Book Description

"The Spanish Redemption contributes an extremely important chapter to the burgeoning literature on the construction of whiteness in the United States, to our understanding of the shifting and complicated relationship between ethnicity and class, and a concrete example of how culture can be used to shape political and economic identities. With considerable dexterity and authority, with nuance and subtly, with newly utilized archival evidence, and with a glorious narrative flair, Montgomery fastidiously describes the racial politics that were played out through the cultural production of an imagined Spanish past."—Ramón Gutiérrez, author of When Jesus Came the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846, and co-editor of Contested Eden: California Before the Gold Rush "Between the two world wars, villagers in northern New Mexico became Spanish Americans rather than Mexican Americans, and artists, writers, and boosters celebrated their previously despised arts, crafts, architecture, foods, and folkways. With probing intelligence and graceful, limpid prose, Montgomery tells the remarkable story of this shift in regional identity and its disturbing and enduring consequences. The "quaint" Hispano villages of northern New Mexico will never look the same."—David J. Weber, author of The Spanish Frontier in North America