"Father Edward Bastien was known in each of his South Texas parishes as a priest who would happily join in his parishioners' latest plumbing or electrical battles at home at the same time that he worked toward their spiritual well-being at church. But only when he arrived in the poor border town of Zapata, soon to be flooded by the building of the U.S.-Mexico Falcon Dam, did his tenacious efforts to help his parishioners fight the battle of their lives earn him the honorary moniker of the Fighting Father of Zapata." "Maria Rollin knew Father Bastien when she was a child. He gave her family a copy of his Zapata letters interspersed with his personal musings and anecdotes of the events of that time. Later Rollin realized that this man's manuscript is a humorous yet powerful personal account of bureaucracy gone amok, of poor South Texans forced into a diaspora, and of a priest who was willing to fight for the temporal as well as the spiritual needs of those who had no voice. This is his story."--BOOK JACKET.

In 1600 they were the largest, most technologically advanced indigenous group in northwest Mexico, but today, though their descendants presumably live on in Sonora, almost no one claims descent from the Ópatas. The Ópatas seem to have “disappeared” as an ethnic group, their languages forgotten except for the names of the towns, plants, and geography of the Opatería, where they lived. Why did the Ópatas disappear from the historical record while their neighbors survived? David Yetman, a leading ethnobotanist who has traveled extensively in Sonora, consulted more than two hundred archival sources to answer this question. The result is an accessible ethnohistory of the Ópatas, one that embraces historical complexity with an eye toward Opatan strategies of resistance and assimilation. Yetman’s account takes us through the Opatans’ initial encounters with the conquistadors, their resettlement in Jesuit missions, clashes with Apaches, their recruitment as miners, and several failed rebellions, and ultimately arrives at an explanation for their “disappearance.” Yetman’s account is bolstered by conversations with present-day residents of the Opatería and includes a valuable appendix on the languages of the Opatería by linguistic anthropologist David Shaul. One of the few studies devoted exclusively to this indigenous group, The Ópatas: In Search of a Sonoran People marks a significant contribution to the literature on the history of the greater Southwest.

The life of Mexican Revolutionary Emiliano Zapata was the stuff that legends are made of. Born and raised in a tiny village in the small south-central state of Morelos, he led an uprising in 1911--one strand of the larger Mexican Revolution--against the regime of long-time president Porfirio Díaz. He fought not to fulfill personal ambitions, but for the campesinos of Morelos, whose rights were being systematically ignored in Don Porfirio's courts. Expanding haciendas had been appropriating land and water for centuries in the state, but as the twentieth century began things were becoming desperate. It was not long before Díaz fell. But Zapata then discovered that other national leaders--Francisco Madero, Victoriano Huerta, and Venustiano Carranza--would not put things right, and so he fought them too. He fought for nearly a decade until, in 1919, he was gunned down in an ambush at the hacienda Chinameca. In this new political biography of Zapata, Brunk, noted journalist and scholar, shows us Zapata the leader as opposed to Zapata the archetypal peasant revolutionary. In previous writings on Zapata, the movement is covered and Zapata the man gets lost in the shuffle. Brunk clearly demonstrates that Zapata's choices and actions did indeed have an historical impact.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries northwestern Mexico was the scene of ongoing conflict among three distinct social groups—Indians, religious orders of priests, and settlers. Priests hoped to pacify Indians, who in turn resisted the missionary clergy. Settlers, who often encountered opposition from priests, sought to dominate Indians, take over their land, and, when convenient, exploit them as servants and laborers. Indians struggled to maintain control of their traditional lands and their cultures and persevere in their ancient enmities with competing peoples, with whom they were often at war. The missionaries faced conflicts within their own orders, between orders, and between the orders and secular clergy. Some settlers championed Indian rights against the clergy, while others viewed Indians as ongoing impediments to economic development and viewed the priests as obstructionists. In this study, Yetman, distinguished scholar of Sonoran history and culture, examines seven separate instances of such conflict, each of which reveals a different perspective on this complicated world. Based on extensive archival research, Yetman’s account shows how the settlers, due to their persistence in these conflicts, emerged triumphant, with the Jesuits disappearing from the scene and Indians pushed into the background.

An elegy composed on the death of his father, Jorge Manrique's 'Coplas' has occupied a prominent position in the literature of Spain from its original composition in the 15th century to the present day. The author of this book examines its sources, structure, transmission, critical reception and fame throughout the centuries.