I'm shamelessly stealing this idea for our last meeting of the year from Rebel Readers Santa Fe. Let's all read one book on theme and come to discuss. I've got three suggested reads, but feel free to pick any southwestern memoir or autobiography of your choice.

The difference between memoir and autobiography is fairly subjective and vague and the terms are often used interchangeably. What we'll be focusing on this month are first person nonfiction narratives about the author's life and times.

As you read your chosen work, think about how the personal narrative of the memoir reflects or challenges the accepted historical record. How do the author's individual choices intersect with the broader forces of history? In what ways does the memoir help us understand the human experience of history on a deeper, more personal level?

Suggested Titles:

The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca
Description: Originally titled Relación or Naufragios, this details his eight-year journey across North America after a failed 1528 Spanish expedition, during which he survived by living among various Native American tribes.

Down the Santa Fe Trail and Into Mexico: The Diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin, 1846-1847
Description: a historical account of an 18-year-old woman's journey with her husband on the Santa Fe Trail during the Mexican-American War. The diary provides a firsthand perspective on frontier life, cultural encounters, and the U.S. occupation of New Mexico, offering insights into the daily experiences of a civilian during a pivotal historical moment.

Whiskey Tender: A Memoir by Deborah Jackson Taffa
Description: Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian” status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories. Taffa’s childhood memories unspool into meditations on tribal identity, the rampant criminalization of Native men, governmental assimilation policies, the Red Power movement, and the negotiation between belonging and resisting systemic oppression. Pan-Indian, as well as specific tribal histories and myths, blend with stories of a 1970s and 1980s childhood spent on and off the reservation.

This is a casual monthly book club in which we discuss a book we've read on a southwest history topic. In January, we'll discuss Lamy of Santa Fe by Paul Horgan.

Description:

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History (1976)

Originally published in 1975, this Pulitzer Prize for History-winning biography chronicles the life of Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888), New Mexico's first resident bishop and the most influential, reform-minded Catholic official in the region during the late 1800s. Lamy's accomplishments, including the endowing of hospitals, orphanages, and English-language schools and colleges, formed the foundation of modern-day Santa Fe and often brought him into conflict with corrupt local priests. His life story, also the subject of Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, describes a pivotal period in the American Southwest, as Spanish and Mexican rule gave way to much greater influence from the U.S. and Europe.