by jowl with the embarrassingly eccentric and the downright ugly." (p. 58) Proving that travel is best enjoyed when it's not rushed, the authors take time to talk to the people who live in the Sonoran Desert. Anthropologist Taylor quotes a wide range of people from American Automobile Association clerks "Lots of cars get stolen down there" to muralists to cattle ranchers. The book finds its voice in this regional chorus and turns its focus on picturesque characters, such as the U.S.-borne mariachi who won't cross the borderline: "Fernando was not about to risk the Mexico of his imagination, of his mariachi, by penetrating that border. He would consider flying over it, landing in the center of the nation, in the Guadalajara of Mariachi Vargas, but Fernando Sanchez was not going to take the road to Mexico." (p. 9)

I grew up spending weekends and long vacations in the town of Ruidoso, New Mexico, and I thought I knew everything about the place. Then, one day I got my hands on a copy of this book and devoured it with absolute pleasure. Do you know the story of the haunted hotel that stood where Bonito Dam now stands? Do you know the speculations about the dissapearance of Albert Fall at White Sands? Did you ever wonder how the world's finest quarterhorse race came to Ruidoso Downs? Ever wondered what it was like to grow up in a cabin along the Rio Ruidoso? Can't get enough about Billy the Kid? If these questions intrigue you, you NEED this book!

A society under stress must change or be destroyed. A pre-columbian Native American village in the Southwest has endured many years of drought and has reached its breaking point. Will the external forces of nature or the internal strife of the people be the hammer that shatters the village? This question is explored through the eyes of a boy, named Salt in the language of his people. Salt survives the machinations of a powerful member of his tribe, then begins a quest to find salvation for his people. Ostensibly a novel for young adults, Runner in the Sun presents a complex metaphor to explore the forces of societal change within a familiar hero-quest plot. The story seems simple but has rich soil in which anthropological and linguistic fruit may grow. Even the boy's name, Salt, carries metaphorical depth. As the village's water evaporates in drought, what is left is the people's true essence--the minerals the water carried. D'Arcy McNickle's lifelong focus on the shape of Indian society and its relationship to its surrounding world are expressed in the mythic context of Runner in the Sun (which is also a plain good read, too).

A rather different FSA photobook from the others in my collection. In July 1940 Russell Lee took, over two weeks, a serious of photos to make an in-depth record of a typical Hispanic community in New Mexico. The photos were to be published as a 'Spanish-American' story rather than the usual FSA images of rural poverty.

The eighty-six (from more than 250) photos work so well to convey life in the two villages and surrounding area. The seven chapters cover: The Villages, Farming, Adobe construction, Handicrafts, Domestic scenes, The outside world and Religion. Lee's camera makes every shot count so that by the time you get to the last photo you'll get the feeling that perhaps you known these people more than the time it takes to turn the pages. The excellent captions, originally written by Lee's wife Jean have additional input from the two authors: William Wroth and Charles Briggs.

I think this is a wonderful book of photos and my only criticism is that the paper (actually perfectly adequate) isn't better to really make these images sparkle.

Surprisingly New Mexico has more FSA photobooks than any other state, look out for 'Far from Main Street' (ISBN 0890132593) with a hundred or so beautifully printed photos, 'Women of New Mexico' (ISBN 0941270548) and I can particularly recommend Nancy Wood's 'Heartland New Mexico' (ISBN 0826310729).

I usually shy away from reading biographies written by relatives of the subject, since I suspect they may not be objective. This book is by Ruth Hanna McCormick's granddaughter but she never knew her grandmother - and was probably better able to gain information which her relatives had. I found this account of the life of the first woman ever to be nominated by a major political party for a US Senate seat to be well-written and to tell well the interesting life which Ruth Hanna MCCormick Simms led. Ruth was the daughter of Mark Hanna, the man who made William McKinley president, and she married the brother of Colonel Robert McCormick, longtime boss of the Chicago Tribune. Her husband won a Senate seat in 1918 defeating the legendary J. hamilton Lewis. After her husband was defeated for reelection and took his own life, his widow was elected to Congress in 1928, and then ran for the Seante in 1930, defeating the incumbent Senator in the Republican primary but in turn losing to--J. Hamilton Lewis, the man her husband had beaten 12 years earlier. Thereafter she married a man who was a New Mexico Congressman when she met him--he exchanged seats with a Congressman who before the exchange would lean past Mrs. McCormick to use the spittoon. The book also includes a detailed account of Mrs. Simms' effort to make Tom Dewey President in 1940 and reveals interesting aspects of the 1940 campaign and tells how Dewey rebuffed her help in 1944. I found the book a fascinating look into political life from the woman's suffrage effort (in which Mrs. McCormick played a leading role) to the 1940s. Don't avoid this book merely because it was written by a granddaughter.

