By Rick Hendricks, Ph.D. New Mexico State Historian At present, little is known of the origins of Antonio de Otermín, although some information exists about the family. The House of Otermín was based in the Consejo of Gaintza, municipality of Araitz in the Basque province of Navarre. The community…
by Lena McQuade In Spanish partera means midwife or a person who assists women during labor and delivery. In New Mexico, parteras are usually Spanish speaking, empirically trained, midwives. It is estimated that between 800 and 900 women practiced as parteras in the early 1900s. By 1951 there were…
10 1814 By William H. Wroth Jean Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888) was the first bishop and archbishop of the Diocese of Santa Fe. He was born in Lempdes in Auvergne, a region in southern France in October 1814, one of eleven children of Jean and Marie Dié Lamy. His parents…
Cerro Tome, Tomé Hill When Otermín led his party and many Indian refugees south from Isleta toward El Paso on the east side of the Río Grande early in 1682, he noted passing “Serillo de Tome” (Hackett 1915:391). On September 6, 1692 Vargas noted that the road in the…
by Estevan Arellano For the early settlers who braved the “Jornada del Muerto,” or Journey of the Dead from Mexico to northern New Mexico in 1598, it was not simply a matter of finding good soil and water to plant in order to survive, it also meant learning to…
By Allegra Huston In January 2002, as I sat in a New York City taxi on my way into Manhattan from JFK airport, I was suddenly hit with waves of nausea. I clenched my stomach, determined to hold on until I reached my friend’s apartment. She was four months…
By Orae Dominguez Doña Maria Gertrudis Barceló, she preferred the name Madame La Tules, was well known as an expert card dealer. Her fame as the best Monte dealer spread throughout the territories. She was literate, shrewd, and an independent businesswoman who had amassed wealth and power as a…
By Richard Flint and Shirley Cushing Flint A major player in the re-conquest of New Mexico in the 1690s under Diego de Vargas was Antonio de Valverde Cosío. He became interim governor of the province in 1715 and was named to the post in his own right in 1718….
Salineros in the Estancia Valley; "Late in the fall when all the crops were in, her father and five or six, sometimes more, men in the neighborhood would go in their wagons to the salinas (salt lakes). . . ." Chana does not know where these salinas were, but…
1630 by Matthew Martinez, Ohkay Owingeh Popé is revered as the leader of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Pueblo scholars refer to him as the one who carried out the first successful American revolution against a foreign colonial power, Spain. Popé (Ripe Pumpkin) was from Ohkay Owingeh (known today…
