My Penitente Land: Reflections on Spanish New Mexico

Albuquerque, New Mexco: University of New Mexico Press - A Coyote Book, 1974. First Edition Stated . Hard Back. Very Good/Very Good. 7 3/4" x 10 1/4. 272 Pages. Beautiful red boards with lettering to spine and front. No defects noted. Although we were truly Hispanic in blood, language, religion, and customs, we were no longer Spaniards, writes Fray Angelico Chavez, describing his boyhood in northern New Mexico. Nor were we really Mexicans, as our North European-derived neighbors chose to call us. The differences were a matter of cultural and linguistic development from a parting of the ways with both Hispanic Europe and Hispanic Middle America down three centuries and a half. 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 very 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. A Franciscan mission padre for thirty-four years, Fray Angelico Chavez has spent most of his life in the villages of northern New Mexico. His ancestors were among the earliest Spanish settlers of the region. Telling the story of New Mexico's people, from those Spaniards who first made their way up the Rio Grande Valley from El Paso del Norte to their descendants who faced the advancing American frontier, Fray Angelico is writing about the men and women whose heritage he shares.