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On the Edge of Purgatory

An Archaeology of Place in Hispanic Colorado

Bonnie J Clark author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Nebraska Press

Published:1st Jan '12

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

On the Edge of Purgatory cover

Investigates the unwritten history of a unique Hispanic population

Southeastern Colorado was known as the northernmost boundary of New Spain in the sixteenth century. By the late 1800s, the region was US territory, but the majority of settlers remained Hispanic families. Bonnie J. Clark investigates the unwritten history of this unique Hispanic population.Southeastern Colorado was known as the northernmost boundary of New Spain in the sixteenth century. By the late 1800s, the region was U.S. territory, but the majority of settlers remained Hispanic families. They had a complex history of interaction with indigenous populations in the area and adopted many of the indigenous methods of survival in this difficult environment. Today their descendants compose a vocal part of the Hispanic population of Colorado.
Bonnie J. Clark investigates the unwritten history of this unique Hispanic population. Combining archaeological research, contemporary ethnography, and oral and documentary history, Clark examines the everyday lives of this population over time. Framing this discussion within the wider context of the changing economic and political processes at work, Clark looks at how changing and contesting ethnic and gender identities were experienced on a daily basis. Providing new insights into the construction of ethnic identity in the American West over hundreds of years, this study complicates and enriches our understanding of the role of Hispanic populations in the West.

"Bonnie J. Clark offers a concise, dense, and richly textured account of daily life in the late-nineteenth-century Hispanic settlements of rural southeastern Colorado."—Kelly L. Jenks, Center for Colorado and the West
"History buffs in comfortable armchairs will enjoy learning about the activities of other historical societies around the state, like tiny Aguilar's south of Walsenburg. Not to mention the scholars who will welcome Bonnie J. Clark's On the Edge of Purgatory as a model for the serious study of people and places."—Virginia Simmons, Colorado Central Magazine
"A new and reinvigorated scholarship on the archaeology of nineteenth-century Hispanic Americans in the American Southwest is emerging, and On the Edge of Purgatory by Bonnie Clark is a significant contribution."—J. Andrew Darling, Journal of Anthropological Research

ISBN: 9780803213722

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

176 pages