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Excerpts from Abe Peña's  popular publications

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

from PREFACE

"My first book was Memories of Cíbola: Stories from New Mexico Villages. The foreword was written by Marc Simmons. The book has enjoyed remarkable success and after three years in the market continues to do well and is now in its third printing.

One reader told me she had given six books to members of her family and they were asking when the next one is coming out, saying, “I already have a dozen names on my list.” Another reader called to say that, when he read the book, “I was reading very much what my father had told me about our village. I loaned him the book and he never put it down!” adding, “Abe, you have to keep on writing... that's all there is to it.”

I felt the 65 stories, or vignettes, needed telling and hoped and prayed there would be an audience out there. I'm delighted that it has found acceptance. Ted Allen, who told me he would be the first in line for the book, told me some time ago, “There are several others in line waiting for the second one.”

This book continues the focus on Hispanic villages. How we worked, how we prayed, how we sang, how we loved, how we cried, how we lived and died and how we welcomed our arriving Anglo neighbors into our communities. Back in the 1940s, one of my cousins was asked if there were any Anglos in San Mateo. Her answer was, “No” then, after a brief pause, said, “Yes there is one, and he's Black!”

A great deal of our attention was focused on the Catholic Church. In our isolation, I am convinced we embraced the church for protection. Protection from possible or imagined enemies and from ourselves. We wanted God on our side at all times.

When I started writing the stories/vignettes that make up this book, I called it “Villages and Villagers” and the more I wrote the more I realized that changes had happened and were happening in the villages and I needed to include those changes in my writing.

The changes evolved a new villager in the Hispanic villages of New Mexico. The big changes started with World War II when America sent its boys to war and wives and girlfriends left the kitchen and went to work in the factories that built the guns and tanks to win the war. After the war was over, the girls did not return to the kitchen. They got jobs in town.

The change from the small farm mentality meant that both the husband and wife needed jobs “to make ends meet.”

With two incomes came remodeling and building new homes, and, yes, villagers were reading more newspapers, magazines, and books, and shopping in supermarkets, and driving shiny new cars and pickups on more and better roads.

The village became the bedroom where the villagers returned to sleep and gave them a chance to stay close to their roots and their preferred rural life.

The large families of the past that were needed to work the farm were no longer needed, and the size of families began to shrink. The average size of a family in my parents' generation was six. The average in my generation was four, and the average in the current generation is about two.

The 2000 census placed the Hispanic population of america as the largest minority in the country, surpassing the African-American. Some researchers and demographers tell us that, given current trends, Hispanics could become the majority by the year 2100.

I believe the trend will continue but at a slower pace. It appears that, as the Hispanic family gains more economic strength, the number of children will decrease and the trend will continue to go south.

I have tried to capture our village life and the changes in this book.

Memories of Cíbola has sold in 38 states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, DC. New Mexico leads the list by far, followed by Colorado and Oregon. Reports also show fourteen college bookstores have ordered the book. The University of New Mexico is using it as a text in some classes, and so is New Mexico State University and the University of California in Santa Barbara.

The New Mexico State Department of Education has “adopted” the book and it is being used as a textbook in some elementary and secondary schools and as a reference and resource book in some other schools. I have continued to write stories of the villages and villagers for the Grants/Cíbola County Beacon, and those stories represent most of the stories in this book. Some have been published in La Herencia del Norte and others in Prime Time. I reserved the right to publish elsewhere.

This book is in four parts—Villages; Villagers; Ranching; and Change Comes to the Villages. There's a glossary translating Spanish words to English at the end of the book which should be useful. One of the first words in the glossary is abrazos: hugs, or I embrace you. A brazo is an arm; abrazos literally means to put my arms around you, “I embrace you.” Most every book I'm asked to autograph I sign with Abrazos. In part it's probably my Spanish heritage and in part it's years of living in Latin America, where the abrazo is part of everyday living.

Finally, this book is intended to teach everyone from children in primary grades to the life-long learner about the daily lives of the people of northwestern New Mexico. The stories in large part tell about the descendants of people who came from Spain to Mexico, then traveled north to colonize this beautiful region of the United States, first inhabited by Native Americans and known today as America's Land of Enchantment."