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  • Death and Dying in New Mexico
  • Jason H. Dormady
Death and Dying in New Mexico. By Martina Will de Chaparro. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Pp. xxiv, 261. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95 cloth.

While death is the universal human act, how the dying experience that act is not. As such, Martina Will de Chaparro explores the adaptation of perceptions and rituals of death to the conditions of Spanish colonial, Mexican, and U.S. territorial New [End Page 451] Mexico. Not seeking to challenge the established Iberian and colonial Spanish literature, the author takes a decidedly H. E. Bolton approach to death in New Mexico, declaring that scholars cannot understand the life of death in the United States without reaching beyond the pale of Puritanism. Protestant New England is not the history of the United States, she argues, and death in New Mexico "demonstrates that there was no single American way of death, and . . . challenges scholars to look beyond the Northeast" (p. xviii).

Will de Chaparro accomplishes this goal by examining wills drafted during the colonial and territorial period to ascertain the perceptions of death in New Mexico. She then compares these wills with published letters and pamphlets from Spain and New Spain on "the good death." In addition, the research includes cultural material from museums and archaeological excavations, painting a complex picture of the ritual of death for both the living and the dying. Topics covered by the text include the disposal of property as part of the transition to the "next world;" the importance of rituals and sacraments in death for both the living and the dead; the care of remains before, after, and during burial; and the ever present interest of arranging for well placed locations under the floors on New Mexican churches. Chapter 4 even provides an account of postmortem cesarean sections which, though not new ground for those familiar with Catholicism, will provide new concepts for those who deal with the scholarship of abortion and the life of the fetus in U.S. history.

Naturally, Will de Chaparro tackles the Bourbon reforms on death and burial as applied in New Mexico. Readers familiar with William B. Taylor or Pamela Voekel will find well-trodden territory, though many will be grateful for the concise manner in which the author explains the reforms for her intended audience of U.S. historians and students. Nevertheless, the regional considerations of the application of good dying in New Mexico such as the high indigenous population (Indians could find a place within churches), small total population, and weather (the impossibility of burying bodies in cemeteries during winter) all serve to place the ritual of death and its reformation in the regional context.

Most interesting and simultaneously frustrating, however, is the final chapter, "Transformations in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century." This is a tantalizing look at the arrival of Anglo American technology and deathways to New Mexico. However, at only nine pages, the chapter rushes through the explosion of imported caskets, death photographs, and embalmers in New Mexico after 1850 and the transition to the use of those items. The general decrease in the interest in "the good death" in the early nineteenth century had, argues the author, planted the seeds for a quiet and easy transition to Anglo American deathways. There is no mention of complaint from either parishioners or their priests, and the only hint we get at resistance to the changes of traditional death practices comes by stating that rural areas were slower to transition than urban areas.

Scholars of Latin America will find this a mildly interesting text of regional adaptations of colonial law and Spanish Catholic practices. Those interested in U.S. [End Page 452] cultural history, particularly death, as well as borderlands historians will find an engaging (if at times too brief) look at culture on the borderlands.

Jason H. Dormady
Stephen F. Austin State University
Nacogdoches, Texas
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