A short history of a secret and sacred Spanish-American Catholic brotherhood who have pledge themselves to Christian devotions.

This study by an author with intergenerational ties to the Penitentes--the deeply religious group called Hermanos de la Luz (Brothers of the Light)--ties the santero folk art of New Mexico, the Penitente Brotherhood, and the Penitente religious hymns together. (Christian)

An insight into the secretive life and history of the Penitentes based on the author's experiences, family journals, interviews, and site visits in Colo. and New Mexico. Numerous photos of Penitentes, their rituals, instruments, and moradas. Personal interviews, actual journals, prayers and songs.

I have great love for preserving and retelling unwritten history that my great-grandparents, grand-parents, parents, and I have lived to tell about. I have great ambitions to save our culture and to retell stories of how our ancestors lived. I believe that among the things that shape our lives, perhaps our history is the most significant. I have always had a dream that someday I would be given the opportunity to be able to retell the stories of our ancestors. I have great hopes that you can help me get this book, The Penitentes, published so many of our people can read this and imagine what our lives were like. I believe this book should be published because what is written is exactly what I witnessed as a child and young adult. I have written what my grandparents and parents shared with me about the way of living that actually was the government of this small villages. That is exactly how they learned to live and follow rules in a civilized world. I have never read a book written about the Penitentes, where the author actually saw and or experienced their way of living. Our language and culture has been preserved for hundreds of years because of this secret society. They are the ones that brought the Castilian Spanish to our area. The purpose of this book is to share how our culture, morals, and values were being developed in a very low profile way of living, and their way of living by their strong ways still exists in our small rural communities. This book can be read by many different people who have a wide variety of interests. They may be interested in the area, or they may want to learn a very different way of how a village functioned many years ago, how the villages were formed, and the purpose and responsibility of everyone in their individual village. I believe our culture has been denied or our real way of living for hundreds of years was wrongly described. I believe my book will attract different people who have interest in culture, ethnics, history, and how the real Hispanics lived hundreds of years ago, a totally different form of government that worked just fine for the people who lived in these areas. I believe my book is unique and very culturally related to all Hispanics.

As a result, Carroll concludes, Penitente membership facilitated the rise of the modernin New Mexico and--however unintentionally--made it that much easier, after the territory's annexation by the United States, for the Anglo legal system to dispossess Hispanos of their land.

Michael Wallis's straightforward text and Craig Varjabedian's unadorned photos capture the deep piety of the Penitente Brotherhood and their complex relationship with their history and the modern world.