This book had it all. My friend told me about Mr. Sanderson and I decided to buy this book. I must say that Mr. Sanderson is the only author that I know of who can write a tragic, mysterious comedy all in one. The characters were strange, which made them interesting. The plot was also interesting, and would catch the attention of any action oriented guy. The love scenes would attract any women. The book has it all, (gun smuggling crime romance) and it is a shame that this guy is so underrated. He needs more exposure, because I had to hear of this gem from my dim-witted friend.

regards, K. wheeler

This book treats in great depth the history of San Antonio, Texas. It approaches the history from the standpoint of "community" formation. From an author who served as James Michener's researcher while writing his "TEXAS" one would expect the research is thorough and objective. One is not disappointed!

J. F. de la Teja is the greatest living historian of San Antonio. Here, he puts its history, its people, its institutions, its acequias and how they blend together in a single source. This book covers the early [Spanish] period of the city, and provides the opportunity to see the early settlement, to imagine the lives of those who began a new life here on the far northern reaches of New Spain, back in the early eighteenth century.

It is a "must have" book for anyone interested in San Antonio's early days: an outstanding resource for the student of Texas history.

Here is what the American Historical Review said about this book:

MATTHEW F. BOKOVOY, The San Diego World's Fairs and
Southwestern Memory, 1880-1940. Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press in cooperation with the San
Diego Historical Society, 2005. Pp, xx, 316. $29,95,
Memory and promotion are intrinsically tied to the fair
experience, be it the dusty fairgrounds of a western agricultural
community or the stately buildings of a
world's fair site. Dripping ice cream on scorching pavement,
the rush of crowds, and fantastic architeeture res-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2007
208 Reviews of Books
onant of nationalistic "progress" connect peopte to
places they visited as children or as adults. These memories,
Matthew F. Bokovoy argues, help to create regional--
and contrived--identities. Much has been
written about the role of memory and the construction
of what historians call "the modern Spanish heritage"
of Catifornia and the American Southwest. Bokovoy's
revisionist analysis finds that modern Spanish heritage
represented more than "a tradition of 'false consciousness'
" propagated by "Anglos to denigrate and erase
the contemporary presence of ethnic Mexicans and
American Indians" (p. xvii). While the composite portrait
of southern California envisioned and reinforced
by the San Diego expositions of 1915-1916 and 1935-
1936 was "insensitive" and "untrue" for Native Americans
and ethnic Mexicans, it was also a sympathetic
"set of political understandings" that celebrated cultural
pluratism and ultimately, if inadvertently, "contributed
to the realization of legal, civil rights" (p. xviii).
At the turn of the twentieth century, San Diego may
have been, in the words of D. C. Collier (director-general
of the Panama Exposition), the "gamest city in the
United States and probably the world" (p. 17). It was
also a city of 40,000 diverse residents and a place beset
with a violent colonial past and a host of racial, economic,
and ethnic troubles. Preparations for the 1915
Panama Exposition were hampered at various times by
International Workers of the World-sponsored labor
strife; border violence associated with the Mexican
Revolution; and the arrival of preemptive gambling institutions
and scores of prostitutes. Anglicized respectability,
San Diego's leaders believed, would not come
easy and would require federal funding. After they beat
out New Orleans for the Panama event, San Diego leaders
hired Boston city beautiful advocate John Nolen to
create a "fantasy land of Spanish colonial and missionstyle
architecture" (p. 50) and architect Bertram
Goodhue to create a singularly North American architecture
through the fusion of Indian and Spanish heritage.
Landscape architect Samuel Parsons was paid to
transform the formerly pueblo common lands of Balboa
Park from a rocky, scrubby landscape dotted with wildflowers
and cacti to a sea of "verdant foliage and ample
greensward" (p. 50).
The strength of Bokovoy's book lies in its exhaustive
research--conducted at the San Diego Historical Society,
Smithsonian Institution, Bancroft Library, and
Laboratory of Anthropology--and in its outline of the
evolution and meanings of the Panama Exposition and
