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Three Roads to Magdalena: Coming of Age in a Southwest Borderland, 1890-1990
David Wallace Adams
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Description for Three Roads to Magdalena: Coming of Age in a Southwest Borderland, 1890-1990
Hardback. Over thirty years in the making, cast at the intersection of memory, myth and history, Three Roads to Magdalena is an examination of what it meant to grow up Hispanic, Navajo, and Anglo over the span of a century in west-central New Mexico, a region characterized by both inter-group conflict and accommodation. Num Pages: 448 pages, 25 Photographs. BIC Classification: 1KBBWX; 3JH; 3JJ; HBJK; HBTD; JFSF; JFSL. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 169 x 251 x 38. Weight in Grams: 872.
Someday, Candelaria Garcia said to the author, you will get all the stories. It was a tall order in Magdalena, New Mexico, a once booming frontier town where Navajo, Anglo, and Hispanic peoplehave lived in shifting, sometimes separate, sometimes overlapping worlds for well over a hundred years. But these were the stories,and this was the world, that David Wallace Adams set out to map, in a work that would capture the intimate, complex history of growing up in a Southwest borderland. At the intersection of memory, myth, andhistory, his book asks what it was like to be ... Read morea child in a land of ethnic and cultural boundaries. The answer, as close to all thestories as one might hope to get, captures the diverse, ever-changing experience of a Southwest community defined by culturalborders-and the nature and role of children in defending and crossing those borders. In this book, we listen to the voices of elders who knew Magdalena nearly a century ago, and the voices of a younger generation who negotiated the community's shifting boundaries. Their stories take us to sheep and cattle ranches, Navajo ceremonies, Hispanic fiestas, mining camps, First Communion classes, ranch house dances, Indian boarding school drill fields, high school social activities, and children's rodeos. Here we learn how class, religion, language, and race influenced the creation of distinct identities and ethnic boundaries, but also provided opportunities for crossculturalinteractions and intimacies. And we see the critical importance of education in both reinforcing differences and opening a shared space for those differences to be experienced and bridged. Adams's workoffers a close-up view of the transformation of one multicultural community, but also of the transformation of childhood itself overthe course of the twentieth century. A unique blend of oral, social, and childhood history, Three Roads to Magdalena is a rare living document of conflict and accommodation across ethnic boundaries in our ever-evolving multicultural society. Show Less
Product Details
Publisher
University Press of Kansas
Place of Publication
Kansas, United States
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 5 to 9 working days
About David Wallace Adams
David Wallace Adamsis professor emeritus at Cleveland State University. He is the author of Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience,1875-1928, also from Kansas.
Reviews for Three Roads to Magdalena: Coming of Age in a Southwest Borderland, 1890-1990
A marvelous work.
Journal of the West A richly textured and important study delineating continuity and change in the lives and cultural practices of Alamo Navajo, Hispanic, and Anglo residents of west-central New Mexico.
New Mexico Historical Review The stories that [Adams] relates highlight the ways in which children in the Magdalena region internalized difference while ... Read moresimultaneously figuring out how to transcend the strictures of the worldview they had been raised with in order to find economic, social, and personal success. . . . Adams's writing style is engaging, and he presents readers with a plethora of intriguing stories from Magdalena.
H-Net Reviews Throughout this account, the author successfully meshes children's experiences into a broader discussion of how family, community, religion, and place have influenced the coming-of-age process and identity formation.
Montana The Magazine of Western History Although Adams is clearly a talented practitioner of borderlands history, his book's true power lies in his exceptionally clear prose and command of narrative history. Reading like a fine novel, Adams's history of children, families and growing up in a rural borderland reads with a compassion that is rare among the heap of detached scholarly works. This book is a treasure. Essential.
Choice Rarely is such an insightful historical analysis such a pleasure to read. . . . Adams has written an extraordinary and accessible work that will appeal to anyone interested in U.S. Southwest and borderlands history, ethnicity studies, and indigenous and Latino history.
Journal of American History Adams has crafted a remarkable history of Magdalena, New Mexico through the oral histories of the Alamao Navajo, Hispanic, and Anglo children who grew up there in the last century. . . . a nuanced history of childhood and learning. . . . Adams reconstructs what it was like to grow up in a small, tricultural ranching and farming community in the twentieth century.
History of Education Quarterly From hundreds of hours of oral history interviews, David Adams has re-created an intimate child's-eye view of the rural world of Magdalena, New Mexico in the mid twentieth century. As Adams captures how children came of age in Magdalena, he also demonstrates how they learned distinct racial identities and boundaries
Anglo, Hispanic, and Alamo Navajo
and sometimes breached them. This is a great read.
Margaret D. Jacobs, author of White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880-1940A unique and unforgettable book. Dissatisfied with the mere glimpses of children that he found in New Mexico's archives, David Adams went knocking on doors and inviting aged Anglos, Hispanics, and Navajos to talk. They talked, and the author has woven their memories into a work of startling depth, humanity, and originality. I can't remember the last time a history book made me feel as much as Three Roads to Magdalena. It conjures up a starkly different world by using achingly familiar stories of childhood. Follow David Adams to Magdalena. You won't regret it.
Brian DeLay, author of War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War Overflowing with stories from Navajo, Hispano/a and Euroamerican settlers in this unique corner of New Mexico, David Wallace Adams' Three Roads to Magdalena carries a universal message of compassion, humor and understanding, while reinterpreting a little known region of the High Desert American Southwest.
Margaret Connell-Szasz, Regents Professor of History, University of New Mexico Known for his outstanding scholarship on the American Indian boarding school system, David Wallace Adams has once again delighted readers with his long anticipated borderland history of Native and non-Native people. Deeply personal, and highly engaging, Three Roads to Magdalena tells a wonderful story of the ways Navajos, Hispanics, and Anglos negotiated the social and cultural dynamics of a small mining and livestock community in western New Mexico. It is a story of how individuals, including children, from different backgrounds intersected to ultimately determine and influence their future and a region of the American West that has received little attention from other scholars.
Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, author of Education beyond the Mesas: Hopi Students at Sherman Institute, 1902-1929 Show Less
