How did a southern evangelical religion, culturally, racially, and geographically homogeneous, become the largest Protestant denomination by 1960 in a region as diverse as New Mexico? And why did the Baptist Church's growth in New Mexico level off after the mid 1980s? In examining these two questions, historian Daniel Carnett connects the answers to national trends in the history of Protestant America in the twentieth century.

In 1540 Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, the governor of Nueva Galicia in western Mexico, led an expedition of reconnaissance and expansion to a place called Cíbola, far to the north in what is now New Mexico. The essays collected in this book bring multidisciplinary expertise to the study of that expedition. Although scholars have been examining the Coronado expedition for over 460 years, it left a rich documentary record that still offers myriad research opportunities from a variety of approaches.

Volume contributors are from a range of disciplines including history, archaeology, Latin American studies, anthropology, astronomy, and geology. Each addresses as aspect of the Coronado Expedition from the perspectives of his/her field, examining topics that include analyses of Spanish material culture in the New World; historical documentation of finances, provisioning, and muster rolls; Spanish exploration in the Borderlands; Native American contact with Spanish explorers; and determining the geographic routes of the Expedition.

In Gabriel García Márquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, a character articulates the fascination goods, technology, and modernity held for many Latin Americans in the early twentieth century when he declares that “incredible things are happening in this world.” The modernity he marvels over is the new availability of cheap and useful goods. Steven Bunker’s study shows how goods and consumption embodied modernity in the time of Porfirio Díaz, how they provided proof to Mexicans that “incredible things are happening in this world.”

In urban areas, and especially Mexico City, being a consumer increasingly defined what it meant to be Mexican. In an effort to reconstruct everyday life in Porfirian Mexico, Bunker surveys the institutions and discourses of consumption and explores how individuals and groups used the goods, practices, and spaces of urban consumer culture to construct meaning and identities in the rapidly evolving social and physical landscape of the capital city and beyond. Through case studies of tobacco marketing, department stores, advertising, shoplifting, and a famous jewelry robbery and homicide, he provides a colorful walking tour of daily life in Porfirian Mexico City. Emphasizing the widespread participation in this consumer culture, Bunker’s work overturns conventional wisdom that only the middle and upper classes participated in this culture.

Cueva, ciudad y nido de águila es la culminación de un proyecto internacional de investigaciones y una serie de reuniones organizadas por el Moses Mesoamerican Archive y centradas en el manuscrito pictórico del siglo XVI llamado el Mapa de Cuauhtinchan núm. 2. Pintado sobre un soporte de papel de amate que mide 109 x 204 centímetros, este documento extraordinario contiene más de setecientas imágenes y símbolos que relatan la historia del surgimiento de los ancestros en Chicomoztoc, su migración a la ciudad sagrada de Cholula, su fundación y asentamiento de Cuauhtinchan, la historia de su pueblo y sus reclamaciones sobre el paisaje circundante, y muchos otros sucesos a lo largo del camino.

In this engaging study Genaro Padilla enters into Villagrá’s epic poem of the Oñate expedition to reveal that the soldier was no mere chronicler but that his writing offers a subtle critique of the empire whose expansion he seems to be celebrating. A close reading of the rhetorical subtleties in the poem, Padilla argues, reveals that Villagrá surreptitiously parodies the King and Viceroy for their failures of vision and effectively dismantles Oñate as the iconic figure he has become today. Padilla’s study is not simply a close reading of this challenging work; it is also a lucid critique of our modern engagement with foundational documents, cultural celebrations, and our awareness of our relationship with New Mexico’s complicated multicultural legacies.

Elected for two-year terms, frontier sheriffs were the principal peace-keepers in counties that were often larger than New England states. As officers of the court, they defended settlers and protected their property from the ever-present violence on the frontier. Their duties ranged from tracking down stagecoach robbers and serving court warrants to locking up drunks and quelling domestic disputes.The reality of their job embraced such mandane duties as being jail keepers, tax collectors, quarantine inspectors, court-appointed executioners, and dogcatchers.

From the beginning, Phoenix sought to grow, and although growth has remained central to the city’s history, its importance, meaning, and value have changed substantially over the years. The initial vision of Phoenix as an American Eden gave way to the Cold War Era vision of a High Tech Suburbia, which in turn gave way to rising concerns in the late twentieth century about the environmental, social, and political costs of growth. To understand how such unusual growth occurred in such an improbable location, Philip VanderMeer explores five major themes: the natural environment, urban infrastructure, economic development, social and cultural values, and public leadership. Through investigating Phoenix’s struggle to become a major American metropolis, his study also offers a unique view of what it means to be a desert city.

Discarded Pages is Cab Cumí's life narrative accompanied by her essays, poems, personal narratives, and political and public policy papers. Titled in honor of Cab Cumí's earliest writings which she had thrown away thinking them of little value, Discarded Pages showcases her expressions and thoughts within the context of her eventful and unusual life. In addition to translations of her work, Cab Cumí's original Spanish and Yucatec Maya writings are included in the book.

This study examines the politics of postcolonial state-building through the lens of disease and public health policy in order to trace how indigenous groups on the periphery of power and geography helped shape the political practices and institutions of modern Mexico. Placing Yucatán at the center of an international labor force, global economics (due to the henequen boom), and a modernizing medical establishment, Heather McCrea incorporates the region into a larger discussion about socioeconomic change and the pervasive role that health care, or lack thereof, plays in human society.

Writing in a clear, lively style, Barnes offers general overviews of every variety of disease and their carriers, from insects and worms through rodent vectors to household pets and farm animals. She devotes whole chapters to major infectious diseases such as leprosy, syphilis, smallpox, and influenza. Other chapters concentrate on categories of diseases ("gut bugs," for example, including cholera, typhus, and salmonella). The final chapters cover diseases that have made headlines in recent years, among them mad cow disease, West Nile virus, and Lyme disease.