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.

The author's personal meditation on his cultural heritage is also a kind of spiritual autobiography of the Hispano people of New Mexico. In evoking this special closeness between the divine and the human, he returns repeatedly to the Penitentes of New MexicoNthe societies of men who scourge themselves and replay the Crucifixion each Holy Week to share the sufferings of their Savior.

Chicano Catholicism—both as a popular religion and a foundation for community organizing—has, over the past century, inspired Chicano resistance to external forces of oppression and discrimination including from other non-Mexican Catholics and even the institutionalized church. Chicano Catholics have also used their faith to assert their particular identity and establish a kind of cultural citizenship. Based exclusively on original research and sources, Mario T. García here offers the first major historical study to explore the various dimensions of the role of Catholicism in Chicano history in the twentieth century. This is also one of the first significant studies in the still limited field of Chicano religious history. Topics range from how early Chicano Catholic intellectuals and civil rights leaders were influenced by Catholic Social Doctrine, to the role that popular religion has played in the lives of ordinary men and women in both rural and urban areas. García also examines faith-based Chicano community movements like Católicos Por La Raza in the 1960s and the Sanctuary movement in Los Angeles in the 1980s. While Latino/a history and culture has been, for the most part, inextricably linked with the tenets and practices of Catholicism, there has been very little written, until recently, about Chicano Catholic history. García helps to fill that void and explore the impact—both positive and negative—that the Catholic experience has had on the Chicano community.

For forty years, A Colorado History has provided a comprehensive and accessible panoramic history of the Centennial State. From the arrival of the Paleo-Indians to contemporary times, this enlarged edition leads readers on an extraordinary exploration of a remarkable place.

For fifty years, A Colorado History has provided a comprehensive and accessible panoramic history of the Centennial State. From the arrival of the Paleo-Indians to contemporary times, this enlarged edition leads readers on an extraordinary exploration of a remarkable place. "A Colorado History has been, since its first appearance in 1965, widely recognized as an exemplary work of its kind." --The Colorado Magazine Experience Colorado with this new, enlarged edition of A Colorado History. For fifty years, the authors of this preeminent resource have led readers on an extraordinary exploration of how the state has changed—and how it has stayed the same. From the arrival of Paleo-Indians in the Mesa Verde region to the fast pace of the twenty-first century, A Colorado History covers the political, economic, cultural, and environmental issues, along with the fascinating events and characters, that have shaped this dynamic state. In print for fifty years, this distinctive examination of the Centennial State is a must-read for history buffs, students, researchers—or anyone—interested in the remarkable place called Colorado.

Long before English speakers set eyes upon it, the volcanic plug on the south bank of the Huerfano River was tagged with a moniker that means "the orphan." Spanish conquistadors saw it as a rock pile that God dumped in the middle of nowhere, an odd little cone far removed from the regular foothills edging the Sangre de Cristo Mountain Range. In the 18th century, this outcropping and the river that bears the same name were famous landmarks for Native American tribes, Hispanic explorers, and French adventurers. Then in the 19th century, along came US mountain men, gold-seekers, cowboys, sheep ranchers, railroad workers, town developers, and coal miners from 31 different countries, speaking 27 different languages. Counterculture revolutionaries discovered the area in the 1960s and established five separate communes west of Walsenburg. Each wave of immigrants brought new perspectives and lifestyles.

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.