its successor, the 1935 San Diego Fair. Fairgoers in
1915 entered grounds transformed by Spanish Renaissance
and mission-style architecture, enormous blooming
flowers, and plateaus graced with views of San Diego
Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The California Building
and its exhibits simultaneously represented the region's
fusion of cultures and the "progress" of humankind. If
visitors tired of Spanish architecture, they could venture
out onto the Painted Desert, a land of pseudopueblos
and Indian peoples engaged in sedentary, artistic
tasks. Anglo visitors could embrace the contrived
primitism of the Painted Desert--peopled with natives
from atl over the country enduring bad housing, degrading
comments, and uncomfortable "Indian" clothes--
"to assuage their anxieties about modernity" (p. 43).
If the 1915 fair solidified San Diego as the capital of
an heroic Spanish-Indian past, the 1935 California-Pacific
International Exposition positioned the city at the
center of the California dream of the future. Like other
national events during the 1930s, this San Diego fair
concerned itself with promotion of a brighter economic
future and sold southern California's unique combination
of weather, resources, and diversity (including a
modern nudist colony). The boulevard leading to Ford
Motor Company's massive circular art deco building
was weirdly reminiscent of Mayan cities. The layout of
the fair reflected architect Richard Requa's effort to
mix modernism with Meso-American elements. Fairgoers
could visit Modeltown, a pseudo-suburb that anticipated
what would become the tract housing developments
of ensuing decades. The fair's Roads of the
Pacific placed visitors in a new Ford and whisked them
along a progression of "great roads of antiquity," from
the Old Santa Fe Trail to the Inca Highway in South
America (p. 192).
The legacies of both of these expositions remain. Balboa
Park today bills itself as "the nation's largest urban
cultural park" (http://www.balboapark.org/). Bokovoy's
research shows that San Diego's fairs were as much reflections
of national culture as they were of local developments.
Bokovoy does little with gender at the
fairs, and his thesis meanders through the book's detailed
treatment of fair landscapes. Still, this trip to San
Diego's fairs should not be missed by cultural U.S. historians,
western historians, borderlands historians, or
fans of Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City (2003).
Like any good fair, it offers an enjoyable ride, along
with some cultural discomfort.

As a high school English teacher who is designing a course on the literature of the Bay Area, I have found this collection of critical essays indespensible. The introduction sets the stage, tying together the landscape, history, and culture of the San Francisco area in order to generate a cohesive view of the literature of this region. The key question here is what makes the literature of the Bay Area distinct? What unifies the literature of this region? Fine and Skenazy present a view of Bay Area writing that ranges from the post-gold rush, pre-earthquake days of Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Ambrose Bierce to modern voices such as Amy Tan, Richard Rodriguez and Maxine Hong Kingston. They illustrate the ways in which the literary scene of the Bay Area has grown and transformed, moving from the newsapaper articles and short stories written from a predominantly white male perspective, to a more inclusive, broder regional identity. Incidently, their definition of "San Francisco stories" is admittedly wide-ranging; they have included writers from as far afield as Santa Cruz to the south and Sacramento to the west. The essays feature analyses of the work of Frank Norris, Jack London, Dashiell Hammett, William Saroyan, Jack Kerouac, Wallace Stegner and others I've mentioned above.

While my interests in the subject at hand are mostly academic, I imagine that anyone interested in the rich--if brief--history of the Bay Area would enjoy reading these essays. As a collection, the essays raise and adress interesting questions about how a place can shape writing. They also ask the reader to look at the character of the Bay Area and consider why it is as it is--unique and complex, a land of travelers, heading forever west, hoping to strike it rich.

If you are going to fish The San Juan River you need this book. Heck for ... with shipping even if the book was bad it couldn't hurt but this book is really great. Shows maps of all the great spots and lots of local tips. I have used one other of the author's books and got "hooked" on their simplicity and usefulness.