San Antonio College Library

In Digging the Days of the Dead, Juanita Garciagodoy depicts various aspects of the celebration - including Prehispanic and Spanish Catholic traces on its development as well as folk and popular culture versions - and describes its changing place in contemporary Mexico. Garciagodoy examines in detail differences in attitudes toward death in Mexico and the United States. In part because the living do not exclude the dead from their family circle, celebrants...

Mexico's churches and conventos display a unique blend of European and native styles. Missionary Mendicant friars arrived in New Spain shortly after Cortes's conquest of the Aztec empire in 1521 and immediately related their own European architectural and visual arts styles to the tastes and expectations of native Indians. Right from the beginning the friars conceived of conventos as a special architectural theater in which to carry out their proselytizing....

The tradition of home shrines first began evolving in the American Southwest during the Mexican colonial period, when priests often travelled to homes to perform mass, novenas, baptisms, and marriages, a practice that continues today. This colourful book features the personal altars of mostly Hispanic families living in the towns and villages of northern New Mexico. Most are devoutly Catholic, and although Roman Catholic dogma does not officially...

The Penitente Brotherhood, formally known as La Fraternidad Piadosa de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno, is a lay Catholic organization unique to New Mexico and southern Colorado. This book documents moradas, the buildings in which the Brothers meet and pray, and offers an intimate and respectful account of their religious observances. The Penitente Brothers have been objects of intense curiosity ever since New Mexico became a tourist attraction, and...

The region once known as Pimeria Alta--now southern Arizona and northern Sonora--has for more than three centuries been a melting pot for the beliefs of native Tohono O'odham and immigrant Yaquis and those of colonizing Spaniards and Mexicans. The author reveals some of the supernaturally sanctioned relationships that tie people to places within religious meanings of locations and showing how bonds between people and places have in turn created relationships...