Born in Santa Fe in 1802, Donaciano Vigil was an active participant in many of the critical events in New Mexico’s history in the nineteenth century. Vigil was witness to New Mexico’s transition from a Spanish province (1802–1821) to a Mexican department (1821–1846) and eventually to an American territory (1846–1877), and he was a key player in most of the events of that era. As a Hispano soldier and officer in the New Mexico Militia, he was instrumental in the Navajo Wars, the Rio Arriba insurrection of 1837, the Texas invasion of 1841, and the American invasion of 1846. As a Mexican statesman in New Mexico, he was one of the most active assemblymen. Following the American occupation, he joined the civil government, first as secretary, then as governor. It was in these roles that Donaciano left an enduring impact and legacy on the territory. In this gripping biography of a remarkable man, Maurilio E. Vigil and Helene Boudreau fill the gap within the scholarship on Hispanics in nineteenth-century New Mexico.

Land grant disputes from the nineteenth century have divided and embittered some people for most of the twentieth century. In an attempt to bring final resolution to lingering controversies in New Mexico and throughout the West, in 2000 the U.S. Congress pledged to review disputed claims in the next few years. The Pecos Grant is illustrative of legal and administrative wrangling over land grants. To ensure that a U.S. Senate Committee understood the complexity of the Pecos Grant, New Mexico lawyer and historian Ralph Emerson Twitchell told them in 1923: "There are so many things in connection with this entire business that twenty King Solomons cannot unravel the knot." Yet in this book Hall does sort through the conflicting claims in the over one hundred years of Spanish, Mexican, and American legal maneuvers, legislative stalemates, and private sales involving this 18,000 acre square of land.

Chapter 15. Realized Political Parties, 1869-1871 -- Conclusions -- Appendixes -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Dozens of selections from firsthand accounts, introduced by David J. Weber's essays, capture the essence of the Mexican American experience in the Southwest from the time the first pioneers came north from Mexico.

This book explores how the diverse and fiercely independent peoples of Texas and New Mexico came to think of themselves as members of one particular national community or another in the years leading up to the Mexican-American War. Hispanics, Native Americans, and Anglo Americans made agonizing and crucial identity decisions against the backdrop of two structural transformations taking place in the region during the first half of the 19th century and often pulling in opposite directions.

This question-and-answer book contains 400 reminders of what is known and what is sometimes forgotten or misunderstood about a city that was founded more than 400 years ago. Not a traditional history book, this group of questions is presented in an apparently random order, and the answers occasionally meander off topic, as if part of a casual conversation.