State Records Administrator
505.476.7955
Rick Hendricks was born in Waynesville, North Carolina, nestled between the Great Smokey and Blue Ridge Mountains. Rick received his B. A. in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his Ph.D. in Ibero American Studies at the University of New Mexico. He also attended the Universidad de Sevilla in Spain. He is a former editor of the Vargas Project at the University of New Mexico, a long-term, historical editing project that transcribed, translated, and annotated the papers of New Mexico governor Diego de Vargas.
Rick has been a historical consultant for Sandia, Santa Ana, and Picuris Pueblos in New Mexico and Ysleta del Sur in Texas. After the conclusion of the Vargas Project, he worked in the Archives and Special Collections Department at New Mexico State University Library. While there he took part in the project to microfilm the Archivos Históricos del Arzobispado de Durango and the Archivos Históricos de Sombrerete and edited the guides to those collections. At NMSU Rick also taught courses in colonial Latin America and Mexican history.
He has written or collaborated on numerous books and articles on the history of the American Southwest and Mexico. His writings have garnered awards from the Historical Society of New Mexico, the New Mexico Historical Review, the El Paso County Historical Society, the Border Regional Library Association, and the Doña Ana County Historical Society. His most recent book, The Casads: A Pioneer Family of the Mesilla Valley, was published in 2012 by Rio Grande books. He edited the Southern New Mexico Historical Review, a publication of the Doña Ana Historical Society, for a decade. Rick is a past president of the Historical Society of New Mexico and is a long-time member of the Advisory Council of the Center for Big Bend Studies at Sul Ross State University.
He is currently completing a biography of Spanish-Mexican patriot Father Antonio Severo Borrajo. Rick’s leisure time is usually filled with soccer. He served on the High Noon Soccer League board for ten years, six as president. He coached for ten years and is a referee, referee instructor, and referee assignor. Rick’s wife, Lois Stanford, a cultural anthropologist, is an associate professor on the faculty at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. His son, William, is a student at NMSU, majoring in Biology. The family’s life is enriched by a loving rescue dog named Mischa, a Labrador-Australian Heeler mix, and a Husky named Talia.