John L. Kessell's Spain in the Southwest presents a fast-paced, abundantly illustrated history of the Spanish colonies that became the states of New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California. With an eye for human interest, Kessell tells the story of New Spain's vast frontier--today's American Southwest and Mexican North--which for two centuries served as a dynamic yet disjoined periphery of the Spanish empire.

Chronicling the period of Hispanic activity from the time of Columbus to Mexico's independence from Spain in 1821, Kessell traces the three great swells of Hispanic...

This book, originally published in 1989 and long unavailable, is reissued in conjunction with the completed multi-volume translation of the official correspondence of don Diego De Vargas, late seventeenth-century governor and re-coloniser of New Mexico. These personal letters not only illuminate their author but the history of New Mexico as don Diego experienced it. Like the Journals of don Diego de Vargas, this volume reflects years of document collection, translation, and annotation by the Vargas Project directed by John L Kessell.

A documentary account of the resettlement of New Mexico composed of journals and official government records from the late 17th century.

Documents the legal manoeuvring at Santa Fe, Mexico City, and Madrid, as sitting governor, former governor, and groups of contending colonists struggle to make themselves heard and advance their interests.

In this, the sixth and final volume of the journals of don Diego de Vargas, Kessell and his colleagues continue their exploration of politics and society in the colonial New Mexico of the turn of the eighteenth century. Despite serious charges of malfeasance brought against him by agents of his political enemy Governor Pedro Rodriguez Cubero, Vargas was acquitted after three years of court hearings and legal manoeuvring in the court in Mexico City. With his acquittal came reappointment to the governor's seat in New Mexico. The journals reveal that maintaining peace in New Mexico during...

For more than four hundred years in New Mexico, Pueblo Indians and Spaniards have lived "together yet apart." Now the preeminent historian of that region's colonial past offers a fresh, balanced look at the origins of a precarious relationship.

John L. Kessell has written the first narrative history devoted to the tumultuous seventeenth century in New Mexico. Setting aside stereotypes of a Native American Eden and the Black Legend of Spanish cruelty, he paints an evenhanded picture of a tense but interwoven coexistence. Beginning with the first permanent Spanish settlement among the Pueblos...

This tenderhearted story, based on the love letters the author's father wrote to the woman who became his wife in 1933, including numerous excerpts, is told by their son for those of us who have experienced or imagined the love of a lifetime.

Having retaken Santa Fe by force of arms late in 1693, Diego de Vargas faces unrelenting challenges, waging active warfare against defiant Pueblo Indian resisters while maintaining peace with Pueblo allies; providing homes, food, and supplies for 1,500 unsure colonists; and bidding unceasingly for greater support from viceregal authorities in Mexico City. At the head of combined units of Spanish and Pueblo fighting men, the governor in 1694 leads repeated assaults on castle-like fortified sites. Through combat, prisoner exchange, and negotiation, he reestablishes the kingdom. Franciscans...

The Bicentennial of the United States in 1976 gave rise to myriad projects. In New Mexico-still a borderlands possession of Spain in 1776-an unusually keen Franciscan observer, Fray Francisco Atanasio Dominguez, painted an extraordinarily detailed and often unflattering word picture of the colony. "The Missions of New Mexico, 1776," impeccably translated and edited by distinguished historians Eleanor B. Adams and Fray Angelico Chavez, is a single source like no other that reveals life in raw and remote, late-eighteenth-century New Mexico. Dispatched from Mexico City as canonical inspector of...