Nearly four hundred years old, this unique classic of Southwestern American history is now available in a modern translation to a wide reading public. Fray Alonso de Benavides, a Portuguese Franciscan and third head of the mission churches of New Mexico, published this highly engaging book in 1630 as his official report to the king of Spain. In 1625, Father Benavides and his party travelled north from Mexico City via creaking oxcart and mule back to reach the mission fields of New Mexico. A keen observer, Benavides described New Mexico as a strange land of frozen rivers, Indian citadels, and elusive mines full of silver and garnets. Benavides and his Franciscan brothers built schools, erected churches, engineered peace treaties, gazed in awe at endless miles of buffalo grazing placidly on the Great Plains, and were said to perform miracles. The most thorough and riveting account ever written of Southwestern life in the early seventeen century, A Harvest of Reluctant Souls is at once medieval and a tale of the Renaissance -- a portrait of the Pueblos, the Apaches, and the Navajos at a time of fundamental change in their lives.

A multifaceted reinterpretation of the Pueblo losses of settlements and population from 1540 until after reconquest at the end of the 1600s.

Quill and Cross in the Borderlands examines nearly four hundred years of history, folklore, literature, and art surrounding the legendary Lady in Blue and her historical counterpart, Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda. This legendary figure, identified as seventeenth-century Spanish nun and writer Sor María de Jesús de Ágreda, miraculously appeared to tribes in colonial-era New Mexico and taught them the rudiments of the Catholic faith. Sor María, an author of mystical Marian texts, became renowned not only for her alleged spiritual travel from her cloister in Spain to New Mexico but also for her writing, studied and implemented by Franciscans and others around the world. Working from original historical accounts, archival research, and a wealth of literature on the legend and the historical figure alike, Anna M. Nogar meticulously examines how and why the person and the legend became intertwined in Catholic consciousness and social praxis. Nogar addresses the influence of Sor María’s spiritual texts on many spheres of New Spanish and Spanish society over several centuries. Eventually, the historical Sor María and her writings virtually disappeared from view, and the Lady in Blue became a prominent folk figure in the present-day U.S. Southwest and U.S.-Mexico borderlands, appearing in folk stories, artwork, literature, theater, and public ritual that survives today. Quill and Cross in the Borderlands documents the material legacy of a legend that has survived and thrived for hundreds of years, and at the same time rediscovers the extraordinary impact of a hidden writer.