While most books about Mary emphasize her role as the compassionate mother of God, this book uncovers her significant role as an active and often belligerent patron of warfare, as seen from the mosques and castles of medieval Iberia to the cities and shrines of colonial Mexico and finally to present-day New Mexico. Amy Remensnyder explores Mary's prominence on and off the battlefield in the culturally and ethnically diverse world of medieval Iberia, where Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived side by side, and in colonial Mexico, where Spaniards and indigenous peoples mingled. As this array of peoples turned to her to articulate their identities, Mary was drawn into both hostile and peaceful cross-cultural encounters. Although Mary became an icon of the Christian conquest of Muslims, medieval Muslims and Christians shared her, sometimes even joining together in rituals of worship in her churches. In the New World, some indigenous peoples of the Americas appropriated from the Spanish the idea of Mary as Conquistadora, using it to reinforce the identity they fashioned for themselves as native conquistadors. Offering a ground-breaking look at the Virgin Mary, La Conquistadora connects medieval and early modern understandings of this iconic figure to reveal her enduring legacy.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An epic novel of love, discovery, and adventure by the author of the award-winning, bestselling memoir When I Was Puerto Rican. • “Santiago’s storytelling is thrilling.... A triumph.” —The Washington Post As a young girl growing up in Spain, Ana Larragoity Cubillas is powerfully drawn to Puerto Rico by the diaries of an ancestor who traveled there with Ponce de León. And in handsome twin brothers Ramón and Inocente—both in love with Ana—she finds a way to get there. She marries Ramón, and in 1844, just eighteen, she travels across the ocean to a remote sugar plantation the brothers have inherited on the island. Ana faces unrelenting heat, disease and isolation, and the dangers of the untamed countryside even as she relishes the challenge of running Hacienda los Gemelos. But when the Civil War breaks out in the United States, Ana finds her livelihood, and perhaps even her life, threatened by the very people on whose backs her wealth has been built: the hacienda’s slaves, whose richly drawn stories unfold alongside her own. And when at last Ana falls for a man who may be her destiny—a once-forbidden love—she will sacrifice nearly everything to keep hold of the land that has become her true home. This is a sensual, riveting tale, set in a place where human passions and cruelties collide: thrilling history that has never before been brought so vividly and unforgettably to life.

Few religious icons dominate and inspire their subjects as powerfully as La Conquistadora, America's Oldest Madonna, has over the centuries. La Conquistadora's origins are shrouded in mystery, but Chevalier unveils surprising new information about this icon's amazing provenance and past.

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 Ang lico 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 Ang lico Ch vez 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 Ang lico Ch vez 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, Ch vez 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 his small stature, Japanese bullets always missed him. In time, despite heavy clerical duties, Fray Ang lico managed to become an author of note, as well as something of an artist and muralist. Upon all of his endeavors, one finds, understandably, the imprint of his religious perspective. During nearly seventy years of writing, he published almost two dozen books. Among them were novels, essays, poetry, biographies, and histories. Sunstone Press has brought back into print some of these rare titles.

Months before Alma López's digital collage Our Lady was shown at the Museum of International Folk Art in 2001, the museum began receiving angry phone calls from community activists and Catholic leaders who demanded that the image not be displayed. Protest rallies, prayer vigils, and death threats ensued, but the provocative image of la Virgen de Guadalupe (hands on hips, clad only in roses, and exalted by a bare-breasted butterfly angel) remained on exhibition. Highlighting many of the pivotal questions that have haunted the art world since the NEA debacle of 1988, the contributors to Our Lady of Controversy present diverse perspectives, ranging from definitions of art to the artist's intention, feminism, queer theory, colonialism, and Chicano nationalism. Contributors include the exhibition curator, Tey Marianna Nunn; award-winning novelist and Chicana historian Emma Pérez; and Deena González (recognized as one of the fifty most important living women historians in America). Accompanied by a bonus DVD of Alma López's I Love Lupe video that looks at the Chicana artistic tradition of reimagining la Virgen de Guadalupe, featuring a historic conversation between Yolanda López, Ester Hernández, and Alma López, Our Lady of Controversy promises to ignite important new dialogues.

A native resident of Santa Fe discusses the impact of tourism on the City Different and the cultural identity of its Hispanic citizens.