Yearning for his roots and for a return to the land of his birth, Lucero follows two families across 12 generations, from their entry into New Mexico at "La Toma del Rio del Norte," in 1598, to their achievement of statehood in 1912 and beyond.

The land to the south of the villa of Santa Fe was a series of ridges, like ripples in the earth. Indians standing on the roofs of the casas reales in the pre-dawn hours of December 16, 1693, could see across the ruins of the village to the hills beyond. The sun was just beginning to light the mountains to the east. Across the snowy hills came a winding army of men, wagons, and stock riding up from the south. The army, as warlike in appearance as any that ever marched to meet an opposing force, came slowly, a long beige snake spiked with muskets, horse snaffles, and lances glinting in the sun. The colonists’ first sight of the large, fortress-like casas, the former government buildings and the residence of the Spanish governor, was marked by an outburst of extraordinary fervor. After the agonies of the past two-and-one-half months, the Army of Reconquest had finally reached its goal. The Indians and colonists observed each other across a great expanse as the army approached the city’s walls. Colonized in 1598 and driven into exile in 1680, the Spaniards were aware that theirs might be the first colony to be defeated by an indigenous people. They had made several previous attempts at reconquest, but each of these attempts had failed. The Spaniards were finally successful in 1692 in achieving a bloodless, but only ritual repossession. The actual occupation and resettlement of the New Mexico Kingdom, however, would prove to be a deadly affair. This book completes Lucero’s trilogy—Voices in the Stillness—regarding New Mexico’s colonial history. It provides an account of the better than 20 ancestral families—his forebears—that returned with the Army of Reconquest. Based on a true series of events, the book sets out the particulars of the Pueblo Indian Revolt of 1680 and its aftermath, as told from the viewpoints of the Lucero de Godoy and Gomez Robledo families and some of the other New Mexico colonists who experienced it. Author of several books regarding the New Mexico colony (The Adobe Kingdom, A Nation of Shepherds, The Rosas Affair, all from Sunstone Press), Dr. Lucero meticulously retraced the colonists’ deadly retreat, as well as the trails of their several attempts at reconquest, as part of his research for this book.

This book is considered to be the starting place for anyone having family history ties to New Mexico, and for those interested in the history of New Mexico. Well before Jamestown and the Pilgrims, New Mexico was settled continuously beginning in 1598 by Spaniards whose descendants still make up a major portion of the population of New Mexico.

The Spanish began to settle New Mexico in the sixteenth century, and although scholars have long known the names of those settlers, this is the first book to place the colonists on the map. Using documentary, genealogical, and archaeological sources, Elinore M. Barrett depicts the settlement patterns of Spaniards in New Mexico from the beginning of colonization in 1598 up to 1680, when the Pueblo Revolt forced the colonists to retreat for a time. Barrett describes the natural environment and the Pueblo villages that the Spanish colonists encountered, as well as the activities of the Spanish civil and religious establishments related to land, labor, and tribute and the mission and mining landscapes the colonists created. She also recounts the founding and settling of Santa Fe and analyzes demographic dynamics, adding a new dimension to studies of the colonial Southwest.

Studies of seventeenth-century New Mexico have largely overlooked the soldiers and frontier settlers who formed the backbone of the colony and laid the foundations of European society in a distant outpost of Spain's North American empire. This book, the final volume in the Coronado Historical Series, recognizes the career of Juan Domínguez de Mendoza, a soldier-colonist who was as instrumental as any governor or friar in shaping Hispano-Indian society in New Mexico. Domínguez de Mendoza served in New Mexico from age thirteen to fifty-eight as a stalwart defender of Spain's interests during the troubled decades before the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. Because of his successful career, the archives of Mexico and Spain provide extensive information on his activities. The documents translated in this volume reveal more cooperative relations between Spaniards and Pueblo Indians than previously understood.

Zettie Mae Painter Garcia was the last of 12 Painter children born in Stockton, Utah, on July 26, 1912. She married Robert Garcia on June 15, 1931 in Southgate, California. She is the mother of Robert Aaron and Nancy Mae, both born in Taos County, New Mexico.