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Reviews 251 able . . has had his troubles with popularity and fashion, but Nolte believes that we may in many ways be “just now catching up with Jeffers.” If so, Jeffers may achieve the enduring influence he hoped for. Nolte’s book, like those of Squires, Carpenter, Everson, Coffin, Brophy, and Shebl, is an indispensable contribution to a re-evaluation. JERRY A. HERNDON, Murray State University Hispano Folklife of New Mexico. By Lorin W. Brown, with Charles L. Briggs and Marta Weigle. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 279 pages, $15.00.) Although Brown collected the manuscripts for this book in the late 1930’s, the portrait of the village and its people could characterize a num­ ber of our rural New Mexico villages of today. However, only a bilingual native of the state could gather such information from the inhabitants and present it so warmly and vividly. In Briggs’ and Weigle’s brief biography of Brown in Part I, he is established as a qualified collector of such information. Here we glimpse Brown’s Taos boyhood with his curandera grandmother of Hispano and Puebleño ancestry and his Hispano grandfather, a former student of the rebel priest, Padre Martinez, whom Willa Cather portrayed so vividly. We come to understand the lifestyle which led Brown to Cordova, New Mexico, to take a position left vacant by his teacher-mother. Thus began his interest in that Hispano community thirty-five miles northeast of Santa Fe. Brown became popular among the artists and writers of Santa Fe, entertaining the Applegate-Austin crowd yearly in Cordova during Holy Week at which time they watched the proceedings of Los Hermanos. He accepted a position with the Federal Writers’ Project and collected the information that is presented in Part II. This fascinating section, edited and organized by Briggs and Weigle, contains sketches, stories, dramas, hymns, songs, and adages recorded and translated by Brown who went to the elders of the community to re-capture the past in order to preserve personal views, memories, and stories that had been handed down since the establishment of Cordova in the mid-1700’s. His sketches of the ancianos are among the most heart-warming of all the manuscripts. Tía Lupe (Guadalupe Martinez) becomes a most mem­ orable person. The “aunt” of the villagers, she “was all things to all peo­ ple” (p. 129), regardless of their ages, and she was well over seventy when 252 Western American Literature Brown wrote his sketch. She comes to life as a beautiful old woman with gnarled hands, heavily wrinkled face, lively brown eyes, lilting Spanish voice talking to the holy figures in the church and scolding them as she dusts and cares for them through the years. She jokes about a saint, “The saints are human like the rest of us, except that they have access to God’s ear and so can intercede for us” (p. 132). Other village people and the many stories and tales that are included show us the intimate, quiet life of Hispanos of Cordova. As Briggs and Weigle state, “This presentation thus closes with a rich perspective on old age, the Church, death, mourning, and life lived fully in the knowledge of death and the hope of life eternal” (p. 38). For the researcher, there is a useful appendix which includes valuable information on the Federal Writers’ Project, plus a bibliography of Brown’s manuscripts and a supplemental compilation of Hispano folklife in New Mexico. As Brown says in his foreword, “Careful nurture with cautious fanning and the addition of dry grass, twigs, or dried bark will soon reward you with a bright blaze, a cheerful and warming flame for your enjoyment” (p. x). LYNN MONCUS, New Mexico State University Women, Women Writers, and the West. Edited by L. L. Lee and Merrill Lewis. (Troy, N. Y.: Whitston, 1979. 252 pages, $15.00.) Women, Women Writers, and the West is by no means a book pro­ claiming the existence of a rugged women’s liberation in the frontier West; rather, it provides a close look at elements of the American West, both past and present, as told by women writers and those who write about...

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