A Drama Of The Southwest

This book, a critical edition of a previously unpublished 1935 manuscript, makes A Drama of the Southwest available to readers for the first time.

Isabel visits her aunts on Saturdays. They dance, dress up, and make empanadas.

One of the great festival traditions shared by Pueblo and Hispano across New Mexico is the celebration Los Comanches. In this series of winter festivals, communities come alive with colorful processions, boisterous ceremonial dance, allegorical nativity plays, and a folk drama on horseback which portrays the 1779 defeat of famed war chief Cuerno Verde. In a mixture of defiance and emulation, these events honor the historic relations of war and peace with the Comanches, the feared and admired warriors and traders of the south plains who once held the fate of all New Mexico in their hands. Lamadrid and Gandert provide historic, poetic, and photographic documentation of one of the richest legacies of the upper Rio Grande, a cultural crossroads known for its mestizo traditions and transcultural exchanges. A CD anthology of "Comanche" music accompanies a stunning selection of Gandert's photographs.

Hidden Chicano Cinema examines how New Mexico, situated within the boundaries of the United States, became a stand-in for the exotic non-western world that tourists, artists, scientists, and others sought to possess at the dawn of early filmmaking, a disposition stretching from the silent era to today as filmmakers screen their fantasies of what they wished the Southwest Borderlands to be. The book highlights “film moments” in this region’s history including the “filmic turn” ushered in by Chicano/a filmmakers who created new ways to represent their community and region. A. Gabriel Meléndez narrates the drama, intrigue, and politics of these moments and accounts for the specific cinematic practices and the sociocultural detail that explains how the camera itself brought filmmakers and their subjects to unexpected encounters on and off the screen. Such films as Adventures in Kit Carson Land, The Rattlesnake, and Red Sky at Morning, among others, provide examples of movies that have both educated and misinformed us about a place that remains a “distant locale” in the mind of most film audiences.

Gathers riddles, rhymes, folk poetry, stories, ballads, superstitions, customs, games, foods, and folk arts of the Mexican-Americans