In the Country of Empty Crosses
The Story of a Hispano Protestant Family in Catholic New Mexico
by Arturo Madrid
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Pub Date Apr 17 2012 | Archive Date Jun 03 2013
Description
Arturo’s Madrid’s
homeland is in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains in northern New
Mexico, where each town seems a world apart from the next, and where
family histories that extend back four centuries bind the people to the
land and to one another.This New Mexico is a land of struggle and
dispute, a place in which Madrid's ancestors predate those who landed at
Plymouth Rock.
In the Country of Empty Crosses is Madrid’s complex yet affirming memoir about lands before the advent of passable roads--places such as Tierra Amarilla, San Augustín, and Los Fuertes that were once among the most remote in the nation. Madrid grew up in a family that was doubly removed from the community: as Hispanic Protestants, they were a minority among the region's politically dominant Anglo Protestants and a minority within the overwhelmingly Catholic Hispanic populace.
Madrid writes affectingly of the tensions, rifts, and disputes that punctuated the lives of his family as they negotiated prejudice and racism, casual and institutional, to advance and even thrive as farmers, ranchers, and teachers. His story is affectionate as well, embracing generations of ancestors who found their querencias—their beloved home places—in that beautiful if sometimes unforgiving landscape. The result is an account of New Mexico unlike any other, one in which humor and heartache comfortably coexist. Complemented by stunning images by acclaimed photographer Miguel Gandert -- ranging from intimate pictures of unkempt rural cemeteries to New Mexico's small villages and stunning vistas -- In the Country of Empty Crosses is a memoir of loss and survival, of hope and redemption, and a lyrical celebration of an often misunderstood native land and its people.
In the Country of Empty Crosses is Madrid’s complex yet affirming memoir about lands before the advent of passable roads--places such as Tierra Amarilla, San Augustín, and Los Fuertes that were once among the most remote in the nation. Madrid grew up in a family that was doubly removed from the community: as Hispanic Protestants, they were a minority among the region's politically dominant Anglo Protestants and a minority within the overwhelmingly Catholic Hispanic populace.
Madrid writes affectingly of the tensions, rifts, and disputes that punctuated the lives of his family as they negotiated prejudice and racism, casual and institutional, to advance and even thrive as farmers, ranchers, and teachers. His story is affectionate as well, embracing generations of ancestors who found their querencias—their beloved home places—in that beautiful if sometimes unforgiving landscape. The result is an account of New Mexico unlike any other, one in which humor and heartache comfortably coexist. Complemented by stunning images by acclaimed photographer Miguel Gandert -- ranging from intimate pictures of unkempt rural cemeteries to New Mexico's small villages and stunning vistas -- In the Country of Empty Crosses is a memoir of loss and survival, of hope and redemption, and a lyrical celebration of an often misunderstood native land and its people.
Advance Praise
“Blessings, benedictions, benificence to all things in the world, little and large. Arturo Madrid has given them each a name, and their names are chamizal, Segovia, Teófilo, Tierra Amarilla. For the country of empty crosses is not empty at all. It is a story older than Plymouth Rock, a history history forgot.”
-- Sandra Cisneros
“This is a beautifully written and reverent history of a family and its homeland in northern New Mexico. Gentle, unsentimental, yet enormously moving, it shines with an elegiac radiance. Miguel Gandert’s spare photographs complement the prose perfectly.”
-- John Nichols
“In the Country of Empty Crosses arrives as an event in the literary annals of America’s epic pageant of anathematized New World identities, prophetically remembered. Read it as the first ‘deep time’ testimonio of a Hispano protestante from old New Mexico to heed the call of his ancestors to tell their story, which is also his own, con corazón. Wrought with an often wry, flinty poetic eloquence, boundless compassion, and a geomancer’s attention to the austere mystical power of the landscapes of his Tierra Amarilla homeland, Madrid’s fearless tale gives us a glimpse into a secret world of untold histories and longings, narrated throughout with a generous heart, open to becoming something new. It is a bravura performance of ancestral imagination.”
