Colonial New Mexico Families

Colonial New Mexico Families: Community, Church, and State, 1692-1800 by Suzanne M. Stamatov. University of New Mexico 2018 Press. 242 pages with tables and graphs

In villas scattered across the north of Spain’s New World empire, family mattered. In this book, Suzanne Stamatov skillfully relies on both ecclesiastical and civil records to explore how families formed and endured during the eighteenth century. Stamatov also places family in its larger contexts of church, secular governance, and community and reveals how these exchanges—both mundane and dramatic—wove families into the enduring networks that created an intimate colonial New Mexico. This book was a finalist for the 2019 New Mexico Book Award.