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Excerpts from Abe Peña's  Memories of Cibola

All material used with the kind permission of the author, given to me personally.

from PREFACE
"In December 1987 Joe Looney, a reporter with the Grants Daily Beacon, and I were having a cup of coffee at the Monte Carlo Cafe in Grants. He asked about traditional Hispanic Christmas plays or pageants, and I excitedly told him about Los Pastores, the shepherds' pageant performed in San Mateo and other Hispanic villages during the Christmas holidays. He said, "Abe, why don't you write that up for the Beacon?" I came home and wrote what was to be my first story, "Los Pastores." That began a relationship with the paper that continues to this day. Since then, the Beacon has published every story I've given them.


This book is a compilation of those and other stories about the daily lives of the people of northwestern New Mexico, especially the Hispanic people. The people communicated orally, and very little is left in writing. Much of the material for these stories came from listening to people tell their stories and from old-timers who shared their memories with me. Feedback on the stories when they were published was positive and encouraging...


People in the Spanish and Mexican colonial periods were struggling to survive, tending their small farms and livestock and focusing on the church, not on schools. Very few people could write, and most of what was written consisted of official land and court records, kept in Santa Fe by officials who came from Spain. There were also church records, kept by priests trained in Spain.


Little was written or has been published about life in villages, especially in west central New Mexico. This book provides a look into the life of the village. The people you meet are real people. The stories fill a void and provide a window into the past, not only in Cíbola County, but in northern New Mexico and throughout the Southwest where Hispanic people settled with similar customs and traditions.


Memories of Cíbola: Stories from New Mexico Villages consists of six parts, each with a brief introduction, highlighting important locales in the region: Seboyeta, San Mateo, San Rafael, Grants, Navajoland, and Cíbola. Within each part are stories of people, cultures, and customs. Because my ancestry stems from Seboyeta and San Mateo, part two in particular contains the most stories...
This book is intended to teach everyone--from children in the primary grades, to the life-long learner--about the daily lives of the people of Cíbola and northwestern New Mexico. The stories in large part tell about the people who came from Spain to Mexico and their descendants, who traveled north to colonize this beautiful region of the United States, inhabited by American Indians and known today as America's Land of Enchantment."