Debunks the great tourist myth, and explains how the Santa Fe architectural and design style, so popular with millions of visitors today, was consciously created by Anglos in the early 20th century.

David L. Caffey's book tells the story of the rise and fall of the Santa Fe Ring, looking beyond myth and symbol to explore the history of this remarkably durable alliance.

"In 2010, Santa Fe officially turns 400 - four centuries of a rich and contentious history of Indian, Spanish, and American interactions. Pueblo Indians settled along the banks of the Rio Santa Fe as long ago as the sixth century C.E. By 1610, Spanish colonists had established the town as a distant outpost in Spain's expanding empire. Drawing on recent archaeological discoveries and historical research, this updated edition of a classic history details the town's founding, its survival through revolt and reconquest, its turbulent politics, its lively trade with Mexico and the United States, and the lives of its most important citizens, from the governors Peralta, Vargas, and Armijo to the madam dona Tules. The origins and transformations of the very building blocks of Santa Fe, from the iconic Palace of the Governors to the city's acequia irrigation system, are revealed in these pages."--BOOK JACKET.

When New Mexico became an alternative cultural frontier for avant-garde Anglo-American writers and artists in the early twentieth century, the region was still largely populated by Spanish-speaking Hispanos. Anglos who came in search of new personal and aesthetic freedoms found inspiration for their modernist ventures in Hispano art forms. Yet, when these arrivistes elevated a particular model of Spanish colonial art through their preservationist endeavors and the marketplace, practicing Hispano artists found themselves working under a new set of patronage relationships and under new aesthetic expectations that tied their art to a static vision of the Spanish colonial past. In A Contested Art, historian Stephanie Lewthwaite examines the complex Hispano response to these aesthetic dictates and suggests that cultural encounters and appropriation produced not only conflict and loss but also new transformations in Hispano art as the artists experimented with colonial art forms and modernist trends in painting, photography, and sculpture. Drawing on native and non-native sources of inspiration, they generated alternative lines of modernist innovation and mestizo creativity. These lines expressed Hispanos’ cultural and ethnic affiliations with local Native peoples and with Mexico, and presented a vision of New Mexico as a place shaped by the fissures of modernity and the dynamics of cultural conflict and exchange. A richly illustrated work of cultural history, this first book-length treatment explores the important yet neglected role Hispano artists played in shaping the world of modernism in twentieth-century New Mexico. A Contested Art places Hispano artists at the center of narratives about modernism while bringing Hispano art into dialogue with the cultural experiences of Mexicans, Chicanas/os, and Native Americans. In doing so, it rewrites a chapter in the history of both modernism and Hispano art. Published in cooperation with The William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

The author explores the status of being a misfit as something to be embraced, and social misfits as being individuals of value who have a place in society, in a work that encourages people who have had difficulty finding their way to pursue their goals.

"Hailed by many as the most accessible of all epic narratives recounting a classic Pueblo Indian story of creation, migration, and ultimate residence, this version of the Acoma Pueblo creation myth offers a unique window into Pueblo Indian cosmology and its dramatic, ancient history. It reveals how one premodern society answered key existential questions and formed its guiding social, religious, and economic customs. In 1928 it was narrated by Edward Proctor Hunt, a Pueblo Indian man from the mesa-top village of Acoma, New Mexico, to Smithsonian Institution scholars. In this new edition, Peter Nabokov renders this important document into clear sequence, adds excerpted material from the original storytelling sessions, and explains the creation and roles of such central myths in American Indian cultures." -- Back of cover.

This is a book of scenes and portraits from three centuries of the society of Santa Fe, New Mexico, the city which was for so long the northernmost capital of Spain in the New World. Since its foundation in 1610, it has known a variety of social life and an enlivening contrast, and a commingling of several different races. This volume tries to describe that life in the sequence of time during periods of significant change and throughout a succession of conquests from early Spanish colonial times to the present.