El Cerrito, New Mexico : eight generations in a Spanish village /

Historical geographer Nostrand (Univ. of Oklahoma) has spent much of his highly productive career studying the regional cultural landscapes and sense of place of the Hispanic population of New Mexico: those people descended from original Spanish settlers of the Upper Rio Grande Valley. Building on his regional knowledge and work with students in the field over 20 years, Nostrand has undertaken a very rich and highly detailed genealogy of one village, El Cerrito, from its first settlement in the very early 19th century to the present. Each chapter covers an approximately 25-year period (a generation), assessing the dominant or characteristic challenge villagers then faced--obtaining land, building farms, and developing livestock raising--and then responding to external forces undermining the community they had built, even as those forces provided opportunities for modernization and interaction with an expansive world. Nostrand brings archival work, landscape study, and extensive interviews to his analysis, which he augments with maps, tables, and photographs. This book is a model study of a single place and should appeal to both general audiences for its readability and advanced students for its methodology. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. J. S. Wood University of Southern Maine