— John Phillip Santos
"What a gift it is to visit Arturo Madrid’s New Mexico, a land not just of enchantment but exception, full of the unexpected, the newly seen, the deeply felt. One rides along on a current of lyrical prose, and Miguel Gandert’s superb photographs document the landscapes flowing by. There is pleasure in every page."
— William deBuys
“Why is it that ‘the American story’ gets revitalized and enlarged again and again? Because of brilliant storytellers like Arturo Madrid, who gives us this splendid In the Country of Empty Crosses. It is a journey of recorridos, remembrances through the many landscapes that make up New Mexican lives—‘downstream and upstream’ through geography, culture, religion, human gesture, food, and a cemetery washed away in a flood scattering the bones of ‘heretics’ and brave people who make up the Madrid lineage. And through the near-hypnotic landscape photographs of Miguel Gandert we see where Spanish-Mexican Protestants with names like Blea, Estrada, Gallegos, Gonzales, Jaramillo, Lucero, Mesta, and Madrid broke with Catholic religiosity to embrace Bibles and invent places and lives of a new devotion. Raised in a family of readers where the Protestant faith and rich scents of house and home became a fuerte, or fort, against ethnic and religious exclusion, Madrid brings to life a crucial and often suppressed part of Latino history in the United States—the Hispanoprotestante part. Readers will learn that while Arturo Madrid, too, sings America, it’s a Hispanic song where the saints, the interlopers, and the skeletons dance together and give us a new courage to celebrate the complex human presences that have always filled the crosses of our lands.”
— Davíd Carrasco
-- Sandra Cisneros
“This is a beautifully written and reverent history of a family and its homeland in northern New Mexico. Gentle, unsentimental, yet enormously moving, it shines with an elegiac radiance. Miguel Gandert’s spare photographs complement the prose perfectly.”
-- John Nichols
“In the Country of Empty Crosses arrives as an event in the literary annals of America’s epic pageant of anathematized New World identities, prophetically remembered. Read it as the first ‘deep time’ testimonio of a Hispano protestante from old New Mexico to heed the call of his ancestors to tell their story, which is also his own, con corazón. Wrought with an often wry, flinty poetic eloquence, boundless compassion, and a geomancer’s attention to the austere mystical power of the landscapes of his Tierra Amarilla homeland, Madrid’s fearless tale gives us a glimpse into a secret world of untold histories and longings, narrated throughout with a generous heart, open to becoming something new. It is a bravura performance of ancestral imagination.”
— John Phillip Santos
"What a gift it is to visit Arturo Madrid’s New Mexico, a land not just of enchantment but exception, full of the unexpected, the newly seen, the deeply felt. One rides along on a current of lyrical prose, and Miguel Gandert’s superb photographs document the landscapes flowing by. There is pleasure in every page."
— William deBuys
“Why is it that ‘the American story’ gets revitalized and enlarged again and again? Because of brilliant storytellers like Arturo Madrid, who gives us this splendid In the Country of Empty Crosses. It is a journey of recorridos, remembrances through the many landscapes that make up New Mexican lives—‘downstream and upstream’ through geography, culture, religion, human gesture, food, and a cemetery washed away in a flood scattering the bones of ‘heretics’ and brave people who make up the Madrid lineage. And through the near-hypnotic landscape photographs of Miguel Gandert we see where Spanish-Mexican Protestants with names like Blea, Estrada, Gallegos, Gonzales, Jaramillo, Lucero, Mesta, and Madrid broke with Catholic religiosity to embrace Bibles and invent places and lives of a new devotion. Raised in a family of readers where the Protestant faith and rich scents of house and home became a fuerte, or fort, against ethnic and religious exclusion, Madrid brings to life a crucial and often suppressed part of Latino history in the United States—the Hispanoprotestante part. Readers will learn that while Arturo Madrid, too, sings America, it’s a Hispanic song where the saints, the interlopers, and the skeletons dance together and give us a new courage to celebrate the complex human presences that have always filled the crosses of our lands.”
— Davíd Carrasco
Available Editions
| EDITION | Paperback |
| ISBN | 9781595341310 |
| PRICE | $24.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 240 |
