Book Review

Nuevo México Profundo: Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland. By Miguel Gandert, photographer, with essays by Enrique R. Lamadrid, Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Lucy R. Lippard, and Chris Wilson. (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2000. 156 pp. $29.95 paper.)

New Mexico has figured significantly in the work of U. S. scholars since the publication of Hubert Howe Bancroft's History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1530–1888 (San Francisco, 1889). Yet, for much of the succeeding decades, outsiders told New Mexico's story, and much of that story was neglected. In the past decade, a number of studies have sought to correct this. From the publication of Ramón A. Gutiérrez's When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford, 1991) to the publication of Deena J. Gonzalez's Refusing the Favor: Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1821–1880 (New York, 1999), Chicana and Chicano scholars have been telling a different story and from a different perspective.	1
Such is the case with two recently published works, The Contested Homeland: A Chicano History of New Mexico and Nuevo México Profundo: Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland. Using different disciplines and methodologies, these two books help to tell the largely untold story of the region's Chicano/Indo-Hispano people. Although the two works are different in fundamental ways--one is an anthology of historical essays and the other a collection of photographs with accompanying essays--they share a similar premise: Nuevomexicano identity is rooted in a strong sense of place.	2
For many people, New Mexico holds a special place. For countless New Mexicans, it is tierra sagrada, sacred land. Homeland to indigenous people for thousands of years, it was also populated early on in the Spanish Colonial period by a diverse group of settlers sent northward in the late sixteenth century. It is this history that is at the foundation of both books. The editors of Contested Homeland, both former faculty members at the University of New Mexico, created the anthology to fill a void. The collection of interdisciplinary essays examines both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The editors assert that the anthology is unique because of its perspective. The essays examine New Mexico history from a Chicano perspective, that is, from the point of view of "the ethnically identifiable group of people who call themselves Nuevomexicanos and who self-consciously inhabit a place they call their homeland" (p. 9).	3
The book is divided into two sections. The first part includes an overview of the nineteenth century, as well as three historical essays. The overview introduces a number of important themes. Among these are the effects of the Mexican-American War of 1846–48. While other scholars have written about this, the essays in this collection are important because they challenge long-held notions about Nuevomexicano responses to the war.	4
The essay by Carlos Herrera, for example, challenges the often-repeated idea that New Mexico experienced a "passive conquest." The essays by Martin Gonzales De La Vara and Anselmo Arellano support the view that New Mexicans resisted U. S. conquest in a number of ways. Gonzales De La Vara's essay on the relocation of New Mexicans after 1848 examines a little-known program. Following the war, the Mexican government established several repatriation programs, which resulted in the founding of numerous frontier colonies, including La Mesilla. Arellano's piece on Las Gorras Blancas expands on earlier work by Robert J. Rosenbaum, Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest (Austin, 1981).	. . .