Everyone was in for a surprise in 1909 when New Mexico declared open the Spanish American Normal School at El Rito. The school had been founded to train teachers for the vast region of the "Rio Arriba" in which there were few schools and the citizenry still did not speak English, sixty years after becoming a territory of the United States. The Territory of New Mexico, in quest of statehood, had decided that fluency of its people in English would earn it the right to become one of the Forty-eight, which it did three years later. State and school officials were dismayed that few students were...