Written as an autobiography, the author lets this famous willow wood statue speak for herself, tell her own story from the time she was brought to New Mexico in 1625 by Fray Benavides until the present. Many photographs bring this remarkable history to life. Fray Angelico researched, translated and annotated facts about the statue's history, its religious society, its fiestas and chapels, correcting the mistakes and folklore held as truth for more than two centuries. Fray Angelico Chavez has been called a renaissance man and New Mexico's foremost twentieth-century humanist by biographer Ellen...

He has been called a renaissance man and New Mexico's foremost twentieth-century humanist by biographer Ellen McCracken. Any way you measure his career, Fray Angelico Chavez was an unexpected phenomenon in the wide and sunlit land of the American Southwest. In the decades following his ordination as a Franciscan priest in 1937, Chavez performed the difficult duties of an isolated backcountry pastor. His assignments included Hispanic villages and Indian pueblos. As an army chaplain in World War II, he accompanied troops in bloody landings on Pacific islands, claiming afterwards that because of...

As the Spaniards were preparing to reconquer Santa Fe from the Pueblo Indians in 1692, Captain-General Don Diego de Vargas solemnly vowed to build a special chapel for his own favorite statue of Our Lady of the Rosary should he gain a quick victory, and also to hold a yearly procession in her honor. The image was carried into battle and the Spaniards gained an effective conquista, and thereafter this particular image came to be known as La Conquistadora. Other legends and practices grew around these bare essentials of the story. Many people have tried, in all sincerity, to evaluate the...

A gentle wood carver whose santos are stolen; an old hunchback who, with the help of Our Lady, comes into her own; a horse thief innocent of wrong intents-theirs are the stories that Fray Angelico paints, framing them with exquisite art in the manner of the medieval triptych. Born and bred in the land of sunshine and silence, Fray Angelico Chavez has a threefold heritage and a threefold gift. Heir to the artistic tradition of Spanish New Mexico, steeped in the spirit of Franciscan mysticism, and word-perfect in the folklore of the adobe village, he interprets the ageless spirit of his people...

This unusual book, Fray Angelico Chavez's personal meditation on his cultural heritage, is also a kind of spiritual autobiography of the Hispano people of New Mexico. The spirit of New Mexico, he feels, grows out of its dry mountain terrain whose hills and valleys resemble those of Spain and of ancient Palestine. Just as this kind of landscape helped the Hebrew shepherd Abraham to find his God, so in Fray Angelico's view, have New Mexico's mountains kept her people close to their God. In evoking this special closeness between the divine and the human, the author returns repeatedly to the...